Gygax Quotes

Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game.

The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.

The worthy GM never purposely kills players' PCs, He presents opportunities for the rash and unthinking players to do that all on their own.

There's gotta be a way out of this dungeon."- G. Gygax

I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else.

You are not entering this world in the usual manner, for you are setting forth to be a Dungeon Master. Certainly there are stout fighters, mighty magic-users, wily thieves, and courageous clerics who will make their mark in the magical lands of D&D adventure. You however, are above even the greatest of these, for as DM you are to become the Shaper of the Cosmos. It is you who will give form and content to the all the universe. You will breathe life into the stillness, giving meaning and purpose to all the actions which are to follow.

Send anyone claiming that their RPG activity is an art form my way, and I'll gladly stick a pin in their head and deflate it just to have the satisfaction of the popping sound that makes. One might play a game artfully, but that makes neither the game nor its play art.

Even the most outspoken of the critics must admit that long before we had print and film media to "spread the word," mankind was engaged in all forms of cruel and despicable behavior. To attribute war, killing, and violence to film, TV, and role-play games is to fly in the face of thousands of years of recorded history.

Do not be sidetracked. A good referee will have many ways to distract an expedition, many things to draw attention, but ignore them if at all possible.

In an interview given at Gen Con in 2007, Gygax explained that he had been reluctant to talk about his identity as a Christian during the era of the panic: “I was afraid it would give Christianity a bad name because I did D&D.”4

Although the masculine form of appellation is typically used when listing the level titles of the various types of characters, these names can easily be changed to the feminine if desired. This is fantasy--what's in a name? In all but a few cases sex makes no difference to ability!

Created in 1972 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, two friends in their early twenties, Dungeons and Dragons was an underground phenomenon, particularly on college campuses, thanks to word of mouth and controversy. It achieved urban legend status when a student named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared in the steam tunnels underneath Michigan State University while reportedly reenacting the game; a Tom Hanks movie called Mazes and Monsters was loosely based on the event.

The extremely high price of $10 (in 1974 dollars) for three slim pamphlets in a box must have sorely tempted consumers to take matters into their own hands; in the American Wargamer, George Phillies judged that “the rules are rather expensive—sufficiently over the cost of copying them, I think, that there are probably more pirate Xerox copies than licit copies in the world.” [AW:v2n8] Gygax would later conjecture, “I have no way of knowing how many pirated copies of D&D were in existence, but some estimates place the figure at about 20% of total sales, some as high as 50%.

The appeal was primal. “In Dungeons and Dragons,” Gygax said, “the average person gets a call to glory and becomes a hero and undergoes change. In the real world, children, especially, have no power; they must answer to everyone, they don’t direct their own lives, but in this game, they become super powerful and affect everything.

Fans of Dungeons and Dragons will recognize the science fiction of Margaret St. Clair even if they don’t recognize her name. Gary Gygax, one of the pioneering designers of the game, included her in Appendix N of the Dungeon Masters Guide (TSR, 1979), which is a list of his inspirations in creating his extensive world. Specifically, Gygax mentioned St. Clair’s novels The Shadow People (Dell, 1969) and Sign of the Labrys (Mineola, 1963).

Hadn't Gary Gygax simply invented a game, and an esoteric one at that? It was hardly a footnote in the increasingly fast and complex information age that we live in. What was all the fuzz about? The reason for all the fuzz among those who understood his work was simple. Gary Gygax and his seminal game creation, Dungeons & Dragons, had influenced and transformed the world in extraordinary ways. Yet, much of his contribution would also go largely unrecognised by the general public. Although it is debatable whether D&D ever became a thoroughly mainstream activity, as a 1983 New York Times article had speculated, referring to it as the great game of the 1980's, D&D and its RPG derivatives are beloved by a relatively small but dedicated group of individuals affectionately known as 'geeks'. Although the term 'geek' is not exclusive to role-playing gamers, the activities of this particular audience have often been viewed as the most archetypal form of 'geekiness'. Labels aside, what is notable is that the activities of this RGP audience were highly correlated with interests in other activities such as early computers, digital technologies, visual effects, and the performing arts. In this way, these geeks, though relatively small in number, became in many instances the leaders and masters of this era. With the advent of the digital age, geeks worldwide found opportunity and recognition never previously available to their predecessors. Icons and innovators such as George R. R. Martin, Mike Myers, Richard Garriott, Vin Diesel, Tim Duncan, Anderson Cooper, David X. Cohen, John Carmak, Tim Harford, Moby, and the late Robin Williams, to name just a few, were all avid role-playing gamers in their younger years. The list of those who include D&D as a regular activity while growing up is both extensive and impressive.

One display of particular interest to Gary featured a medieval castle and associated miniature soldiers used for a game called The Siege of Bodenburg. At the time, traditional board wargamers and miniatures battle players were still two distinct audiences. Wargame publishers, such as Avalon Hill, hadn’t thought to use miniatures in its battle simulations, instead relying on hex maps and cardboard counters. Bodenburg seemed to have an appeal for diverse factions of gamers, and it sparked Gary’s interest in miniatures gaming in the medieval setting, an interest that would inevitably lead to his greatest creation. Not

Though Gary remained enamored of the medieval-type fantasy genre, it is notable that he actually disliked the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the overwhelmingly popular The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series. He would go on to say that Tolkien’s work was “so dull. I mean, there was no action in it.”8

Revenues were on pace to quadruple over the previous year, bolstered by the success of its D&D and AD&D lines, and supported with new, strong-performing products like 1978’s Gamma World: Science Fantasy Role-Playing Game and 1980’s Top Secret,

Gary Gygax and his seminal game creation, Dungeons & Dragons, had influenced and transformed the world in extraordinary ways. Yet

Though too young to be involved in the testing, it was Gary’s youngest daughter Cindy, who when hearing all of the prototype names for the then unnamed Fantasy Game, famously said “Oh, Daddy, I like Dungeons and Dragons best!”6 Gary

the LGTSA was playing various miniature battle games weekly, usually on Saturday mornings, and with growing attendance. In fact, the group had drummed up enough regional notoriety that it managed to get the attention of the U.S. government who sent a pair of undercover Army intelligence agents, posing as a man-and-wife team of wargamers, to monitor the activities of the fledgling group. Because so little was known about wargaming and miniature combat groups, and it being a time of great social unrest, there was concern among various government agencies that such tabletop combat simulation was meant to train and plan for real-life insurgency. Mary

While I realize that there are a lot of different angles on this, I’m going to set all of these speculations aside for now and try focusing entirely on trends in fantasy from the perspective of tabletop gaming alone. The first thing you need to know is that the men who laid the groundwork for the role-playing hobby had an incredible appetite for books. You may have been in a comic book shop on a Wednesday when the new shipment came in and the most dedicated fans in your town are right there to get the latest installment of everything they’re into. Well, Gary Gygax and James M. Ward were like that with books: One fateful Tuesday, I was poring through the racks, picking up the newest Conan and Arthur C. Clarke novels. When I reached the end of the racks, I had seven books in my hand. There was a gentleman doing the very same thing beside me. When he got done, he and I had the exact same books in our hands. We laughed at the coincidence and he started talking about a game he had just invented where a person could play Conan fighting Set. I was instantly hooked on the idea. A few weeks later I was regularly going over to Gary Gygax’s house to learn the game of Dungeons & Dragons.1 Note that the main selling point of the game at its inception was that it was not merely an adaption of their favorite stories to game form. No, the “lightning in the bottle” that Gary Gygax had gotten hold of was, in fact, the apex of genre fiction.2 He was opening up an entirely new method for creating worlds and allowing people to enter them. We take it for granted today, but J. Eric Holmes was not exaggerating when he declared that it was a “truly unique invention, probably as remarkable as the die, or the deck of cards, or the chessboard.”3

It wasn’t the jocks or the prom kings and queens who created the social and business infrastructure of the twenty-first century. It was the geeks and the nerds who spent their Friday nights playing with their computers and Saturday nights playing a little D&D with their friends. In this way, D&D filled an important social gap for those less inclined to mingle.