Role Playing Nerds Lament the Loss of Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons

POSTED BY QBert on Mar 4 under Newz, mind control, vidz

I can just picture the legions of nerds who will gather in the various online RPG realms tonight to hold ceremonies and remembrances for the man who made it all possible, Gary Gygax. I’ll admit…I tried to play D&D a couple of times, I tried hard. I created a character that I put a lot of time and thought into, a character I thought I would enjoy exploring…but somehow the sessions usually boiled down to me trying to use a set of bugbear balls as a weapon or something equally as dumb. Somehow I just wasn’t able to emerse myself deep enough into the game’s reality to not see it as one big pile of joke fodder.

I can remember there being a scare in my town when I was a kid, and it also being on tv, about the dangers of Dungeons & Dragons and how it could be a gateway leading to more sinister pastimes, namely, Satanism. Around the same time, a teenage kid who happened to like metal bands, and doodling the art work that surrounded the metal scene at the time on his books and walls, committed suicide in my town. The idea that the kid was a Satanist and that he took his life as a result spread quickly. Soon enough, there was a full blown panic about D&D for a short while…I recall hearing teachers, our priest, my mother and neighbors all telling us kids playing D&D was dangerous (and evil) well before I ever tried playing, and it could quite possibly be the reason why I never was able to let myself enter the game’s reality deeply enough to fully enjoy it. Maybe subconsciously I had taken on the fear of becoming possessed by the devil in the process, like a young Tom Hanks in the movie “Monsters and Mazes”…but in any event, I have to admit for even a non role player, it’s a day of note, to mark the “final campaign” of the Ultimate Dungeon Master.