Farewell to the Dungeon Master

Sad news: Gary Gygax, the man behind Dungeons and Dragons, has died at his Lake Geneva home, aged 69.

The truth is that every role-playing game, whether tabletop or electronic, owes a huge debt to Gygax. Less an innovator than a visionary that could see the potential of fusing dice-rolling with high fantasy, he realized halflings were cool 30 years before Peter Jackson. He was a co-creator of Chainmail, the system that he later turned into D&D. The original Gen Con, now a series of massive gaming conventions around the world, was held in Gygax's basement in 1967. And, yes, it was Gygax that changed the business model of role-playing games, so that instead of buying one game, fans would buy supplement after supplement, rule book after rule book, and then when the new edition came out, the fans would leap for those updated stats.

But maybe Gygax will be best remembered as the man who made geekiness a communal activity. For that, we, the nerdy teens who had something to do on a Friday night other than read comics, and the imaginative adults that they became, salute him.