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The Dungeon Master of Dungeon Masters has left the table.
Legions of role players, fantasy lovers and gamers faced a painful reality yesterday after learning that Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax died at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisc., yesterday morning. He had been suffering from a number of health problems, including an abdominal aneurysm. He was 69.
But even though Mr. Gygax is gone, the legacy of the modest medieval fantasy game he and his business partner Dave Arneson created in 1974 is stronger than ever, industry experts say.
Dungeons & Dragons, affectionately known as D&D by the mainly teenage boys and fully grown men who have spent much of their lives pretending to be elves, wizards and warriors around the kitchen table, was the world's introduction to the concept of role-playing games. It has spawned some of the most popular games on the Internet, video-game consoles and computers, including Microsoft's Halo 3.
Gary Gygax
Mr. Gygax and Mr. Arneson originally came up with the concept for Dungeons & Dragons - played with graph paper, pencils, polyhedral dice and a lot of imagination - for a small community of like-minded gamers after playing war games with miniature figurines. But the game caught on and they went on to sell millions of copies.
"Everyone knows about the game he created - whether they play it and love it or whether they point and laugh and say, 'Oh, that's for geeks,' " said Steve Jackson, himself a popular games designer in Austin, Tex., and considered by some in the online gaming community as the Gary Gygax of the eighties.
Mr. Jackson said it's thanks to Mr. Gygax and Mr. Arneson that popular cultural icons such as the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter series are now household names.
"When I was in college, Lord of the Rings was a small cult book. ... The first edition published in the United States was pirated. If it wasn't for D&D, I do not think that Lord of the Rings ever would have been rediscovered."
What's more, it's no longer just geeks who play role-playing games, Mr. Jackson said, pointing to the cult-like success of Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft and Halo.
Wizards of the Coast - the division of Hasbro that now publishes the Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks - said on its website that Mr. Gygax's "innovation created an entirely new type of hobby that now attracts millions of players worldwide to face-to-face and online role-playing games. ... He inspired generations of players, designers and authors, and he will be sorely missed by legions of fans."
Hasbro says about four million people still play Dungeons & Dragons each month. Meanwhile, the game also has spawned novels, magazines, television shows and movies.
Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka - co-general managers of Edmonton-based Bioware Corp., which developed the popular role-playing computer games Baldur's Gate and Mass Effect - said Mr. Gygax inspired them to form their company.
"Without D&D's direct influence, role-playing games as we've known them might not exist at all. ... If it wasn't for him, an entire swath of classic computer and console games wouldn't exist," Mr. Zeschuk said, while Mr. Muzyka added virtually every video game now includes role-playing to some extent.
Mr. Jackson, the game designer, said the niche market that Dungeons & Dragons has created is here to stay, featuring hundreds of published role-playing games - or thousands, if those that fans make up on their own are included.
"Before D&D, we had people playing hobby games, of course, but mainly board games, mainly hex-spaced games that simulate famous battles," he said. "Those are still played and they're a lot of fun, but they have nothing like the popular appeal that role-playing games do and will continue to have."
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Game on
A (very basic) guide to playing Dungeons & Dragons:
Roll: Players begin by creating their own unique characters, whose abilities are determined by rolling a polyhedron die.
Choose: Players then choose a class (such as a fighter or a wizard) and a race (such as elf or dwarf) for their characters. All other characters in the game world who aren't controlled by a player are called Non-Player Characters (NPC) and are controlled by the Dungeon Master.
Rules: The Dungeon Master leads each group of players through the development of the game and story line in each session.
Play: The Dungeon Master describes where players are and what is around them. The players then take turns telling the Dungeon Master what they would like to do in response. The Dungeon Master answers players' questions and explains the outcomes of any actions they have taken.
Goal: As characters journey through various lands, they search for hidden treasures while battling menacing monsters with their own brains and brawn.
Source: Wizards of the Coast
