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Texas and Ohio’s primaries have come and gone, and the fight continues to drag on; Clinton’s firewall states performed as she’d planned. But, topical as they are, my thoughts on the matter are going to have to wait, because I can’t let the death of E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of and driving force behind Dungeons & Dragons go by without comment.

I am strongly ambivalent about Gygax. On the one hand, he deserves all kinds of credit for his creation and the industry it spawned. Viewed in hindsight, the original D&D was unbelievably primitive, both as tools and as narrative—but no more so than early television, board games pre-monopoly, or the contrived plots and dialogue of Everyman plays and ancient Greek theater. Simply that they were made, and worked, at all was a monumental and visionary achievement. RPGs have improved incrementally but steadily since D&D was first published, but none of them would exist without that first incredible leap of imagination: that people could play a game as a free-form story, using fictionalized alter-egos as protagonists, instead of as a fixed set of tokens limited to pursuing a fixed goal by fixed means.

That said, I have to speak up, too, about what I think of Gygax himself. Having performed the mighty deed of getting the RPG ball rolling, Gygax soon proved generally poisonous to the industry, fueled by limitless egotism. Gossip has it that egotism drove him to push D&D co-creator Dave Arneson from the business. It was at least partially responsible for a lot of predatory lawsuits, which sought and failed to establish that Gygax owned not only the rights to D&D, but to all role-playing gaming. TSR lawyers, while never reaching the sheer litigative power of, say, Microsoft and Disney, nonetheless had an equal power to destroy competitors unfairly, because new RPG titles usually came from microscopic vanity presses, barely able to retain a single lawyer, if that. Lawsuits, or even the threats of lawsuit, throttled a lot of good ideas and good products in the crib. Gygax’s sexism infected RPGs for far too long. Certainly, ego fueled his loud and perpetual assertion that D&D was the product of intensive playtesting and revision, and that any other RPG was, at best, inferior to D&D, and at worst worthless, an argument that ignores the playtesting that other games got, or could get, and ignores too the way that D&D playtesting often enshrined bad ideas instead of improving upon them. Gygax considered himself the sole authority on what role-playing should be.

Those who listened perpetuated a lot of bad ideas; Gygax thought the only acceptable form of role-playing was the dungeon crawl, with a lot of arbitrary events, especially arbitrary deaths. Death-trap dungeons. Design by random table. Crap-shoot story elements, like indistinguishable poisons and poitions, the Deck of Many Things, and NPCs who would aid or betray the party without motive, and certainly offering no way to tell the difference before they had. Rules lawyering, because Gygax’s official rules were more important than common sense. A presumption that an RPG narrative must progress from weakness and anonymity to earth-cracking personal power. A presumption that the only worthy motivators were personal power, as measured in money, gear, and experience points. A presumption of player-GM hostility, and that players had to be kept in line by any means necessary, including death without saving throw, powerful NPCs who just happened to be ready to save the town from violent PCs but not to help the PCs save the town from an external threat, and some very weird monsters indeed. (Rust monster, anyone?) Eventually, and reluctantly, Gygax stepped down from his pedestal (or, if you prefer, was replaced by people voicing opinions that could not be denied), but not before he did a lot of damage to the craft of RPGs, to TSR, and to the RPG community as a whole.

Still, no matter what gamer geeks think of D&D or of Gygax himself, we owe him big-time for creating the RPG, and indirectly for spinoffs like MMOs, video games like Final Fantasy and Diablo, and an awful lot of mediocre fantasy novels. Supreme egotism is almost a necessity for successful visionaries. Without that conviction and desire for public acknowledgement, visionary projects would never enter the public consciousness. Just as we must accept the less admirable baggage that came with Orson Wells, Pablo Picasso, and Thomas Edison, we must accept Gygax’s shortcomings. He deserves the praise he is receiving in memoriam. Anyone who doubts that is referred to the sheer number of fans who are ready to speak at length about rolling a 20 just when they needed it, their eccentric gnomish ranger/illusionist, or how a bunch of 5th-level characters managed to off the evil wizard with three tons of iron rations, not to mention those of us who are still playing D&D and its many offspring. (My favorite memorial is Crisper’s proposal that “...every gamer nerd on the planet should chip in some dough and we should build Gary Gygax an enormous tomb filled with the deadliest traps ever devised.” Nothing could be more appropriate.)

Good-bye, Gary. Thanks for a lot of unforgettable experiences.