Nothing to do with Ars except start the genre that lead to it.
postfrom Troll lord games who Gygax had been working with
That's very sad news. Without Gary this board wouldn't exist. I wouldn't have met nearly half of my closest friends, and so on and so on for thousands of games and millions of people.
Yep. He has everything to do with Ars. he is the Grandfather of all gaming. I pasted the AP obituary in a letter to the Berklist. He is the one who had the pivotal epiphany, taking wargame miniatures and ascribing them names and character. He invented RPGs. In my Berklist post, I mused which Outer Plane he was headed for. Then I thought of the one modual he wrote where a Gygax like wizard lived in a house on some outer plave, his home was all modern and powered by a quasi-elemental of lightning, and so on.
Remember Keep on the Borderlands and White Plume Mountain?
Oh! This is a shock. I... Well, this is stupid, but sometimes, you just get used to have people around.
Sad news indeed
So many of the good things in my life can be traced back to that guy... I never really thought about that before. What a tragic loss.
Through his game, Gygax made a difference in the world and the world is diminished by his passing.
Thanks for all, Mr Gygax.
Thanks for all. My life has changed whit rpg.
Ahhh...White Plume Moutain, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Descent into the Depths of the Earth ... sweet lovin' dungeon crawls. Gary has gone to be with the Great Druid in the sky.
Boardgamegeek is up to 16 pages of memorials:
boardgamegeek.com/thread/298031/page/1
Actually, I've been learning more with Gygax's passing what went down as far as Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax getting co-creator credit. Apparently Arneson borrowed Armor Class and Hit Points from a civil war naval game?
Another source indicates Dave was involved with a gaming club in St. Paul/Minneapolis (go Atlas!), Gygax in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and they met at 1st or 2nd GenCon in Lake Geneva and their clubs hashed out the first role-playing sessions.
---excerpt from GameSpy interview---
Dave Arneson: I know. So, as it started out it wasn't a major gaming effort as such but I was then adding rules and modifying things to make it ongoing. We had to change the old wargame system Gary (Gary Gygax) used in Chainmail.
The beginning of Blackmoor
GameSpy: And this led to the rules eventually published in Blackmoor?
Dave Arneson: And that led to Blackmoor. Yeah, I was really creative: Blackmoor Dungeon, Blackmoor Castle, Blackmoor Village, all in the Province of Blackmoor. (Laughs) Ok, I could have thought of names but…
Anyway, when we tried to use the old matrix rules (for Chainmail) only one die decided combat. So either the player would die or the monster would die. Well, the players didn't like that, so that's where I came up with hit points. Actually I got that from a set of Civil War Naval Rules where you had Armor Class and Hit Points and guns would do different damage.
8)
A sad loss.
All our our troupe passed onto Ars via D&D backgrounds, and I'm sure this is the case for many Ars players.
He will be missed by all involved in this hobby.
Steve
"[b]Little by little, as we grieve for lost loved ones,
we begin to remember not just that they died...
... but that they lived[/b]."
Author Unknown
All stories have an ending, all who breathe will one day breathe their last. Be not dimished by a loss, so much as enlarged by all that has been left behind.
May the boatman ferry you safely and swiftly across, sir.
I have been role-playing for some 30 years. As you can imagine, my first foray into RP was D&D. We didn't have 20 sided dice, so we rolled a combination of three different colored 6-siders to generate numbers from 1-20. When you rolled a 6 on that last 6-sider, you had to roll again!!!
We bought all the supplements, a lot of the adventure packs. We hated 2nd edition, and most of us had moved on to other RPGs by the time 3rd edition came out (most notably Ars Magica).
If there was ever a father of a genre, it was Gary.