Wargame Articles

Gary Gygax 1938 - 2008 by John Basset

Gary Gygax, father of role-play gaming and co-inventor of "Dungeons and Dragons" died on 4 March at the age of 69. There are good obituaries on the BBC BBC and Daily Telegraph Daily Telegraph websites.

Gygax and Dave Arneson published "Dungeons and Dragons", the first fantasy role-play game in 1974. It became a phenomenal success in the second half of the 70s, and shaped role-playing and skirmish games for a generation. The D&D demographic was pretty specific: if you're a wargamer in your 40s now, it's odds on that somewhere you have a small, battered box containing three dog-eared booklets and some Minifigs "Mythical Earth" figures; it was over by 1980, really.

In terms of structure, D&D grew out of Gygax's "Chainmail" Mediaeval miniatures rules, themselves a development of Tony Bath's ancients rules. Even at the time D&D game mechanics were unwieldy and often ineffective (statistically it's pretty much impossible for a fighter to survive long enough to gain the 2000 points to get to level 2). And unfortunately those mechanisms, rather than the concept of role-play, were the immediate legacy of D&D. Too often the next generation of RPGs majored on character classes, saving rolls and levels rather than pushing the dramatic concept implicit in the game. And I remember flasks of oil taking on the role of implausible iron-age hand grenades.

Gygax cited Verne's "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" and H.G. Wells' "Time Machine" (with its subterranean Morlocks) and "Little Wars" as major influences on D&D, along with Robert E. Howard's Conan and Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter of Mars. He had less time for Tolkien's epic. D&D echoes this, with its emphasis on plundering raids into the underworld and picaresque skirmishing. The first edition included references to Barsoom's green men, thoats and radium rifles, robots, and Tolkien's hobbits and ents. Subsequent editions lost touch with some of these sources as D&D evolved into a self-referential quasi-Mediaeval world of Disneyesque proportions.

Whatever you think of D&D and its numerous imitators, Gygax's impact on wargaming, role-playing (both recreational and professional), computer games, fantasy writing and wider popular culture was significant. The weekend after his death the top opening film in the US was Roland Emmerich's "10,000 BC" in which a northern barbarian fights fabulous beasts and the crazed priests of a pre-Egyptian civilisation who are building the pyramids using mammoth power. Pure D&D and a nice example of Gygax's broader cultural influence. In terms of his contribution to the wider wargaming hobby, Gary Gygax is up there with HG Wells, Fred Jane and Fletcher Pratt.