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Wizards of the Coast posted this notice on the front page of its D&D website yesterday:

ERNEST GARY GYGAX
JULY 27, 1938 - MARCH 4, 2008
Today, Wizards of the Coast was deeply saddened to learn that Gary Gygax passed away in his home at age 69. Gygax was a co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons game. His innovation created an entirely new type of hobby that now attracts millions of players worldwide to face-to-face and online roleplaying games. Gygax was a grand storyteller renowned for his unique style, sprawling "Gygaxian" adventures, and the fantastic World of Greyhawk. He inspired generations of players, designers, and authors, and he will be sorely missed by legions of fans. We extend our sincerest condolences to his family and friends.

In a 2004 interview, Gygax said, "I would like the world to remember me as the guy who really enjoyed playing games and sharing his knowledge and his fun pastimes with everybody else." I don't think there's any question about it: his wish has been granted.

I think the best Gygax tribute of all is an eight-year-old episode of Futurama in which he appears (alongside Nichelle Nichols and Stephen Hawking) as a member of Al Gore's Vice Presidential Action Rangers, charged with protecting the space-time continuum.

Sometime in the fall of this year, I will have been playing D&D for thirty years. Except that I don't really play it anymore. Everyone in my gaming group is very busy, myself included, and in recent months finding a time when we're all available has become virtually impossible. Thinking about this a few days ago, I found myself wondering if it wasn't time to accept the fact that D&D was a thing of the past for me. Nothing lasts forever, and perhaps this part of my life was finally over.

Well, I'm not gonna do that. Not now. Not when Gary Gygax isn't even cold yet. Not with the 4th Edition about to arrive in stores, and my 30-year anniversary as a D&D player mere months in the future. Hell, no! I refuse to just let it slip away. Somehow, somewhere, I will play this game again. And today, just to prove to myself that I'm still a D&D player, I'm going to buy some new dice.

UPDATE: The 4th Edition of D&D will be dedicated to Gygax.

More tributes: Penny Arcade, The Order of the Stick (comic, blog), Salon, Wil Wheaton, Steve Jackson, XKCD, New York Times

12:25 AM in Games
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E. Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and father of the role-playing game, has died.

Farewell and Godspeed, Gary. You may be gone, but the game you helped create is alive and well, with the Fourth Edition almost ready for launch. And that's as good a legacy as anyone could ask for.

2:33 PM in Games
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If you're wondering how D&D 4th Edition is coming along, there have been some interesting news items on the Wizards of the Coast D&D website. A recent editorial in the online version of Dragon Magazine (yes, it still exists!) said "4th Edition is close on the horizon -- and fast approaching." A February 13 news item on the website was a bit more specific:

For the next several weeks, you'll be seeing fewer 4th Edition Design and Development columns than normal. This is because the writers, all of whom are members of the R&D staff, are busy finalizing the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual. As a result, we're scaling back the number of online articles. Once the three core rulebooks are off to the printer, we'll get the R&D staffers back on their regular schedule.

1. Character roles are more clearly defined.
2. Powers give you more combat options.
3. Attacker rolls against a static defense.
4. Standard, move, and minor actions.
5. Healing gets an overhaul.
6. Short and extended rests.
7. Attack!
8. Action points give you an extra action.
9. Movement is quick and easy.
10. Saving throws are straightforward.
11. Durations are easy to manage.
12. Reach (usually) isn't as threatening.
13. A trio of "c" rules you might want to know. (These are Combat Advantage, Cover, and Charging.)

1:42 AM in Games
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Ben points out that it's been a long time since my last entry. Fortunately, I had an experience yesterday that is relevant to his recent article about the supply and demand of the Nintendo Wii.

I was in a Wal-Mart when an associate came on the public address system and said, "We now have the Nintendo Wii in stock." I wasn't interested in buying a Wii myself, but I headed for Electronics anyway because I was curious. I hadn't actually seen Wiis for sale before, and I wondered if a mob would form and start fighting over them.

What I actually saw was rather anticlimactic. There were indeed some Wii packages visible behind the glass of the game-console display case, and a woman in that aisle had one in her cart. No other customers were there. I shrugged and went back to my shopping. When I was ready to check out, I swung by Electronics again just to see if anything had changed. The Wiis were gone, but when I asked an associate how many the store had received that day, she said "Four". So it's not surprising that they sold out quickly.

So that's my firsthand experience with Wii demand: enough to make them disappear in short order, but not enough to draw a crowd.

7:23 PM in Games , Technology
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Wizards of the Coast released Episode 15 of the D&D Podcast today, and this one has some solid information about the upcoming Fourth Edition. It's a question and answer session in which Dave Noonan and Mike Mearls respond to two dozen questions from gamers about the new edition. You can see a list of the questions in the show notes, but here are some highlights:

• How will players convert their 3E characters (and campaigns) to 4E?
• Will action points be part of the core game?
• How will encumbrance be handled?
• Is the monetary system being revamped?
• What about critical hits?

(If you don't know what action points are, you haven't played in the Eberron setting. But Ben has, and he's promised to explain how action points work.)

1:24 AM in Games
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Wizards of the Coast has announced Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. The first 4E publication, the Player's Handbook, will be released in May 2008. EN World has a summary of everything that is currently known about 4E.

1:15 AM in Games
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Dragon Magazine has been a part of the Dungeons & Dragons gaming hobby for over three decades. From its inaugural issue in 1976, Dragon was published every month -- first by TSR Inc., then (after TSR went bankrupt in 1997) by Wizards of the Coast, and finally (after WotC outsourced its periodicals in 2002) by Paizo Publishing.

But later this year, the magazine will close its doors. Dragon and its sister magazine Dungeon will cease publication after their September issues. In its announcement, Paizo stated that WotC will be "moving to an online model" for publication of those kinds of content.

2:58 AM in Games
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I don't know why I find this game so addictive. It makes no sense if you stop to think about it. I mean, mining for gold by shooting a mechanical claw into the ground and using a winch to pull up whatever it grabs? That would be silly even without the gophers that sometimes carry diamonds in their teeth. And the barrels of TNT that explode when you touch them (who buried those, and why?). But for some reason the game is fun, so I keep playing.

UPDATE: There's also Gold Miner Special Edition, which seems to be exactly the same game with fancier graphics.

11:48 PM in Games
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Pong was one of the first video games, and it's at least 35 years old (closer to 50 years if you consider Tennis for Two an early version of Pong). But even today, it inspires new variations and tributes. For example, Curveball is a Pong-based game that operates in three dimensions instead of two, and displays the action from a very different angle. Text-Pong shows us what Pong would be like if it were a text adventure game. And then there's this video of a Pong game that uses people as pixels:

12:49 AM in Games
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A few months ago I posted the news that the classic out-of-print board game Robo Rally was being revived. At the time, only GamingReport.com was reporting the news. But Wizards of the Coast has confirmed the report in a press release about the 2005 product lineup for their Avalon Hill brand.

11:20 AM in Games
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This D&D website turns out to have nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons; it's for D&D Chevrolet in DeWitt, Iowa. My initial reaction was "How have these folks avoided being sued by the game's publisher for trademark infringement?" But the dealership has been called "D&D" since 1971, three years before the game first appeared. Now, if they had called it Chainmail Chevrolet . . .

1:57 AM in Games
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Is the world ready for a reality TV show about Dungeons & Dragons players? Maybe, if all of the players (apart from the Dungeon Master) are attractive young women. The Daily Illuminator reports that such a show already exists on cable-access TV in Southern California. It's called Dungeon Majesty, and you can see a video clip of it here.

1:03 PM in Games
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I just realized that I forgot an anniversary. My first blog post was written on October 2, 2001, so this blog turned three years old on Saturday.

That strikes me as significant, for reasons that require a bit of explanation. Over the years, I have learned that I have a tendency to get interested in a new activity, pursue it enthusiastically for a while, and then lose interest and abandon it. Sometimes I actually experience a loss of motivation; sometimes I take a break from the activity and just never get around to resuming it. In a couple of cases I've decided that the activity is just too expensive and I can't afford it.

The reasons vary, but I've noticed a fairly consistent pattern: if a new interest of mine is going to run out of steam in this way, it's most likely to do so after about two years. That appears to be the point at which my initial enthusiasm flags and, if I haven't made a genuine long-term commitment, I just don't feel like pursuing the activity any more. So if a new activity of mine survives past the critical two-year mark, that suggests that I'm not going to lose interest in it. There have been exceptions, but this seems to be the general rule.

Well, I've now been blogging for three years. Does that mean I'm likely to keep it up for a lot longer? I hope so.

UPDATE: If anyone is wondering, my involvement as a volunteer at Raleigh Little Theatre passed the two-year mark three months ago. My family and I first signed up as volunteers at the Backstage Night open house on July 8, 2002.

And as long as I'm observing anniversaries, I should point out Sputnik 1 was launched 47 years ago today -- a fact commemorated by today's X-Prize-winning flight of SpaceShipOne.

10:15 AM in Games
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If you've ever played the boardgame Robo Rally, you know that there's nothing else even remotely like it. If you haven't played it and you are at all interested in games, you owe it to yourself to try it out. Unfortunately, this is increasingly hard to do. The publisher, Wizards of the Coast, stopped producing the game several years ago, and the basic game and expansion sets routinely sell on eBay for upwards of a hundred dollars. But now the game is poised to make a comeback next spring, according to GamingReport.com.

6:37 PM in Games
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I'm playing the License Plate Game again this year, and it's going much better than in 2003. I only have 35 of the 50 states so far, but among those 35 are some that are quite rare in North Carolina. I spotted a Minnesota plate on Tuesday, and yesterday I saw one from Idaho. Idaho was one of the two states I never managed to get last year, so checking it off was especially satisfying.

This morning, as I was driving to work, I glanced at a passing minivan and was astonished to see that it had front and rear plates from Hawaii. On the other hand, I still haven't sighted a license plate from Kentucky, which is practically next door. But with eleven months to go, I'm not very concerned about that one.

12:03 PM in Games
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Since the middle of summer, I've been playing the License Plate Game: try to spot a license plate from every state in the U.S. by the end of the year. Greg and Virgil have been doing this for several years, using their Palms to keep track of their progress, and I decided to give it a try. I think I've done pretty well, considering that I started playing after half the year was already gone. But on the last day of the year, I'm still two states short -- I haven't seen Idaho or South Dakota. Unless a double miracle occurs in the next six hours or so, I'm not going to complete my 2003 checklist.

So I'll start over with a new checklist tomorrow morning. I just wish I hadn't seen an Alaska plate yesterday on my way to work. Argh! I'll need that one tomorrow, but right now it's useless. (I actually saw plates for Idaho and South Dakota a few days ago, but they were expired plates for sale in a truck stop. The rules of the game state that the plate has to be attached to a vehicle. So those were equally useless.)

5:37 PM in Games
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Listening to BBC Newshour on the radio this morning, I heard a report about the earthquake in Turkey. At one point, the reporter spoke with a British earthquake expert, and I realized that I know the guy. Well, sort of. I've never met him, and I was hearing his voice for the first time. But we actually exchanged e-mail messages a few years ago.

The reasons for this go back to 1979, when I was first introduced to Dungeons & Dragons by friends at the University of South Carolina. If you spent any time in game or hobby stores, you were familiar with a monthly magazine called The Dragon, published by TSR Hobbies (the same company as the D&D game itself). But there was another magazine, White Dwarf, that you could only find in a few stores because it was a British import (published by Games Workshop). Issue 15 (October/November 1979) contained an article called "How to Lose Hit Points . . . and Survive" by a British gamer named Roger Musson. I didn't see that issue of White Dwarf, because the Columbia hobby shop where I was hanging out didn't carry the magazine. But a few years later, while browsing in Silver City Comics (a much cooler store in Cayce), I stumbled across a copy of The Best of White Dwarf Articles II, a 1983 compilation of material from issues 15 through 30. I found several of the articles interesting and bought it. The Musson article was included, and I was particularly impressed by it.

Fast-forward to early 1997. A discussion of the hit point rules (and ideas for improving them) was in progress in the D&D newsgroup. I thought Musson's article was relevant, so I posted a summary. To my astonishment, Musson himself responded, expressing delight that the article was still remembered two decades after he wrote it. I sent him a note praising the article and asking some nitpicky questions about it, which he was happy to answer. In the course of all this, I learned that he was now a seismologist working for the British Geological Survey. In fact, he seemed to be a rather prominent seismologist -- at one point, I ran a Web search to see if he had a gaming-related site (he didn't), and found numerous references to, and quotations from, his research.

So this morning, when a BBC reporter introduced an earthquake scientist named Roger Musson, I knew immediately who she was talking to. BBC World Service doesn't seem to have an online archive of their radio reports, but this transcript of their report about Turkey's last major earthquake (in 1999) includes some quotes from him. His remarks this morning were quite similar: he discussed the tectonic forces at work in that part of the world, and the Turkish construction practices that tend to exacerbate the death toll when a quake occurs.

Thanks to the BBC, a great many people heard Musson on the radio today. But how many of them know that he used to play D&D, have a copy of his article about hit points, and have conversed with him by e-mail? I'm such a geek.

(Note: The Dragon exists today as Dragon Magazine, now published by Paizo Publishing. White Dwarf is also still around, and is even still published by Games Workshop. But it's now devoted entirely to miniatures-based wargames like Warhammer.)

UPDATE: You can listen to the BBC radio segment here. Dragon Magazine's print edition ceased publication in September 2007, but the magazine lives on as a part of the D&D Insider website.

11:55 PM in Games , News
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