Tuesday, March 04, 2008

A Moment for Geekiness

Sadly, Gary Gygax passed away today. In my non-birding years, I spent a lot of time sitting in my basement playing Dungeons & Dragons - the great role-playing game that he created. Similar to birding, D&D has a bit of a nerdy reputation. I had a lot of fun playing it back in the day along with games it helped inspire like Magic: The Gathering. I also spent a lot of time painting tiny lead alloy miniatures that will probably give me cancer. In salute to Gary, here's a hilarious clip from the extremely underrated TV series Freaks & Geeks that encompasses D&D pretty well:


For the record, I never dressed up in character except for Halloween one year. I sold off most of my stuff years ago and made a killing on eBay. I still have some lingering miniatures that I couldn't part with though.

6 comments:

corey said...

I loved GG's Greyhawk books...and I, too, was a D&D geek.

Actually, I would probably play again if I still had my Dungeon Master's Guide and Player's Handbook...

P. Ollig said...

I recently repurchased all the 2nd Edition AD&D manuals (my old ones were adopted and then sold by my little brother). Greyhawk was by far the best realm around.

I vividly remember staying up all night playing a 12 hour marathon campaign and making soda can pyramids on the downstairs table. I even found a couple of my old character drawings:

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e364/wolfcrazy_101/delhanha1.jpg
http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e364/wolfcrazy_101/elias.jpg

Patrick, you do realize what this means if you and Beth ever do stop over for a visit? You better remember to bring your dice!

P. Ollig said...

crap, those links didn't work. Here they are again:

Delhanha

Elias

Patrick B. said...

Corey, I should have known you were a D&D guy.

Paul, I still have them. I even have a handmade chainmail dice bag! I lost my funny 100-sided die somewhere though. Did you ever play Magic too? Nice drawings. I was a big Greyhawk fan and Forgotten Realms too. I never played Dragonlance though.

Anonymous said...

One of the servers on Dungeons and Dragons on-line held a memorial service last night, images are here:

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=138713

Warning however, this game is highly addictive!

Jennifer W. Hanson said...

Oh, no, another D&D-er. It's been a long time since I played but I still have all my dice, books, etc. stuffed in the closet. If I had a dime for every doodle of a character I ever drew when I was supposed to be concentrating in class...