What can I say about this man that hasn’t already been said?

My biggest regret is that, even after all these years of going to Gen Con, I never talked to him. I saw him many times at fairly close range, but never quite had the guts to go up to him and make a total fanboy out of myself. I was afraid that I’d just embarrass myself and annoy him, and I was sure he got more than enough of that already. Besides, I’d tell myself, I’ll be here next year, right?

But he won’t.

Thank you, Mr. Gygax, for the red “Basic Set” box, for showing me that not all dice have six sides, for the dungeon crawl, for random tables (encounters, treasure, whole dungeons, NPC personalities, and anything else you can imagine), and for countless nights spent hanging out with my friends.

Thank you for the very idea of kicking down the door to fight an orc guarding a chest in a 10-by-10 room. We might tell ourselves otherwise, but it never gets old.

Thank you for my hobby, which stimulated my interest in literature, history, politics, math, and science. I doubt I would have made it this far without it.

Thank you for what is now my career. I get to work in gaming every day, and I still can’t believe that I have that privilege.

Working on designing a new edition of a game is really hard work, and now more than any other time I realize why that is: Gygax is a tough act to follow. All those “sacred cows” are sacred because they were his ideas. Not all of them are perfect, but all of them are memorable, inexorably linked to our concepts of gaming. It was hard doing something like, for example, removing saving throws from Saga Edition — they were his. And even in the midst of removing that sacred cow, I remember championing the reintroduction of another — so we put hit points back in the game, a beautiful and elegant abstraction of a hero’s ability to survive the myriad means of death that stalked him at every turn.

Gygax truly had a gift with that sort of thing, something both carefully detailed yet necessarily abstract, and every game designer since him has tried to live up to the standard he set: We had to make a game that felt the way his did when we first discovered D&D, something that was just as much fun … and we consider it a smashing success if we even come close.

Thank you, Gary … for everything.