“An adventure in which your 7th-level columnist honors the passing of Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax by exploring the depths of his own early teen D&D years. Featuring hypotheses of attempted profundity and confessions of adolescent dorkery. Enter, brave adventurer, if you dare!”
Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal has a nice column on Gary Gygax. It sounds like Mr. Fry is about the same age I am, and started playing D&D at about the same time. And he too was a DM more often than a player. It sounds like we have a lot in common, in the area of D&D experiences. (I never colored the pictures in my Monster Manual though. Yikes!) He’s got a lot of good observations in this piece that I heartily agree with, particularly his note on Gygax’s vocabulary, and how it had “taught me two very interesting ideas at once: first, that a single thing could be described by many names; and second, that each of those names meant something subtly different.”