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A review by helpfulsnowman
Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D by David Kushner
3.0
This is a really good, brief primer on what D&D is and how it came about.
It's definitely more a biography of the game than the guy.
I think I'd be willing to take a deeper dive on this one, provided there's more interesting details to explore. I'm not totally sure that there is. Gygax seemed like a nice guy and interesting, but...I don't know that his life up to the point of creating D&D is super atypical or incident-filled.
What's interesting is there's another dude involved in the creation of D&D, and he gets play in the book, but the relationship between the two creators was strained, and there are issues surrounding how much credit each deserves. This is such a classic situation. Stan and Jack, Jobs and Woz. It seems like you can't get a couple of dorks together to make a thing without this happening. Weird.
The big downfall of the book, a lot of it is written in a second person voice, which I think it meant to imitate a dungeon master narrating a dungeon crawl. But it doesn't always work because the you, presumably the reader, is sometimes the reader, sometimes Gary Gygax ("You're X years old, junior in high school..."). It's awkward. I think it could work, but it felt a little ill-fitting in a lot of spots.
It's definitely more a biography of the game than the guy.
I think I'd be willing to take a deeper dive on this one, provided there's more interesting details to explore. I'm not totally sure that there is. Gygax seemed like a nice guy and interesting, but...I don't know that his life up to the point of creating D&D is super atypical or incident-filled.
What's interesting is there's another dude involved in the creation of D&D, and he gets play in the book, but the relationship between the two creators was strained, and there are issues surrounding how much credit each deserves. This is such a classic situation. Stan and Jack, Jobs and Woz. It seems like you can't get a couple of dorks together to make a thing without this happening. Weird.
The big downfall of the book, a lot of it is written in a second person voice, which I think it meant to imitate a dungeon master narrating a dungeon crawl. But it doesn't always work because the you, presumably the reader, is sometimes the reader, sometimes Gary Gygax ("You're X years old, junior in high school..."). It's awkward. I think it could work, but it felt a little ill-fitting in a lot of spots.