Don't I Get a Saving Throw?

It's been a week for obituaries here - today, Gary Gygax, co-inventor of D&D. The blogosphere pays tribute, revealing some of their inner nerd - me too, I guess, me too. Is that saving throw gag too obvious? So what if it is? it's long since entered the vernacular, at least among certain classes of people - including a good many of my friends.

The truth is, I've never played all that much D&D. I started in college, and my brothers simultaneously discovered the game in middle school. I played at school, but I wasn't an enthusiast about it - even as a gamer, I was more into Diplomacy and Squad Leader. I was a history nerd, not a scifi nerd. I played a lot more with my brothers - though our games were a different kind of thing. The Making Light link mentions the mashup style of D&D - that was us. It was always a mix of war game and Hardy Boys, Bonanza & Gunsmoke, Get Smart, LOTR - in later days, this got out of hand, and we played characters based on William S. Burroughs, Zippy the Pinhead, ran dungeons derived from Borges or Eco, always working in jokes about contemporary politics, our friends, etc. Of course most of these things never quite got past the conception, and maybe writing up character sheets, and heading out to fight monsters but instead getting into a long conversation with a strange old man on the trail... once the dice started rolling, everyone got bored and went to the other room to watch the Braves.

Anyway: I don't talk about that kind of stuff here, but maybe I should. I've never really set down what this blog is supposed to be for - but the template adornments ought to be a hint - it really is a three headed monster composed of Captain Beefheart, Shohei Imamura and the Hardy Boys. The boys tend to get short shrift, I'm afraid. I manage to get around to talking about music often enough; and movies most often (when I get any posting done) - but the Hardy Boys, not so much. The Hardy Boys represent, well - not quite pop culture not quite trash culture - but maybe, nerd culture - or the odd corners of pop culture - or, maybe most of all - a kind of mashup culture, cartoons and paraliterature and YouTube and primitive cinema and Ed Wood and D&D and so on - not just disreputable things, but things that invite you to make of them what you want to. A Madvillain aesthetic. And that was something that D&D did very neatly: provided a means of chewing up and spitting out whatever caught your eye. It was, at its best, improvisational mashups - injokes and incongruous references the point of the exercise.

I don't think we were unique in that approach: I think it was built into the game, especially in the days when Gygax was writing it. "Lamentable Belaborment" spells - or the spell that made you tap and shuffle, heel to toe and shuffle off to Buffalo... made me happy.