(11/41: 1977) ERNIE GYGAX (1959–2025)
The First Player
In the winter of 1972, in a basement in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, a thirteen-year-old boy sat down at a table covered with hand-drawn maps and penciled notes. His father, Gary Gygax, had been working on something new—a set of rules that let players control individual characters instead of armies. The boy picked up the dice.
Ernie Gygax became the first person to play Dungeons & Dragons.
He didn’t know it yet. Nobody did. The game didn’t have a name, let alone an industry. But those early sessions in the Gygax basement—where Ernie, his siblings, and a handful of neighborhood friends tested Gary’s evolving ruleset—produced feedback that shaped the most influential game in hobby history. Ernie’s aggressive play style with his wizard revealed the need for high-level fighters to strike multiple times per round. His habit of charging into melee as a spellcaster inspired a spell that lets wizards fight like warriors. His frustration with Fireball destroying treasure led to Cone of Cold’s distinctive cone-shaped area effect.
These contributions are real and historically significant. They are also playtester contributions, not published design work. No D&D rulebook credits Ernie as a designer or co-designer. The distinction matters for this project, though it does not diminish what he gave the game.
Tenser
The character Ernie created at that first table—Tenser, an anagram of “Ernest”—became one of D&D’s most enduring legacies.
Tenser’s Floating Disk has appeared in every edition of Dungeons & Dragons from 1974 through the 2024 Player’s Handbook. Tenser’s Transformation remains in the spell lists fifty years later. The Water Weird, a monster Ernie created, has lurked in every Monster Manual since 1977. The character’s name is printed in millions of rulebooks, spoken at millions of tables, cast by millions of players who have no idea they’re invoking a thirteen-year-old boy’s wizard from Lake Geneva.
That’s a kind of immortality most designers never achieve. It’s just not design immortality. It’s the immortality of the first player.
The Dungeon Master’s Dungeon
Where Ernie truly excelled was behind the screen.
In 1978, building on initial maps sketched by Terry Kuntz, Ernie began running what became known as the Hobby Shop Dungeon—a megadungeon campaign operated out of the Dungeon Hobby Shop in Lake Geneva. Over the following decades, more than a thousand players sat at his table: at the shop, at conventions, at Gary Con and Gamehole Con and his own EGG Con. By all accounts, the experience was electric—deadly, faction-rich, old-school in the purest sense, run by a dungeon master who had literally been there at the beginning.
Luke Gygax’s tribute captured it: Ernie “always made time for young gamers and encouraged them… he didn’t pull any punches.”
This was Ernie’s real craft. Not the written module. The live experience. The table. The dice. The shared story. He was a dungeon master in the deepest sense of the term, and the Hobby Shop Dungeon was his life’s work as a practitioner of play.
But this list doesn’t measure dungeon mastering. It measures game design. And the distance between those two crafts is where Ernie’s score lives.
The Published Record
When Ernie did publish, it was always in collaboration, always within existing rule systems, and always in one format: RPG adventure modules.
His first credited design was Dungeon Geomorphs Set Two: Caves & Caverns (1977), co-designed with his father. GW1: Legion of Gold (1980), a Gamma World adventure co-designed with Luke Gygax and Paul Reiche III, was his first full module. Then came a twenty-two-year gap.
The independent career began with The Lost City of Gaxmoor (2002), co-authored with Luke and David Moore for the d20 system, later adapted for Castles & Crusades (2015) and D&D 5E (2020). The most substantial work came last: the Marmoreal Tomb Campaign Starter and its companion volumes (2021–2023), co-authored with Benoist Poiré through GP Adventures, totaling roughly 700 pages. The Hobby Shop Dungeon Box Set (2023) attempted to capture his legendary live campaign in published form.
The reception was mixed. Gaxmoor’s d20 edition drew criticism for stat block errors and encounter calibration problems. The Marmoreal Tomb’s maps—drawn primarily by Poiré—were universally praised, but the writing received consistent critique for organizational issues and front-loaded exposition. The sandbox structure and faction ecology showed real design thinking. The execution struggled to translate forty years of live DMing into text that other DMs could run cleanly.
No published work was solo-authored. No original game system was created. No board games, wargames, card games, or formats beyond RPG adventures appeared in the catalog. Design just wasn’t where Ernie chose to spend his time.
The Honest Assessment
This project measures game design. That phrase carries specific weight in the methodology: the creation of mechanical systems, the architecture of playable structures, the evolution of craft across a body of published work.
Ernie Gygax’s published design output is modest by these measures. Not because he lacked talent or passion—his live DMing proved both in abundance—but because published game design simply wasn’t where he invested his creative energy. He was a player first, a dungeon master second, and a published designer a distant third. He said as much through his choices: four decades of running the Hobby Shop Dungeon for anyone who wanted to sit down, a handful of published modules across the same span.
The methodology doesn’t penalize this. It simply measures what it measures. A brilliant surgeon who publishes two papers scores lower on a publication index than a prolific researcher who publishes two hundred. That doesn’t mean the surgeon is less skilled. It means the index measures something different from what the surgeon chose to do.
Ernie chose to play. The methodology measures design. The score reflects the distance between those two activities, not a judgment on which matters more.
The Scoring Case
Invention (2):
“Professional execution.” Ernie worked exclusively within established rule systems—AD&D 1E, d20, Castles & Crusades, D&D 5E. He never published an original game system or a new mechanical framework. His adventure designs apply the established conventions of old-school dungeon crawling—sandbox structure, faction ecology, deadly encounters—competently but without mechanical innovation. His most significant contributions to gaming mechanics (fighter multiattacks, variable hit dice, Tenser’s spells) were playtester feedback within his father’s framework at age thirteen. The Water Weird has survived fifty years across every D&D edition. These are genuine contributions, but they are contributions to someone else’s published system, not independent design innovations. Functional work within established frameworks. That’s a 2.
Architecture (4):
“Functional but rough.” The published adventure modules contain real design ideas—Gaxmoor’s faction ecosystem, the Marmoreal Tomb’s environmental variety, the Hobby Shop Dungeon’s sandbox structure. Poiré’s maps are consistently excellent. But the execution has documented problems: stat block errors in the d20 Gaxmoor, encounter calibration issues across editions, organizational problems that make the text difficult for other DMs to run, and writing that reviewers consistently found verbose. The live Hobby Shop Dungeon was reportedly excellent, but the published translation lost much of what made it work—because what made it work was Ernie in the room. Basic design goals achieved with real content underneath, but needing interpretation and house-ruling. That’s a 4.
Mastery (3):
“Early career or limited depth.” No solo-authored game designs exist. Every published work carries co-author credits. The total catalog is roughly a dozen items across forty-six years, with a twenty-two-year gap between 1980 and 2002. Game design was not his primary profession for most of his life. His design philosophy showed remarkable consistency rather than evolution—the 2021 Marmoreal Tomb exhibits the same AD&D 1E instincts as his 1978 campaign. That consistency reflects deep devotion to a tradition, but the methodology measures demonstrated craft refinement, and the writing quality issues in later publications suggest limited development of the technical skills needed to translate live play into effective printed design. Real but limited published output, concentrated in a single niche. That’s a 3.
Adjustments (+2):
- ■ Longevity 20+ years: +2 (Published designs in 1977, 1980, 2002, 2014, 2015, 2020, 2021–2023. The independent career alone spans 21 years.)
- ■ Full-time career: No. Game design was not Ernie’s primary profession for most of his life. Retail management, executive roles, and other work occupied much of his career.
- ■ Awards: No. No formal game design awards, nominations, or Hall of Fame inductions.
- ■ Branded name: No. Non-gamers do not recognize Ernie Gygax or any of his published titles.
- ■ Cross-genre success: No. Exclusively RPG adventure modules. No board games, wargames, card games, or distinct game formats.
- ■ Commercial success: No. The Marmoreal Tomb Kickstarter raised $126,110. No title approached $10M in lifetime revenue.
- ■ Design propagation: No. No third-party supplements for his settings. No designers have credited his published adventure designs as influential on their own work.
The Hidden Pattern
Ernie Gygax was always on the player’s side of the screen.
Even when he published adventure modules, the design reads like a dungeon master’s campaign notes—rich with the kind of detail that comes alive at the table but struggles on the page. The Hobby Shop Dungeon worked brilliantly as a live experience because Ernie was there to run it, to improvise, to read the room, to channel forty years of practice into the moment. The published version couldn’t contain that. No published version could.
This is the gap the methodology illuminates. Game design is the craft of building systems that work without you in the room. The rules have to stand alone. The encounters have to calibrate without the designer’s intuition adjusting on the fly. The text has to organize itself for a stranger reading it at midnight before tomorrow’s session.
Ernie’s gift was presence, not architecture. He was the best kind of dungeon master—generous with his time, unforgiving with his dice, steeped in the tradition he’d helped create at age thirteen. That’s a different craft than game design. A worthy one. The methodology doesn’t rank one above the other. It just measures the one it measures.
What Remains
Tenser’s Floating Disk, printed in every Player’s Handbook for fifty years. The Water Weird, lurking in every Monster Manual. Fighter multiattacks that have shaped billions of combat rounds. A character name that outlived its creator.
The Hobby Shop Dungeon—not the published box set, but the real one. The table in Lake Geneva where a thousand players sat across four decades and heard the dungeon master say: my dad made this game, and I was the first person to play it.
Ernie Gygax was born into the game. He lived inside it for sixty-five years. He chose to play rather than to publish, and the methodology is honest about what that choice means for a design score.
But the methodology isn’t everything. Some contributions don’t fit in four pillars. Being the first player is one of them.
The score measures design. The legacy measures something larger.
Total: 11 points. Year: 1977.
Total: 11 points. Year: 1977.
The score measures design. The legacy measures something larger.