I think the best way to express the unbridled excitement I experienced upon finding out I was going to interview Luke Gygax is to just share the text exchange with my editor at that moment.
The four-second audio file is just me screaming.
Thankfully, I calmed down and composed myself like a professional when I actually got to interview Gygax at Dragon Con 2024. Serendipitously, I bumped into him doing signings in the America’s Mart 2 for his latest project, The Eye of Chentoufi, just a few hours before we met for our interview. I’ve read the first couple of pages and I can tell this is solid adventure material.
Without further ado, here’s a look at the wonderful chat I had with Luke Gygax this year. (I shared the interview slot with another interviewer, so while I feel comfortable quoting Luke’s part in the conversation between the three of us, I will be summarizing the other interviewer’s questions instead of directly quoting)
The other interviewer opened by asking about the legacy and evolution of Dungeons & Dragons over the last 50 years.
Luke Gygax: Yeah! It’s really interesting to think about the very humble roots of D&D and how it was a niche game that no one expected to be popular. And in fact, even when it gained popularity, people looked at it suspiciously. Or if you played it, there was something wrong with you. […] People were just like, Oh, they’re kind of nerds. And, oh, they’re the odd folk. So now, to see this switch come around in the past – probably 15 years – it went from being not cool to, yeah, okay, that’s all right. And then to, oh, it’s a desirable thing to do. And that’s pretty strange.
Me: So I attended the 50 years of D&D panel you were in today – that was really fun to watch! What did your prep look like for that and do you have any thoughts about how the panel went?
Luke Gygax: My preparation for that has been the last 16 years, because [of] running Gary Con. It’s been wonderful running Gary Con, because I’ve gotten an opportunity to become friends with a lot of the people that my dad worked with who knew me as a child. But I got to reconnect with them as adults and have conversations about what they did and their role. I formed friends with all those folks and heard directly from them what was going on. So not only did I read [the] books and talk to guys who wrote the books, like Jon Peterson and Mike Witwer, I’ve talked to the sources, chatted with them over a beer, and that’s been my prep for the 50 years of D&D panel. The panel was a lot of fun. It was a good time.
The other interviewer then asked about where Gygax thought the game could evolve and improve as we look to the future of D&D.
Luke Gygax: I think that we want to be careful about how much we automate things in tabletop. I think part of the charm of tabletop is being with people face-to-face, without screens and other things. I think screens are as useful as props or terrain and miniatures and things like that. They’re much more portable, right? If you do VTT (Virtual Tabletop), or even some of the cool ones that do 3D stuff on the table. But to an extent, they also can limit your imagination. And I think what’s beautiful about role playing games is that you are unleashing your imagination, just like reading or painting a picture in your mind. And those are skills that we need to continue to develop, being able to be creative, being able to tell stories, being able to imagine, and I think that’s important. We should foster those roots and use technology in good ways to enhance that, but not try to replace it. As far as rules and things like that go, it’s going to change with culture and what people are looking for in their day-to-day.
Me: So obviously, you’ve been close to this for so long and you got to be a player with Gary for as long as you did: what do you think is your preference between running the game or being a player? And has that fluctuated over the years?
Luke Gygax: I used to like to play a lot more, just because that was what I was more comfortable doing. And DMing can be anxiety producing, right? Because, holy smokes, I’ve got to do the whole thing and people are relying on me. Are they going to have fun? But as you do it more, just like anything else, you become relaxed, you have fun. I DM at games at conventions all over the world. Super fun. I write adventures and run them.
I just want to share an extremely enthusiastic THANK YOU to Luke Gygax for being so generous with his time and meeting the other interviewer and me with such warmth and undivided attention. They kept Gygax busy running around Dragon Con this year, so I feel very fortunate to have snagged a few minutes out of his loaded schedule.
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