Gygax was dumbfounded by their accusations.
Gygax's first draft was 50 pages long.
Gygax decided that he had no choice but to publish the game himself.
I say, tell that to the gunter clans in the gold mines of Gygax.
Gygax credited his four-year-old daughter with picking the pair
that became the game's official title.
After years of declining health, Gygax died in 2008 at the age of 69.
The suits were eventually settled out of court, but his relationship with Gygax never fully healed.
After ending his involvement with Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax dabbled in fantasy fiction writing and other projects.
But if Gygax worried about the impact of the controversy on the game's sales and popularity,
he needn't have.
And to demonstrate the absurdity of his critics' claims, Gygax invited them to try to deposit the loot in their bank accounts.
When Gygax pitched Dungeons & Dragons to Avalon Hill,
the biggest publisher of war games in the United States, they didn't know what to make of it.
When Gygax's business partner and childhood friend
Don Kaye died suddenly in 1975, Gygax had to bring in outside investors to raise the money he needed to buy out Kaye's widow.
Apparently neither Gygax nor Arneson thought“Black-moor” was descriptive enough or had enough
marketing pizzazz to work as the new game's title, so that name was given to a scenario within the game instead.
Each player still had a dozen or more plastic soldiers, but instead of each figure representing up to 20 men as
had been standard in other games, Gygax had each figure represent only one soldier.
This fantasy element alienated many of the most orthodox war gamers, but plenty of other people liked it-
soon Gygax's basement wasn't big enough to hold all the players who
wanted to play in his games.
He ended his creative contributions to the game in 1976 and
three years later filed the first of five lawsuits against Gygax and TSR, alleging that he would been shortchanged on both creative credit
and royalties.
It took Gary Gygax's organizational skill to boil the game down to a coherent set of rules that anyone could
follow- complete with lists of monsters, character types(such as fighters, clerics, wizards), weapons, spells, and so on.
Gygax thought a two-word title would work best,
so he wrote up a list of words that described or were related to the game- monster, journey, dragon, adventure, quest, dungeon, treasure, and so on- and paired them in different combinations.
There, on a giant table in the basement- just as war gamers had
done since the invention of Kriegsspiel in the early 1800s- Gygax and his friends re-created famous battles such as Gettysburg
or the D-day landings of World War II and fought them all over again in miniature, devoting countless hours to killing each other's soldiers with one roll of the dice after another.