A daughter, a dad, and some comics

I took my daughter Elizabeth to Free Comic Book Day on Saturday. The local store had some people playing Imperial Stromtrooper Dress-Up out on the street promoting the event. To get her in the store I had to convince her that Darth Vader and crew were not a threat. But when Boba Fett gave her a friendly wave she calmed down a bit.

Inside the comic store was the busiest I had ever seen it, though I must note that I avoid the place like the plague on Wednesdays. I'm too cheap to have a pull list and besides, Marvel Two-In-One was canceled a while back. Still, since the joint shares digs with my local gamestore Elizabeth and I get in there often enough to browse the bargains bins. They make it a point of putting the "all ages" books on a single low shelf, which makes it easy for me to identify to Elizabeth which books she can pick from. She usually goes for Scooby-Doo and JLU. The Big Three of the DC Universe are among her favorite superhero characters, probably due to lots of viewings of the Superfriends DVDs with her old man.

When it came time to look over the free comic selections I did my best to stay out of her decision-making process. I really wanted to see what kinds of books she would pick out on her. Of course I monitored to make sure she didn't try to select anything with lots of gore or whatever, but she was mostly drawn to kid-friendly looking super hero books. Here's what she selected:


She also got the Iron Man/Hulk freebie, but I can't find an image of it just now. She also picked out this gem from the "all-ages" section:I thought it was pretty interesting that she passed up on cartoony stuff like the Mickey Mouse comic being offered and instead she went straight for genre stuff like superheroes and robots and magic cowgirls. Now, she's not all tom boy by any means. Had there been Strawberry Shortcake or Barbie comics available she would have gotten those as well.

By way of comparison, here's what I got:
I really wanted the free Lynda Barry and Charles Schulz comics being offered, but none were left by the time we showed up.

Con GMs: a dying breed?

The first con game I ever ran was a little AD&D module I had written called The Iron Trapezoid. An evil wizard laid his hands on the Trumpet of Doom and planned on blowing it at the end of a ritual that would open a gate to Hades. The result would be an army of hordlings roaming the land. The PCs were tasked with entering the oddly-shaped metallic fortress of malefactor and stopping him. Inside the Trapezoid were a bunch of fake-out monsters: ogres in oriental garb who weren't really ogre magi, skeletons in suits of iron armor posing as golems, gas spores, etc. The players were a typical mixed bag of college kids, twentysomething ex-college kids, and a greybeard or two who remembered the bad ol' days of the beige box.

At the time I ran this con event I was 14 years old. My mom had driven me to this convention. The players were not prepared for a kid who knew the rules, had pre-gen PCs ready to go, and offered a coherent scenario with serious challenges for both the PCs and the players. For my own part, I was completely oblivious that anything was out of the ordinary. I was the DM. Gary Gygax and Tom Moldvay had been telling me for years that I was in charge of ensuring a smooth-running, entertaining game. One of the college kids tried to lean on me a bit, asking for some dagger-poison for his halfling thief. In retrospect he was probably testing his ability to manipulate the punk kid behind the screen. At the time I just told him 'no' like I wuld have to any of my regular players.

Fast forward a few years. I was jibber-jabbering on the phone with my pal Don. IIRC, he had just taken over as chairman of Winter War, my nifty little local con. He asked me to run a 2nd edition AD&D tournament for the con. I organized some DMs, wrote the three-round tournament module, and at the con I herded cats, getting all the gamers to their tables. It wasn't the best adventure ever written or the best con tournament ever run, but I was pretty proud of having guided it from start to finish. The next year I did it again.

Looking back at these and other events I've run at cons, I'm struck by how utterly clueless I was. At no point did it ever occur to me that I couldn't run a con game as a snot-nosed kid, or that a college student with no formal writing experience could write and manage a D&D tournament. When I decided to start running niches games at small cons it never even occurred to me that no one might want to play Encounter Critical or Wuthering Heights. I just went out and ran the games I wanted to run. And everything turned out pretty well, except for the recent lack of interest in Mazes & Minotaurs. Even my 3E intro games, which I had no business running, turned out okay. Man, that was stupid. Don't try and teach others a system you don't understand, kids.

Which is all a long intro to try to explain why I was utterly freaked out by my man Don's comments in an earlier Gameblog post:

Actually, Jeff, what I think is more significant for the hobby is an answer to WHY we aren't producing more DMs like you and Dave who can run games with strangers.

I don't have any good answers, and I don't see anyone else even asking the question.

Now I know plenty of people will be ready to jump up and say "GenCon's not lacking for GMs." Don's ten years or more of convention data only looks at out tiny little local shindig, so maybe the problem is a local phenomenom. What do other people think? Is the RPG section of your local convention as vibrant as it was a decade ago?

I know Living Greyhawk and similar ventures look more healthy. Winter War's own LG section has been full of raucous action for the last couple of years. But LG does several things to make things easy and safe for the GM. You don't have to come up with a module. The RPGA supplies those. You don't have to come up with some PCs. The players bring their own. Emphasis seems to be placed on running the Rules As Written, which in a game like 3.5 takes away a lot of the freedom but also a lot of the responsibility of the GM. Not to be dissing on hard-working Living Greyhawk DMs, but that looks like the easy-peasey, phone-it-in way of running a con game. I don't see much art to that approach.

More importantly, the Living Greyhawk structure completely undermines the social aspect of the player/GM relationship. In my games I hand out some PCs with the hope that we'll all work together to have some stupid fun for a few hours. Living Greyhawk puts the rulebooks and module between the DM and the players, some of whom seem to be only interested in scoring points. Maybe I'm mis-characterizing the LG scene here. I only have a handful of run-ins with it.

None of which changes my basic question. Is the hobby doing a bad job of creating con GMs? Back when I was a kid Dragon took the con scene seriously. In addition to the monthly calendar of events, they'd also carry con reports. And didn't the Gen Con program used to appear as an insert to Dragon? Gary Gygax's much-maligned how-to books (Role-Playing Mastering and Master of the Game) talked extensively about the larger social mileu to which the individual gaming group belongs. Does D&D for Dummies even mention the existence of conventions? I don't recall.

Both Gygax and Dragon left young Jeffy with the distinct impression that GMing at a con is simply part of the larger GM experience. The hobby seems to have moved away from that assumption. Is this another issue we can try to lay at the feat of Storyteller? I dunno. My impression is that running a one-shot game for strangers would not be on the list of priorities for World of Darkness chroniclers. But I have even less direct experience of that subset of the hobby than I do with Living Greyhawk.

maps from campaigns past

A couple days ago I was sifting through the mess in my game room when I stumbled across an old players' handout style map.
This map dates back to Dave Dalley's 2nd edition AD&D campaign, circa 1990. Dave was a really great DM when working in small settings and low levels. He could make a game seem epic even when it was just a handful of 3rd level PCs saving the Hammlet of Croak from a demonic cattle rustler. The creature in question turned out to be a berbalang, one of the weird monsters from the 1st edition Fiend Folio.
Fighting this guy on a farm in the dark was quite a kerfuffle. We wounded him and he fled. One of his wings was badly mauled in the initial encounter and he half-flew/half-hopped back to his lair, leaving a trackable trail. The thing's lair was a small dungeon of course. Every monster's lair was a dungeon back then. It's just how we did things. So we crawled our way through some traps and spiders and whatnot. The other players thought we had this guy's number when we caught up with him before he had time to heal. Then the real berbalang showed up.

See, berbalangs (at least in previous editions) had this weird power of projection. It's pretty much like Doctor Strange's astral projection in reverse: the projection hunts for food on the Prime Material plane while the host body chills out on the Astral. So the wounded faux berbalang disappears to be replaced by the fully functional Real Deal. I knew all this was coming, since I had owned the Fiend Folio for years, but I didn't let any word of it slip to my fellow players because I wanted to see their reactions to this turn of events. Some days I can't stop thinking like a DM even when I'm a player.

Dear Borders, WTF?

My local Borders bookstore has this infamous tome on the shelf with the other D&D stuff:Unlike some folks I don't have any objections to the existence of a product like Book of Erotic Fantasy. But stocking it on the shelf right below the D&D Basic boxes is not the smoothest of moves. And it's not like this was something that was special ordered and never picked up. There were two copies. That shows some level of forethought exercised by some Borders employee.

Three Unrelated Items

1) My Dad the Movie Star

The utterly forgettable flick Grandview, USA (starring Jamie Lee Curtis and her two best friends) was filmed in Pontiac, Illinois, about a 15 minute drive from the farm I grew up on. My dad, like many other locals, was an extra in the big parade scene at the end of the movie. My classmate Natasha got a close-up during the end credits, but my dad is seen only from behind. He's walking down the street carrying a lawnchair. We know it's him because of the cowboy hat. It seems like Dad wore that thing everywhere for a couple of years.

Back when Amy and I were engaged I mentioned my dad's brief encounter with Hollywood to one of her relatives. A couple months later her uncle Tom, who was not a participant in the original conversation, says to me "So, your dad starred in a movie with Jamie Lee Curtis?" Still cracks me up that my future in-laws thought I was the son of a movie star.

2) Is Ben 10 the new Hal Jordan?
Just stay with me for a moment. Both these guys a thick-headed, cocky jerks with bits of alien jewelry that allow them to do all sorts of crazy things. All the Ben 10 episodes I've seen have him going up against evil aliens and mad scientists. It's like the New Silver Age or something.

3) Emails I don't want to get from my mom.

I know it's just another crazy forward she got from someone else who thinks internet joke emails are hilarious, but still. My mom's name and 'strip poker' are not words that need to be adjacent in my brain.

The Saga continues

Has everyone been following the previews for the new Saga Edition of Star Wars d20 that Wizards is supposed to be releasing this month? I think it's looking pretty sweet. I've never run or played any of the previous Star Wars rpgs, which always struck me as very weird behavior on my part. Why would a roleplaying nerd who likes Star Wars not try a Star Wars rpg? I honestly can't explain my behavior.

And this new edition is coming out at a time when my faith in the forthcoming 5th edition of Traveller, and its ability to impact the hobby positively, is at a low ebb. Everything I see on the message boards and other sources tells me that Marc Miller is writing a game that will only be of interest to people who are already fans of the Traveller franchise. I want a sci-fi game I can pitch to people who haven't already drank the Trav koolaid.

Here's the other thing that's making me consider hopping onboard the Saga train. The RPG section of my local con seems to be treading water or maybe even slowly dying. The Living Greyhawk section is going full steam ahead, but the rest of the roleplaying games are starting to look as crusty and insular as the guys who've run the same minis games for the last 20 years. No offense to those minis dudes, but I want a more fresh and exciting vibe out of the RPG department.

My buddy Doug pointed out recently that part of the problem was so many of the GMs run the same old games every year. We need some fresh, exciting material. The year I ran two 3E games it was still the hot new thing and I had absolutely no trouble filling those tables with people eager to play those games. I think I need to do something like that again. Sure, those games were me jumping on the bandwagon. But plenty of people wanted to be on that bandwagon with me. And that's kinda the point, I guess. For Winter War to continue to bring people in the door we need to be offering the games people want to play.

What have you fiends done with my real players?

It's only been a couple of days since I mailed out my latest campaign update to my the players of my Beyond Vinland game, but I'm a little suprised at the lack of reponse. I know my writing writing wasn't exactly a brilliant piece of literature, but I thought Big Jerk Needs Your Help + Free Magic Stuff = Interested Players. At least Stuart spoke up to express interest in the magic bastard sword.

But where is everybody else? Really, I would gladly take any response from "That magic spear is totally mine" to "We'll need a magic item and 1,000gp each to take the job" to "To Hel with the cranky castellan and his shiny toys, we're going to continue to plunder the Canyon of Chaos". Heck somebody complaining ("Why is the spear so much better than the longsword?") might be better than silence. At least that player would be engaged.

So Doug, Pat, you're regular readers of this here blog. What's the deal? Have you just been too busy to respond? Is my adventure pitch just lame? I'm genuinely curious what's going on here.