I Hated Stories in my Game Mags

“…Your humming has summoned up a pair of mud ghouls, Lute!”



Over at Grognardia today James mentions some pulp fantasy fiction in Dragon Magazine back in the day. I had an immediate thought I wanted to comment upon there, but rather than lay a negative on his blog, I will do it here where it belongs.

I HATED that shit in my magazines. Short stories featuring some fighter or barbarian or thief or another. The Dragon, White Dwarf, The Dungeoneer…whatever, I hated it. They could have been the greatest stories ever told for all I knew. I didn’t care, I rarely read more than a few paragraphs before turning away to look at the Anti-Paladin article or whatever for the thousandth time. I didn’t care if they were good; if I wanted to read fiction I would get a book or Argosy Magazine or something.

Tables, charts, rules clarifications, character class and alignment articles, and even comics. These were fun to read and you would read the same entries again and again, and a thousand times again. But the stories. Ugh. Who read these more than once?

I more or less stopped buying game mags by the late 80’s, but I did pick up the occasional Dungeon magazine in the late 90’s, and they seemed blissfully free of amateur fiction. I hope that is still the case today, especially if I get a hankering to buy one.

Paul Crabaugh and Me

The other day no less than two well known blogs (Grognardia and Jeff’s Game Blog) posted about a gentleman named Paul Crabaugh, who wrote some interesting articles for Dragon Magazine (and some others) in the early 80’s. I knew Paul a little from my youth playing games at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica, so I thought I would do a post about him myself since the name is getting bandied about.

Oh, and the title of this post is a play on Michael Moore’s famous first documentary. I actually did not know Paul well, and can only speak on experiences surrounding gaming with him at a dingy, smelly little game shop.

I bought most of my first D&D stuff as a kid at a place in West LA called Chess and Games. Way in the back they had a medium size rack that contained the LLB’s, Greyhawk, and Blackmoor. I snapped them up with what little allowance money I had.

But my real gaming started at Aero Hobbies. For my first year or so gaming there it was mostly kids my age I think, plus a couple of much older former leftover wargamer beardo’s who probably should not have been around kids.

But not long after I started going there it stopped being so much about young folk, as a passel of 20 and 30 something guys, including some friends of owner Gary, started playing a lot at the store a lot more. Most of them were not so nice to the younger teenagers, acting like their presence was a liability, and were typical of snarky D&D geeks.

But one guy who was actually pretty nice to the younger folk there was Paul Crabaugh himself. Not that he particularly wanted to play with kids, but he didn’t seem to resent their presence so much as the other older guys did. He never put the younger people down, ever, which seemed to be the stock in trade of his peers.

The first thing you would notice about Paul was how huge he was. He was a massive man. Not especially tall, but he very much looked like Michael Moore after doing three months worth of a Morgan Spurlock routine super-sizing at Mickey D’s. No-Chair-Can-Hold-Me big (and I say that being no Jack Sprat myself lately). But he was a gentleman in every way to everybody. He spoke to a 15 year old very much the same way he talked to adults, with respect and interest for what they had to say. Very rare among gamers. That is one thing that even though I didn’t think of it at the time, made me really like the guy. A gentleman in a sea of owner Gary’s asshole peers and cronies.

I didn’t know until quite some time after meeting and playing in games with Paul that he had written D&D articles for Dragon. Since Paul only really seemed to like Traveller and other science fiction games at the time, I’m guessing that his heaviest D&D period had been in college. He was writing about stuff he didn’t seem to play anymore (though I think he wrote some Traveller items as well) unless he was doing it away from the shop. The interesting thing was he never talked about those articles. He had zero ego about it. Owner Gary had pointed them out to me. I thought it was pretty cool.

Gaming at Aero was pretty bland and more often than not boring for me. Whether GM'd by a sleazy, druggo Vietnam vet, or a college educated computer programmer, it was not so much as story-making or painting a picture for players. It was monotone descriptions of things, usually some pun or two thrown into (like older geek from all walks of life seemed to love back then – more often than not based on Monty Python), then something attacks and you fight it (owner Gary's games had a bit more peronality to them than the others). I’m grateful for my Aero exposure to Runequest and Traveller and other games I may have never played otherwise back then, but even as a kid I knew games were better when you could inject a little personality, passion, and wonder into them.

Paul’s Traveller games were moderately interesting, nothing really special in retrospect, and like most younger guys at Aero I didn’t get too involved in them. Games by older guys like Paul, owner Gary, and other regulars seemed to be aimed at one or two other older guy’s characters no matter how many people sat at the table. One or two characters doing everything and everybody else were just side characters; side-kicks at best. Just sitting and watching. Looking back, that was a real shame. One time, towards the end of my going to Aero on a regular basis (sports, girls, and my own gaming groups were too attractive compared to the dust, moldy smells and the heinous attitudes of the Aero sausage-fest) my sweetheart of the time, who lived an hour north in Ventura, was in town for the weekend and I took her to Aero to play in one of Paul’s Traveller games. I spent all this time getting her a character set-up to play (if you know Traveller you know what that takes), but when we were ready it was once again an ignore fest as Paul pretty much ran the game aimed directly at owner Gary and left us and everybody else to sit, fidget and stare. I really get the impression that Paul would have been most happy just running for Gary alone with nobody there.

You’d think that a tall, beautiful girl at the game table for a change would generate some interest, but these guys were just too into how they did it at Aero (or maybe they didn’t know how to deal with a female gamer who didn’t look like Janet Reno) so In retrospect I guess it wasn’t Paul’s fault, although we never once got so much as a “so what are you’re characters doing?”. Young people, who these games were ostensibly aimed at, got no props at Aero. It was adults playing games and the young’uns be damned, unless you were one of owner Gary’s little blond cabin boys he got to watch the register now and again (I think one of those grew up and eventually bought Aero from Gary before he passed a few years ago). Thankfully, a couple hours of being ignored at the table ended when one of my high school friends showed up and asked us to hit the mall with him and we got gratefully the hell out of there to go have fun. That was the last time I actually sat in on a game at Aero I think. I was outgrowing it. Moving on to my own groups, and to non-gaming related activities. This was one of my experiences at Aero that shaped me as a GM. In this case, I would always make sure and give lots of time to other players no matter what character was shining at the moment. Actually, now that I think of it, most of my good qualities as a GM comes from doing the opposite of things I experienced in those old games at Aero.

I guess Paul passed away a couple or three years after I stopped hanging out at the shop. Sometime after abandoning the place for more fulfilling pastimes, I saw Paul walking in downtown Santa Monica. He was unmistakable, what with his size and the ever-present long-sleeve office job shirt with pocket protector he wore all the time. I just kept on moving for whatever reason, probably because I had so many unsavory experiences at that dingy game shop that were still fairly fresh (including Paul's Traveller game), but I wish I had stopped to talk to him a bit away from the negative environment that was Aero. He was one of the very, very few older people I came away from the place having any respect or admiration for. I’m glad his name still gets mentioned in the gamer community all this time later.

Top Ten craziest AD&D rules (part 1)

Here is a countdown of the top ten most insane AD&D rules. It’s from a site called Topless Robot (one of around a thousand geek sites with the word “robot” in the name). Each item is followed by my own (hold the applause) witty and informative comment on it.

Because it’s a little lengthy (3 or 4 pages or so) post, I’ll do the first five today, then post the other five in a couple of days.


10) Treasure Type

This system of treasure placement suggests that every Gargoyle has 2-8 pieces of gold on them at all times, or that Shambling Mounds always have on their person an assortment of coin, a few gems, a couple of scrolls, and maybe a potion or miscellaneous magic item (not to mention that carrot they have for a nose, just in case you're feeling snacky). Once players realized that this system was more or less a guarantee of at least a chance for a specific item type to drop, it becomes incentive to hunt them down. Who cares if nymphs are neutral good? She's Treasure Type Q and X, man!


My take: I hardly ever used the random treasure type stuff; although at some point in Jr. High I was using some tables from the monster and treasure assortment. Ultimately, it was more fun for me to just decide for myself what the creature had on its person or in its lair. Sure, I keep the Old School Encounter Ref in my game bag for emergencies these days for when characters wander off the beaten (and plotted)path, but that isn’t really based on monster type anyway. Yeah, we don’t need no steeking treasure type lists for monsters.

9) Level Titles

Okay, so these are pretty damn cool, and remain a fond memory for most players familiar with the 1st Edition rules. But if you think about it, they're also pretty nuts -- why is a 1st level fighter a veteran, if they're first level? They're even sort of insulting, in some cases. Take the Cleric titles: at sixth level, you're a Catholic Canon; at seventh, you embrace Buddhism as a Lama; and at eighth, you're a Patriarch out of the Greek Orthodox tradition. All this from a cleric who worships Odin. Seriously, this is just asking for religious boycotts. And while we're talking about it, was there anyone who played a kick-ass Monk who wanted to go by the title "Grand Master of Flowers"?


My take: this is a very good point, and flavor or no I don’t really use them. Let’s for sure hold off on calling Mr. 1st level fighter a “veteran” until he has killed his first orc and kissed his first girl (put a female orc in there and you got yourself a two-in-one).


8) Magic-Users

The name alone warrants inclusion on this list. Later editions fixed this -- "mages" in 2nd Edition, "wizards" in 3rd. But really, anything was better than what they fixed upon for the 1st Edition. It becomes status quo for most players, but think about it--by this nomenclature, fighters (which had at least by this point graduated from the gender-exclusive and similarly lame class title of "fighting men") should have been called "sword-users" and thieves would have been called "lockpick-users." (I'm excluding clerics from this example, since they would have been called "healing-users with a blunt weapon of only marginal combat value"--which they already sort of were.) But the real beef about Magic-Users in 1st Edition was that in terms of magical combat, they were one-shot and done. One magic missile or sleep spell, and they were done for the remainder. Mages make up for this by being insanely powerful on the other end -- when fighters are doing only slightly more damage per hit than they were doing at first level, mages can lay waste to an attacking platoon in a single round. But getting past that early going when a decent wand is more useful than you? That's a tough row to hoe there, Gandalf.


My take: Bah, I don’t really care. I tend to use the term MU or Magic-User because I like to reserve terms like mage or wizard for a character that has advanced somewhat (but not necessarily a name level). In in may game world, I assume people refer to them as magic-users (even though there are other types of spellcasters). As far as MU’s being a little light in the pocket spellwise at low levels, well, them’s the breaks. In the last couple decades I gave new MU’s a couple of random spells “in mind” that they can cast once a day, but for my next campaign I’m just thinking of giving them access to cantrips again, and making those cantrips free and castable anytime, with perhaps a 3-5 a day limit.

7) Arbitrary Limits as to Gender, Race, and Class

Admittedly, this is a broad category. But the problem here is well represented in the early pages of the first edition Players Handbook, in which in his preface on page 6, Gary Gygax mentions that readers will find "no baseless limits arbitrarily placed on female strength"...and then two pages later, the rules specifically state that human female fighters are limited to no more than an 18/50 strength. (It can, of course, be argued that this can still be seen as consistent, and that Gygax meant that those limits -- which are even more stringent, by the way, if your character is demi-human and not a fighter -- are neither arbitrary nor baseless...but that only exacerbates the problem.) But seeing as how that score is (supposedly) rare, there are better examples: how about a cleric of Poseidon who can't wield a trident? A dwarven fighter who can't rise higher than 9th level? (And too bad for you if you wanted to be a half-elf cleric, because you couldn't go higher than 4th level.) Why? Some of it is game mechanics -- unlimited levels were one of the few perks that existed insofar as being a human was concerned, back then -- and the game designers didn't want magic-users and clerics using swords, so they just forbade it (and even though 3rd Edition and onwards has corrected this issue to some degree, it still lingers in legacy games like World of Warcraft.) But other things -- like gender differentials for ability scores and the like? That's not a game balance thing; that's just alienating half your potential audience. To be fair, later editions of the game went too far the other way, and relied almost exclusively on the feminine pronouns -- so the game switched from exclusionary to pandering. Great work.


My take: Heh, I remember some gaming material in the 80’s going with the “she” or “her” instead of the usual male reference. Political correctness at its finest. I also remember fondly articles in The Dragon and The Dungeoneer in the early 80’s aimed at female players (with titles like “Those Lovely Ladies”) that seemed to think women in gaming were getting the short shrift. I had a superhot girlfriend who played in my games when I was in high school (she was already a fan of Sci Fi and fantasy so this hot chick playing D&D was not that weird), and all my jealous gamer friends would have their characters kiss her charcter’s asses in attempts to at least get favor from her PC’s in a way they could only dream of in real life. This was in stark contrast to when I took her around my football teammates, where my friends would try to kick my ass to impress her. Best of both worlds. Jeez, I took this comment in a weird direction. Ah, memories.

6) Bards

Holy crap, why was it so hard to be a bard in first edition? Any idiot can pick up a lute and start strumming it in a tavern -- so why in the world would they need to be at least a fifth level fighter, a 5th level thief, and a first level druid before becoming a first level Rhymer? Especially in a game that didn't seem to have been designed to support characters going much higher than 14th level or so? (No modules were created early on for levels above that with the exception of Isle of the Ape in 1985, and even though the spellcaster tables go up to 29th level, once most classes hit name level---10th, they stopped accumulating even full hit dice, let alone new powers or abilities.) Bards were effectively the first prestige class in a game system that didn't yet support them. Bards--along with psionics and several items above--are a good example of why the stuff in the Appendices were relegated to the appendices in the first place.


My take: D&D bard was indeed some stupid shit, at least in my games. In the 80’s onward you were lucky if I ran a campaign long enough to get your character to 7th level, so a regular bard would be out. At some point I created a bard subclass of thief that gained skill (in music, performance, and art in addition to some thief skills) as they went up. Due to Andy’s early (and fairly mild) power gaming with this kind of bard at the start of this current campaign, I have altered my bard heavily since he rolled up his character Vaidno (much to his chagrin). I love the Vaidno character nowadays, but my bard class will be a different animal if anyone runs one in the future (although in Andy’s defense, I gave my bard a D4 for hit points, which makes up for almost every other problem with my bard class).