Pictured above: profile pic of a Roll20 forum member
advertising as a "Paid DM"
In recent months I've been exploring the Roll20 members forums. Here people advertise that they are looking for games to play in, looking to start a campaign, etc. I've been interested, surprised, annoyed, and even appalled (I'll post more on this in the future), but the most stand out thing to me there is the phenomenon of "paid DM's."
Around 10 years ago when I started exploring the "OSR" online, there wasn't much in the way of "professional dungeon masters." Sure, somebody like Frank Mentzer and other mid-level gaming luminaries might be getting a payday for running a convention game. You can make your own call as to whether such sessions are worth the time and money (I try not to be judgmental but I don't find this grizzled veteran very compelling in his refereeing), but I was never much of a convention dude.
At some point right before I originally started this blog I was lurking around a forum, I think RPG.net, and some young fellow calling himself Captain Kommando or some such made a post discussing the possibility of running games for a living. Apparently he lived with his granny and money was an issue. In order to help he wanted to earn some bucks, and he thought DMing for pay would be a great way to save the homestead. He would don masks and do voices and provide you an interactive experience. That forum, at least then (I have zero recent forum experience; in the past I found forums such as rpg.net and Dragonsfoot to be cesspools of tired old school gamers clinging to tired old notions) was full of people who thought their way of having fun pretending to be elves was superior, and they kind of ate Captain Kommando alive. "pay to play? the hell you say!" But he dug in his heels. I think that after he sat on a train for an hour to go run a free trial game for some folk at a mall food court, and none of them showing up, he gave up on his dream and went back to a regular job search.
Flash forward some years, and the roll20 "looking for games forum" is full of folk advertising as "paid DM's." Literally 25-35 % of the posts are from DM's looking to get 10-20 bucks a sessions from their players. And they often seem to be able to find a group to pay. They call themselves "legendary DM's" though readily admitting they have only been doing D&D for two or three years. That's gotta chap the ass of anybody doing it for free for decades. Hell, sometimes a group will post looking for a DM to pay.
Now, none of that really appeals to me. For one thing I don't really need the money. But to have to have an expectation that you are "working" for the players really turns me off. Too many times in the past, especially outside my own hand-picked groups, have I felt like running a session was like a job that didn't pay. For every player that brought me a six pack of high end beer, there were two who didn't seem to give a shit about what might be fun for me in the game. And I was giving it up for free.
The added pressure of getting paid for it for sure does not appeal. A role playing game as customer service? Just like life in general I have found that when it comes to being a player the secret to happiness is managing your expectations. If you are paying somebody you certainly have high ones.
Honestly, I think this notion is another side effect of the popularity of Critical Role.
A couple or so years ago I wrote a series of articles on RPG related things for an online pop culture website. This site was created mostly by talkbackers on Aint It CoolS New who jumped ship from there when AICN creator Harry Knowles got sucked into the #metoo morass. Below is one of the first items I wrote for them.
The website asked for content featuring fairly raw humor, so I accommodated as best I could. Also a certain amount of artistic license was used here where salient details were somewhat lacking. Please excuse the formatting as this was copied directly from the for mentioned website.
At first Mary Jo Gygax had no reason to believe her young husband Gary was anything but a hard-working family man, who committed much of his spare time to his kids and political volunteerism.
But mysterious late nights with sketchy friends and missed family dinners led her to believe her hubby just might be slipping some Wisconsin salami to some Lake Geneva hussy.
Creeping down the basement steps of one of Gary’s best pals, she steeled herself for the sight of a sexual liaison, but instead found something potentially more terrifying; Gaz and his pals stooped over a table laden with maps and miniatures, recreating some Napoleonic combat or other.
Gary wasn’t a cheating bastard; he was a wargame god.
“this will get me sooooo laid one day”
The Fresh Prince of Lake Geneva
Gary spent his earliest years on the mean streets of Chicago, but when he started showing a childhood proclivity towards gang warfare, the family up and moved Fresh Prince style, but instead of hightailing for Belle Aire, they went for rural Wisconsin.
A high school drop-out, and an uninspired sometimes-college student, Gygax built his strong, professor-like vocabulary by indulging in science fiction and pulp fantasy while working a variety of low-end office jobs. Conan The Barbarian, Lovecraft heroes, and John Carter of Mars were his muses.
Continuing his interest in table top gaming as years rolled by, Gary remained active in the wargaming community, and wrote many articles for wargaming magazines and coming up with his own games. Always yearning for new ways to approach his games, Gary was an early adopter of multi-sided dice, discovered in math teacher supply catalogues. In 1967 he founded GenCon, a yearly meeting of wargame wonks in Wisconsin. Not long after he would produce Chainmail, a warfare simulation with fantasy elements, which would become an early template for Dungeons and Dragons.
A Dork Named Dave
“Me? Not so much”
Along came Dave Arneson, a Minnesota University history student who also loved wargames. Dave had, for the time, unique ideas about his wargame sessions. Not satisfied with merely simulating exact history, Dave liked to explore alternate histories and outcomes. He was also a proponent of “Braunsteins,” an unpublished wargame notion were non-combat goals were introduced into the rigid wargame rules.
This quickly evolved into the idea of players actually taking on the roles of individuals in the game (commanders, town mayors, community leaders and businessmen) and making non-military decisions outside of game task resolution, almost entirely based on whim. Role-playing, to put it simply.
You might remember playing Monopoly as a kid, and your friends or older siblings wheeling and dealing and negotiating outside the rules. Yep, we were all role-playing landlords and train barons. We were Braunsteining.
Dave expanded upon these games by inventing his game world, Blackmoor (widely recognized as the first true fantasy role-playing setting), and his sessions deviated heavily from the stodgy, popular wargames of the time. He injected fantasy elements, quests for gold and monster killing, and scenarios lifted from fantasy literature.
You Got Your Dave In My Gary Butter
Dave and Gary came together like chocolate and peanut butter at GenCon 2, bonding over a mutual love of naval-based games.
Not long after, Arneson would adopt Gygax’s Chainmail rules for his games for his personal home campaigns, but also addended it with what would later be recognized as the Dungeons and Dragons tropes that game is known for, including the improving hit points concept, character development from session to session, and most importantly dungeon crawling.
His players tiring of simple castle sieges, Dave filled the basement levels with traps, magic, and monsters, and had them delve beneath rather than breech the upper walls.
D&D is Coming Together
Gary must have loved the Blackmoor games, because he quickly invented his own setting, Greyhawk. Gary and Dave began to collaborate on a unique game combining their games and rules, and Gary wanted to hustle on it as there were other wargamers with similar publishing aspirations.
Unable to find publishers, Gary and pal Don Kaye tapped friend Brian Blume (one of two brothers who would eventually lead to the downfall of Gary’s version of the company) for the moolah, and they were off and running with a first run of 1000 copies. Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) and Dungeons and Dragons were born. It was 1974.
Arneson was not a partner, and most of his rules were not incorporated into that first version of D&D (though the tropes he invented would be), but he contributed a supplement, Blackmoor, and would briefly work for TSR. But he would soon leave to pursue a separate career in game design.
Dave would receive co-writer credit for a brief time, but that was removed with the publication of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a somewhat different game. Still, it’s main concepts were all Arneson, and he filed several lawsuits, breaking up the friendship. In 1981 they settled, and Dave received co-creator credit and a royalty sum. This soothed the seething tensions between Gary and Dave, and the old school dorks were friends once more.
The Band is Breaking Up
Dave moved on anyway, and eventually landed a prestigious position at Full Sail University, teaching game design for many years. But he continued his home Blackmoor games, sessions that for decades gamers would beg to participate in. At conventions they often got the chance.
Before long, due to the death of TSR partner Kaye, and a buying of more shares by Brian Blume and his brother, Gary found himself the minority shareholder of the company, effectively more an employee than partner in the company that was fast becoming a huge success despite a variety of negatives.
For one thing, stories both true and false about the game in the media (gamers gone missing and suicides) caused a certain amount of eyebrow-raising scrutiny for the hobby, along with religious tongue clicking (Gygax and his wife actually left the Jehovah’s Witnesses due to pressure within their local chapter).
Also, Gary had become obsessed with playing D&D, and it occupied all of his free time. His longtime love of marijuana, the lure of young snizz his new celebrity afforded him, as well as a growing cocaine devotion, helped finish off that marriage, and Gary and Mary Jo divorced in 1983.
“I can’t believe you’re taking half the dungeon!”
Gary continued to be the face of the popular game. While the Blume family continued to run the game aspect of TSR, Gaz was sent off to Hollywood to get the entertainment division off the ground. In gamer circles, tales of Gary doing copious amounts of blow off of young gals’ tatas while cavorting in hot tubs were legendary. He co-produced the popular D&D cartoon, and worked hard (as hard as you can work while playing D&D 15 hours a day with a coke straw glued to your schnozz) to get a D&D movie off the ground.
Villainy Most Foul
The Blumes were back in Lake Geneva having their own party, buying up a fleet of company cars, overstocking the supply cabinets, overstaffing the offices, and believe it or not using company funds to hunt real treasure at the bottom of the sea. Before long, under the leadership of Tweedledumb Blume and Tweedledumber Blume, the three hundy million dollar a year company was several million in debt. Gary, who was close to locking in Orson Wells and John Boorman into his D&D film project, was informed of the Blume’s intention to sell off his beloved company to nix their debt. Spitting out his doobie, and knocking Traci Lords off his junk, Gary boogie-nighted out of his rented Hollywood mansion and hightailed back to the hearth fire in Wisconsin for a little aggressive TCB.
Captain Gygax: Civil War
His tussles with the Blumes and attempts to restructure the company could fill a library’s worth of books, but the long and short of it is Gary got things back on track. He helped hire a Hollywood friend’s sister as a business manager for TSR in 1984, perhaps the greatest mistake of his career. Her name was Lorraine Williams, and that name may as well be “Hitler” to many old school D&D fans.
Gary soon learned that Lorraine, though an excellent manager, held D&D players in low regard, and actually belittled Gary about it. Gary tried a Machiavellian move or two, but it was to no avail. The Blumes sold their shares to Williams, and with a cackle and flash of brimstone, she became the true power behind TSR.
Gary eventually said “screw it” and went on to try his hand at new gaming ventures, but like a modern Moriarty, Lorraine stymied him at every turn, eventually owning (through lawsuits most foul) and shelving his promising Dangerous Journeys game system. Though he would always have his name linked to D&D, Gary would never replicate his original game’s success.
Through the late 80’s and into the 90’s, and to Lorraine’s credit, TSR actually thrived despite many poor ideas, such as a Rocky and Bullwinkle RPG that included the use of hand puppets (can you imagine?). D&D remained strong, and expansions into comic books and novels were a success. But it would not last.
TSR over extended itself, and poor sales of things such as an attempt to enter the collectable card market doomed the company.
In short, Lorraine eventually sold out to Wizards of the Coast, makers of Magic: The Gathering, who themselves soon sold out to Hasbro. Dungeons and Dragons, once an underground playground for overgrown Conan fans, was in the hands of the owners of Transformers and My Little Pony. For good or bad.
Wrapping Up
Both Gary and Dave never lost their love of gaming, and the hobby continued to be the major force in their lives. Dave continued running his coveted weekly home games all the way up to when he died. Over the years many fans would live their dreams of getting to play at the tables of Gary and Dave at various gaming conventions. Gary passed away in 2008, and his old pal Dave died in 2009.
Lorraine Williams still stalks the Earth, laughing her last laughs at Gary, Dave, and their gamer ilk.
Only recently found out they are trying to get it together to get a memorial built representing Gygax and D&D. Although it seems to be more about Gary himself, I guess it is going to be a dragon with an inscription (yawn). I can see the children in the park now “Oh mommy, look! Skyrim!”
So there is this website you can go to for the information on this. Also, I understand the widow of Gary, Gail Gygax, shows up on convention floors with a money jar looking for contributions to this project. I can understand her wanting something like a memorial to Gary’s works, but the cash jar strikes me as kind of sad. I can’t say if Gail was left a hefty estate when Gary passed. It’s not like Gary produced a bunch of films or something. Royalties from the old D&D cartoon, and his books, can’t really be supporting a South Fork Ranch type lifestyle, could they? But anyway, the very wife of the man roaming game rooms looking for fivers from gamers just seems kind of cruddy. Are things that bad?
See, I think the memorial will be in part an ad for the current producers of D&D and their product whether they mean it to or not (plus the new reprints being sold by WOTC are tied in with this). Why is that bad? Well, I think the makers of the game, with their storied history and all, pretty much abandoned their own fanbase. That is what a lot of the voices of the OSR are about. There are a lot of older folk who stuck with the product throughout it’s various incarnations. I'm thinking the people who are the most passionate about this are the people who supported the game and it's companies, decade in and decade out, both monetarily and by bringing new people into it. I feel these are the people who have a right to ask that their voices be heard. It's a niche hobby where people come and go, but many seemed to have been buying the product for a good part of their lives. The product no longer seems to represent the game people have loved. I mean, even modern players of 3rd edition were gob smacked by 4th edition, which was just a head scratching departure from 3rd much in the way 3rd was from older editions. They don’t just want entirely new task resolution – they want support for the game they love. Many supported 3rd despite it’s differences from the old. They had faith in the company and the game, and then the company once again changed the entire game on them. You can see how the faithful would take issue with them.
Me? I'm not one of the faithful. I don't give a rats ass. I haven't bought a new TSR product brand new off the shelves of the local game jobber since around 1987. Despite ol' Gaz telling me since the earliest days of D&D that the "other" product out there was inferior and should be avoided, I started giving my money to other companies product that interested me. Hero Systems and Chaosium seemed to reward their fans by giving them what they wanted - for hearing their voices and actually having an understanding of their fanbase. I still play 1st edition, using my tore up old books. And I have props for Gary. But as far as I'm concearned I'd have more interest in Sandy Peterson or Greg Stafford getting a statue when they pass. They represented a company and product that DELIVERED.
Actually, no knock at Gary by any means, but if a memorial was going to in part represent the D&D that I play, then that memorial would be for Dave Arneson. He most represents the game I love, even though when I was young I had no idea of his contribution. When I was a little kid eagerly buying the first Blackmoor book, I had no idea who the man was or what he meant. Gary was the face of the game. I didn’t know there was this heart and soul named “Dave Arneson.”
Hey, skip the dragon and make it statues of both Gary and Dave doing a fist bump and I’ll crack open my dusty wallet in a heartbeat. But you can keep your 120 dollar memorial set, WOTC. My tore-ass old books are still workable for my games.
Look at it now, and the first edition of the Monster Manual doesn’t look like much on the outside. Looking at it as an adult, it seems like a 12 year old painted the cover in elementary school art class.
But as a kid in the late 70’s, it was a wonder to behold. After having only the little brown books and various cheapie Judges Guild items, the bold colors of the MM cover really hit you over the head. And showing monsters above and underground told you almost all you needed to know about D&D; fighting beasties in the wilderness and in the dungeon.
And all those monster inside; boy, I must have poured through that book day and night for a year after getting it. For future fanboys like me, the MM was the first gateway drug to Greek Mythos. Hydra, Gorgons, hippogriffs, and all that lot right out of Bulfinch’s. And leave us not mention the Tolkien based stuff, including no less than three types of hobbit!
Man, that first copy of the MM got a lot of use, and still does. I still get a chill looking at the artwork, especially the Trampier stuff.
And one night years later, as a confused and sensitive mid-teen, the Monster Manual got me through my first real hard night. After a brutal dumping by a girlfriend at a Sci Fi con near LAX, I went home that Sunday night and was heartbroken. I could not sleep and had no idea how I would make it through the night.
I had a project in mind before that, which was doing the old Tunnels and Trolls classic Monsters! Monsters! But for 1st edition AD&D. So I broke out the MM and a notebook, and started to work out how each and every intelligent creature in the book could be used as a player character. Assigning of classes and class combinations, bonus and minus to stat blocks, and abilities gained through level progression. To this day it is the most work I have ever done on gaming material in a single sitting. And eventually I got to run that game. One player ran a young Frost Giant, another a Carnivorous ape, and things like that. They took a village apart that session, and the atrocities committed were horrendous. Half that party died when they tried to attack an actual walled city. The hail of arrows put an end to their madness.
And a happy ending too. Me and my ex-girlfriend reconnected for a time not long after that lonely night. There is always hope, but you just gotta get through the pain so you can feel good again. Thanks to the Monster Manual, I got through that dark night of the soul and came out smiling on the other end. Thanks, MM! I’m not sure my heart even has nerve endings anymore, but it’s nice to know you are there if I ever had to stay up all night again simmering in my own juices.
Published by TSR’s UK division in 1983, UK1 seems to be inspired by “forest/garden levels” in dungeons. It is, of course, a dungeon-like adventure, in that you cannot fly nor float into the area due to an impenetrable force field. You can actually destroy the force field - If you are a 20th level wizard, that is. It is so funny when modules actually describe how you can affect something, even when there is no chance in hell of having what you need to affect it! This module is designed for levels 4-7, so it’s doubtful anyone involved would have the contacts to get a super-wizard to help out. Note that just like any other aggressive act in the module, destroying the force field has a consequence – the dispelling wizard will be sucked into a vortex, and spewed out in some random place and time. Why did they even bother to go into this? Sheesh.
Created on an island (in the World of Greyhawk) by a wizard and his elvish wife, the gardens still go on long after they had passed away. It is always summer in the garden, and it is full of various sylvan creatures, including leprechauns, pixies, centaurs, an Ent, dryads, and unicorns.
The local governor asks the party to enter the gardens and bring back a young couple. The official offers up 10,000 GP for their return, a hefty sum for any rescue mission. The party will eventually have to earn it, because all of the creatures in the gardens believe the young couple to be their old master and mistress reborn. Within that fact dwells the challenge of this adventure: there is no evil in the garden, but every living thing is your enemy. Many of them, as described in the module, will attack on site.
Like many TSR modules, many spells did not work as normal. In this case, many of the most common spells a druid might use did not work at all. This was a very strange thing, considering druids also were granted a level while they stayed in the garden, but things that did not make a lot of sense were often included in TSR products.
This adventure heavily stresses non-violent parlay, and role-play is more essential to this adventure than most others. In something like “Steading of the Hill Giant Chief,” you ultimately won’t have much choice but to barge and bash your way through it. But in UK1, every page is full of bad things that will happen to you if you are aggressive, steal anything, or harm anything in the garden. Even worse, the official who hired you has an amulet of ESP, so if you show up after a nasty act looking for the 10,000, he will deny you and have you thrown out of town. If the party really is evil, this would be a great time to show it. Kill the governor, take his amulet (easily worth over 50,000 in my game), steal a boat, and disappear for awhile.
There are two combat encounters in the caves leading into the garden. There are some Mudmen, a by product of the magic stream exiting the cave, and also an ochre jelly. But after these fights, don’t fight anything else or you not only forfeit the reward money, you’ll have the entire garden population after your head. The young couple is held up in a magical tower in the garden. This place pretty much would count as a mini-dungeon, but once again you have to walk on eggshells or face dire consequences.
The "boss monster" (forgive the video game lingo-lax) of the gardens is "The Green Man." The spirit of John Barleycorn is alive and well in the place. This meant nothing to me in the 80's when I got this module, but later on when I joined a group at the local Renaissance Faires based on Morris Dancing and folk music, I learned a lot about this old English country spirit. Morris dancing is about making the "ale crops," barley and hops, grow by doing worhipful dances and country dances in his honor. If I run the scenario again in the future, I will use him more than I did the first time.
There is a magical oracle force in the “Cave of Echoes” that lead into the garden that can be entertaining. As described in the module, it will pretty much grant any minor wish to a zero-level NPC who is in need. It has no respect for greedy players though – if they wish for something, it just gives mysterious gibberish. So great fun can be had with this, and you can really see who the greediest player character is judging by how they approach the oracle.
Most DM’s would find it a challenge to keep players entertained, seeing as most of the adventure is passive (or is designed to be). I actually altered things to make it easier: I had a powerful party of evil NPC’s enter the garden to loot it, and that way the players had somebody they could fight and not incur wrath.
As a player character, the most troubling aspect of the gardens is the time stream. For every hour spent within the garden, a month passes on the outside. When I ran the module for the first time, I think the party spent 8 or 9 hours in the garden, and that was after finding out about the time slowdown a couple of hours into it. They stepped it up a bit, but a party unaware (as the module hopes they will be) could easily spend a night or two in the garden, especially if they happen to befriend some creatures and hang out with them. So a typical scenario could have the party come out to find 2-4 years have passed. Yowtch. At this point, have the players put the character sheets away and start new ones. The world will catch up to the garden visitors eventually.
So Cal native, grew up at the beach surfing and playing sports. Got into comics around age 7. Started playing Dungeons and Dragons in my early teens, and have gamed on and off over the decades, usually as DM/GM. I play the highland bagpipes, drums, and occasionally work at California Ren Faires with my hippy world music friends.
