Dragon magazine was the monthly magazine for Dungeons & Dragons. It was published from 1976 to this month 2007 — the last paper issue was #359, September 2007. Its content is now only published online, but that’s not really a magazine to me.

I had a subscription to Dragon from the early 80s to the early 90s, and I picked up individual later issues, off the newsstand, here and there through the years. Some years I’d only pick up one or two issues, but since somewhere around 2003, I’d been buying 3-6 each year. The September 1983 issue (25 years ago this month) had the only readership survey I ever saw in Dragon. (There may have been others, but I never saw them.)

I had filled out the survey, but I never sent it in. Of the 20 questions, I didn’t answer #15 “How do you rate DRAGON Magazine overall compared with other gaming magazines?” and #20 “What other magazines do you read?” I didn’t read any other magazines at the time, gaming or other.

Click the image to see the survey near full size. (You can also see my answers from 1983.)

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

My primary set of dice, blue with white numbers, has done me well for a few years. Except for the twenty-sided die — the main, most-used die of the set. The d20 has let me down many times. In fact, it’s become a bit of a joke among my gaming group.

That blue d20 always let me down in the most important, or dramatic, or most improbable ways. It’s especially disappointing when it lets me down in dramatic ways. Like when my paladin charged the evil wizard at the start of a combat, and the die came up a natural 1. Last game session, my war-priest used enlarge person on himself to pull out the “big guns” because we badly needed heavy damage in the fight. To hit and smash the enemy, I only needed to roll a 7 or better on the d20. What did it give me? 6, 5, 5, and then the fight was over.

I wanted to destroy this cursed die, so I set up an execution for it.

The set lined up to witness the punishment.

The convicted is covered, the hammer rises.

The sentence is carried out. Eyes are cast down.

The remainder of the set will be added to my big bag o’ dice to be used when I need them. I’ve bought a new set to be my main.

Like most gamers, I have a bunch of dice — collected over nearly 30 years of gaming. But unlike many gamers, I don’t bring them all to a game session. I just bring one set. I’ve retired many dice, but this is the first time one has driven me to carry out capital punishment. But that d20 was really damned infuriating.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I’ve mentioned how I’m looking forward to playing D&D as a Player (vice as DM) in our group’s current round-robyn-DMing campaign. But as has happened to me so many times over the many years, I’m finding frustration in this excitement.

Our group agreed to try this round-robyn style several weeks ago, and I was to be the first DM of the campaign. I had two adventures ready, each of which I figured would take us two game sessions to run through. After these four game sessions, I would get to play a character while one of the other guys DMed an adventure. So I made my character (based on a cool miniature figure I found).

The first adventure ended up taking 3 weeks to complete (we skipped D&D one of those weeks), and the current adventure will, hopefully, finish up next week, the fourth game session in it. So I’ve had this character created, and I’ve been looking forward to playing it for 7 weeks. Most D&D Players create their characters the week of, or maybe the week before the day they start playing it. And not only that, but as most Players are always Players (as most DMs tend to most always DM), they don’t feel that long delay between making a character and playing the character.

Maybe it’s my own fault for making the character immediately rather than just ignoring any ideas until the day of play comes. The other guys in my game group made their characters at the same time I made mine, but they got to immediately (within a week) play theirs. I’m waiting at least 7 weeks before I get to play mine. It kind of gets frustrating, this long delayed gratification. It’s like telling a bunch of 7-year-olds they will get some new toys, then while the others start playing with theirs, one kid has to wait several weeks.

It can break a boy’s spirit.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

Our game group is back into a D&D campaign now (still 3rd edition D&D), and this past Thursday was our third game night in the first adventure. We’re running a “round robin” style game, with each Player taking a turn at DMing an adventure. Usually, when we play D&D, I’m the sole DM. I’m looking forward this new play style because it will let me play a character for a while. I think I really need to experience the Player side of the game more, especially with this group.

DMing for this group, there are many times I wonder over why they make certain decisions or choices, why they see certain things or fail to see certain things. When I ask the Players why, I often just don’t understand the answers. One of the Players has remarked many times “You just need better Players.” I don’t think these guys are bad Players, by any stretch of the imagination. They’re creative, intelligent, and generally observant (much more observant than I am most times). But sometimes they just don’t see things that for me is obvious (but as DM, I have all the answers literally written right in front of me), or they see things that I can’t figure out how they come up with. This is one reason I like playing a character in our games often: it lets me see the world from their perspective.

Let me give an example from this current adventure:

The party of adventurers are exploring a dungeon filled with a bunch of monsters. They come to one room where they encounter a big, bad demon monster. They engage it briefly (about 3 rounds of fighting), and find out that they can’t hurt it as they are currently prepared. So they pull back out of the room and regroup. Later, they reprepare their resources specifically to combat the demon. They charge back into the room and defeat the monster (7 rounds). This was all smart adventuring.

[As a side note: this 7-round battle took 40 minutes to play out with 6 characters, plus 2 animal companions and 1 summoned creature against the 1 demon and his 2 summoned creatures.]

In another encounter, the adventurers were trying to leave the dungeon and return to their home base. As they left the dungeon, a WHOLE BUNCH of low-level, low-intelligence monsters were between them and home.

The way I expected this mass combat to go was that the adventurers would see the enemies massing on them and so they would pull back to safety to regroup and come up with a plan for getting through them. (I can think of several ways this group of adventures could get through the mass of monsters.)

But what the adventurers did was to step just outside the dungeon exit and stay there, round after round after round. I explained that they could see more of these monsters coming from the surrounding area, and I directly mentioned that there were many, many more that they couldn’t see yet, but could hear in the distance. The adventurers stayed in their spots and pretty much slaughtered the weak enemies one after another (killing around 2-6 each round). But each round, more monsters arrived, and the adventurers weren’t really accomplishing anything against the swelling horde.

It wasn’t until the 8th round of the fight that one of the Players mentioned pulling back. By this time, there were so many dead monster bodies piled in places that virtual walls were forming from the corpses. On the 9th round, the adventurers starting pulling back into the dungeon, and on the 10th round they were fully disengaged (and the monsters didn’t follow them back inside). Only 1 adventurer and her animal companion had been seriously injured during the standing battle.

Afterwards, the Players didn’t seem too interested in the tactical challenge of getting through the horde. It seemed to be an annoyance to them. When I created the encounter, I had thought it would be a really cool challenge; something more than the cliched just hack the monster till it’s dead. I thought this scenario would be the type of battle talked about for a long time after — “Remember when we had to fight our way through that horde?”

[As a side note: this 10-round battle took 103 minutes to play out with 6 characters, plus 2 animal companions and 4 summoned creatures against never less than 40 monsters on the battlemap at any given time.]

Now, my question is this: How is it the Players realized they weren’t going to defeat the demon monster within a couple of rounds, but against the horde they just stayed there round after round after round . . .? I really want to see what these situations are like from the position of a Player in the game rather than just as the DM. I want to understand if things like this really aren’t obvious, or if the Players get into a mindset that they can’t awake from.

I’ve seen Players, before, get so fixated on things, especially in a battle, that they completely ignore things that to me, as DM, are obvious. I’ve also seen this happen with Players when I’m a Player beside them, but I can’t recall it happening to me, personally. (It may have and I just don’t remember it, though, or I didn’t realize I was doing it.)

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com