My games with Gary (part 3)

The next day I believe we were scheduled to begin at noon. Shortly before that, one of the players from the night before (the guy playing the cavalier - I'm pretty sure it was a cavalier) came up to me and John and told us that his friend wasn't able to play today but asked if John wanted to take over his character (the magic-user) and sit in. Of course we jumped all over that!

The second day game was in a smaller conference room with 3 or 4 tables, though I'm pretty sure we were the only group in our room. Somewhat to our surprise, we found that we were going to be joined by 4-5 more players, still all men, but older - all adults in their 20s & 30s. Because of the larger group, we sat at a long, rectangular table with Gary at one end.

Before we got started there was a fair amount of socializing and kibitzing. I'd brought my copy of Supplement I: Greyhawk and Gary autographed it. I remember one of the other players had the then-current issue of Dragon magazine handy and Gary thumbed through it briefly and commented about how he thought TSR wasn't doing a very good job with it (which was to become a recurring theme...). One of the new players had a set of pornographic "bondage minis" that he'd brought along and showed to Gary, who approved and made some lascivious remarks (another recurring theme).

The new guys got their characters ready - most of them used their own pre-existing characters - one guy in particular (I think maybe the guy with the bondage minis) had a character who was an Archer from Best of Dragon #3. Another guy rolled up a character on the spot - a barbarian named "Bubba" who had his battle axe chained to his wrist so he'd never be without it. I don't remember the other characters, but thinking back am pretty sure we still didn't have a single cleric, which is pretty remarkable and funny in retrospect.

Gary filled the new arrivals in on what they'd missed the night before - that our group had done a lot of "mostly pointless poking around" but had finally managed to find an entrance into the inner tomb. This went along with the same briefing we'd gotten about the house rules, about the Egyptian setting, the village of Aartuat, and the opportunity to buy figurines. One guy, I think maybe the same player with the bondage minis, said he wanted to buy a figurine of Set. All the rest of us went "oooh" and Gary gave him a classically withering "how much of a fucking idiot are you?" look, but let him do it.

With the much larger, and older, player-group the atmosphere was different the second day. Gary was a lot more garrulous and very free with stories about his time in Hollywood, the circumstances of his departure from TSR, and his very, very low opinion of both the brothers Blume and the Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan movies ("who ever heard of a Conan with brown hair?!").

We made pretty good progress in the adventure. When the iron skeletons attacked and the archer-player found out his arrows were basically worthless against them he was pissed - I think he might have even left early. My friend John had his magic-user cast a Chain Lightning spell that ended up bouncing around the room 20 times and did probably as much damage to us as the skeletons had. The lightning-quick zombie got back-stabbed and went down in a single round. Gary mentioned that his golden funerary mask was worth half a million BUCs and was radiating a strong magical aura. Bubba's player (who and already desecrated at least one altar by pissing on it) immediately busts in - "I grab it and destroy it!" Everyone else groans - Gary seems elated and happily informs us that the ruined mask is still worth maybe 5 or 10 thousand BUCs.

Eventually we get to the part with the spiked pits and the chain of curses. The cavalier was in the front and kept getting hit by the traps and then getting cursed by the next one. We found the secret door within the pit that led into the next section of the tomb, and at that point Gary called it a day. He showed us the map and gave us a summary of what would've happened - how the cavalier was being cursed and was almost certainly going to die, and how much trouble we'd all have been in if we'd gotten to the end and actually faced Rahotep. He told us that overall we'd done pretty well.

Gary's DMing style with the large group on day two was the same as it had been with the small group on day one: boxed text was read verbatim, but otherwise he was totally informal and chatty - still no screen, still no minis, still no rulebooks (though we had them and referenced some spell and item descriptions in them, and I remember at one point he did some mental math to calculate a fighter's THAC0, which I remember because at the time I wasn't using the +1 per level rule but started doing so afterwards in a attempt to be like Gary). He had his dice-set, and pointed out a particular white 0-9 d20 that he proudly informed us was his "lucky" die and had been killing characters since 1973.

We still didn't make a map.

Once the action started everything moved super-quickly: he went around the table asking for actions and if you hesitated you got skipped. I'd never played in a game with a DM who moved the game ahead as quickly as Gary did. No dithering or hesitation at all. It was very tense and exciting, very engaging, everybody was on the edge of their seats (except maybe the hapless archer guy).

But, along with that, he still basically took a short break after every room in which he'd critique our performance, tell us about what else could have happened in that room for better or worse, how some other playtest groups had fared, and would digress into off-topic stuff (the aforementioned Hollywood and Blume brothers stuff, as well as digressions about Egyptian culture and religion that had informed the design of the adventure - I remember him enumerating for us the various parts of the soul according to Egyptian beliefs - and so on).

This dynamic - super-intense action alternating with informal, off-topic chatter - was totally unlike any other game I'd ever played in (most of which had either been other kids totally out of their depth or RPGA DMs who wanted maximum in-character roleplaying and no outside distractions) and completely changed my understanding of how the game worked: that it was simultaneously more serious and intense than any other game I'd played in but also way less formal, because there was so much OOC banter and commentary. D&D as I'd experienced it with other DMs had always seemed focused mostly on story and character (and had tended to be kind of boring and not really live up to what I'd imagined it would be from reading the books); playing under Gary was the first time I really appreciated it as both a game and a social activity.

It was by far the most fun I'd ever had playing the game - I'd never had more intense action in a game, nor had I ever laughed as much. Ever since then in any game I've run I've striven to create something as close as I can to that experience - that mix of informal friendly conversation and intense, super-fast-moving action. I'm not as good at is as Gary was, because I'm not as natural a raconteur and storyteller as he was, and don't have that same commanding personality. But I think I'm pretty good at it.

Weirdly, even though shortly after this con I joined the Evansville Gaming Guild (the organization that put on the con and also had weekly game-nights that at their height were drawing probably close to 100 people) and stayed active in it for about 2-3 years, I don't recall ever seeing any of the other players from those games again (except for John of course). I guess maybe they were all in from out of town? I'm also not sure where all those extra players on the second day came from.

Later that summer I attended GenCon for the first time (and ultimately went for 10 years, until I graduated from college and moved to the west coast). I always made a point to attend Gary's seminars, but I never got another chance to play in one of his games (or to get the D&D white-box set that I picked up at the GenCon auction autographed).

Obviously this experienced is colored in my memory from being at an impressionable age and meeting one of my heroes (and having him turn out to be cooler and more interesting than I'd expected), and other people have read this account and dismissively informed me that Gary was clearly a bad DM and I'm just too starry-eyed and hero-struck to recognize it. They're certainly entitled to their opinions, but I don't think they're right. I think even if you remove the fact that I was thirteen and that Gary was a celebrity (at least in my eyes) I think he still ran a really good game. Yes, there was very little in-character roleplaying and he broke "kayfabe" all the time and wandered off-topic and all kinds of other things that any set of "how to be a good D&D DM" instructions will tell you never to do. But, dammit, that made the game more interesting and more fun (at least to me, but seemingly to all but one of the other players too)! Playing D&D is primarily a social experience - you're spending your afternoon or evening hanging out in a room with a bunch of people who are probably your friends. Yeah, you can be super-serious about it and ban all off-topic chatter. You can do the same thing when playing poker or bowling or singing karaoke. But it sure is way more fun when you don't.

My games with Gary (part 2)

Gary showed us the outdoor map of the necropolis and told us that we'd explored it and found what we believed to be the entrance to the main tomb. If you're familiar with Necropolis you know that it's very heavy on boxed text, especially at the start of the tomb section - there are at least 2 or 3 long boxed-text descriptions. Gary read all of those aloud to us, as nearly as I can recall exactly like what's in the published module. However, unlike the mumbled monotone that most DMs have when reading boxed text, Gary's reading was very dramatic - sort of like an actor declaiming a monologue, with lots of pregnant pauses and heavy emphasis on key words or phrases, careful enunciation, lots of eye-contact.

We were of course already on edge, pretty certain that we were really in for it, and these long boxed-text narrations served to ratchet up the tension considerably. They were the opposite of boring. We were all paying rapt attention, trying to glean as much info and whatever clues we could, hanging on every word, hoping not to miss some vital clue (though, of course, that's exactly what we did...).

There was an obvious break in tone and style between when Gary was reading boxed-text and when he wasn't. The boxed text was read directly from the module, not summarized or paraphrased at all, in a very formal tone. It was obvious that he was reading boxed text and that it was important and we should be paying attention. But once he'd finished, his tone was extremely loose and informal.

Most DMs I had played under to that point, especially the RPGA DMs, drew a pretty firm line between "in-character" and "out-of-character" communication, and tended to discourage the latter. The tone was pretty dry and formal and the idea seemed to be that when you were playing you were in the game. Gary's game wasn't like that at all. Except when he was reading boxed text, he was totally informal, very chatty, very prone to OOC and off-topic digressions. He also gave tons of ongoing feedback to us about how well or poorly he thought we were doing, and what would have happened (better or worse) if we'd done things differently. Effectively, after each encounter he'd go "behind the scenes" and tell us about it from the DM perspective. This was totally different than anything I'd ever experienced before - pretty much every other DM I'd ever played with tried to maintain as much of a poker face as possible and to give out as little info as possible - but it both made the game much more engaging - none of our attention ever wavered - and gave us a much better idea of how the adventure "worked" and what was expected of us, which helped us to improve our performance. The game wasn't a confrontation, it was more like a conversation.

Gary didn't use miniatures or any visual aids. Everything was described verbally. We weren't making a map, but everything was described to us in a level of detail as if we were - dimensions of rooms and hallways, locations of doors, etc. When we went down hallways he would call off the distances 10 feet at a time as we went - 10', 20', etc.

We didn't do very well at first. If you know the module, you know that the foyer of the tomb has about a half-dozen death traps out in the open and a secret door leading to the rest of the tomb. We, alas, managed to spring all of them. Once we had sprung them we were good at reacting quickly and well to get out of them, so nobody died, but we weren't at all good at avoiding even the fairly obvious traps. We wandered into the maze area - one player, definitely the sharpest of the four of us, was able to remember all the turns and repeat them back to Gary, so he allowed us to escape. I can't remember exactly how we dealt with a couple of the other traps, but we definitely sprung them.

One particular incident stands out strongly in my memory: There's an alcove with carvings of various monsters. If you touch a carving one of those monsters appears in the dungeon and attacks. We managed to do that a couple times. If you touch a carving and maintain contact the walls of the dungeon fade away and you find yourself transported to a world full of that monster-type. We did that too, with a carving of a vampire. Once we realized what had happened the quick-thinking player turned his Anything Sword into a Luck Blade and used a Wish to get us out of there and back to the dungeon. Gary liked that move a lot. He then went off on a tangent about how if we'd stayed in that world it might have ended up something like one of his favorite books, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, and went on at some length about the premise of the book and how highly he recommended it to all of us. I'd never heard of that book or author before, but started looking for it. I believe it was out of print at the time, so it took a few years to find it, but eventually I did, and read it, and loved it. Richard Matheson became one of my favorite authors, and I enjoy telling people that his books were personally recommended to me by Gary Gygax :)

Eventually, after we'd exhausted all of the other possibilities, every red-herring and trap, we triggered a bit of sarcastic boxed-text where the spirit of Rahotep insults us and gives a pretty-much-impossible-to-miss clue about how to find the secret door leading into the main tomb. With that huge hint, we figured it out, and all felt really dumb that it had taken us so long. Gary laughed, and pointed out that at least we all survived and therefore didn't do too badly. Once we had opened that door, Gary decided that was a good stopping point, but offered to let us all come back the next day to continue playing, if we wanted to.

By that point it was late, John's game had ended a half hour or so earlier, and my mom (or maybe his mom?) had shown up to take us home. Thankfully they were cool about it and willing to sit around and wait until my game finished, rather than making me leave it early. John was definitely jealous, especially because his adventure sucked, but wasn't mean about it. He thought it was really cool that I'd been able to play with the inventor of the game. Even our parents admitted that was pretty cool, though my mom complained how much I smelled like cigarette smoke :)

My games with Gary (part 1)

A couple of years back I did this detailed write up of the AD&D games I played with Gary Gygax back in the 80s, because a couple of folks requested it, and as I get farther away from the event (now almost 30 years ago...) my memories are more likely to fade.

Note: these posts contain some spoilers for Gary Gygax's adventure Necropolis

Glathricon was the local gaming con in Evansville, Indiana, where I grew up. In 1987 and 1988 Gary Gygax was the Guest of Honor. In 1987 I was 12 years old and went to the con with a friend, my second time at a con after going to ConTact (the local SF con, which also had some gaming) the previous fall with my dad. I'd broken my arm a couple weeks before the con so my arm was in a cast. One of the con organizers saw me wandering around and asked if I'd like to have Gary Gygax sign my cast. They led me into the banquet room, where Gary was in the middle of his dinner, and told him the situation, and he graciously agreed to interrupt his meal to autograph my cast. That was my first encounter with him.

By the next year I was 13, had been playing D&D for a little over 4 years, and - as 13 year-olds tend to do, had a pretty high opinion of myself. I considered myself pretty much an expert on D&D, had a subscription to Dragon magazine, and was starting to branch out into other, non-TSR games. I was also getting into exploring D&D from before I'd gotten into it (I had the various Best of Dragon volumes, and had bought the OD&D Supplements from TSR's Mail Order Hobby Shop) and had become a fan of "old school" D&D and thought TSR's recent stuff (Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, etc.) wasn't up to the level of their old stuff. I went back to the con along with a different friend from the previous year, John, my best gaming buddy.

On the Friday evening session we decided to forgo the RPGA events (which we'd already figured out tended to be kind of lame and dominated by hammy-acting players) and instead play one of the New Infinities events (New Infinities was Gary's post-TSR company, and they brought pretty much their whole crew down to Glathricon both years). A dozen or so folks were gathered in the staging area, and the organizer asked "who here hates elves?" and about half the people, including my friend John, raised their hands, and were led off to their table. They ended up playing an adventure called "Those Darn Dwarves!" which was apparently a comedy-module and my friend said it sucked. Left behind were me and 3 other guys - all male, all teenagers a couple years older than me. I'd never met any of them before and don't remember any of their names. Two of them were friends, the third was a loner, like me. The organizer told us to hang tight that we were in for something special, and that Frank Mentzer was going to be along in a moment to tell us about it. We all got very excited and started speculating what we were in for.

He showed up shortly, and told us that we were going to be playtesting Gary Gygax's new adventure, with Gary himself, but that we first needed to roll up characters. He gave us directions that were very loose - pretty much we were told to generate high level characters with whatever stats we wanted, because this adventure was going to be really tough and if we made bad decisions high stats weren't going to help. I can't remember if we were given a limit on levels or magic items. I rolled up a 20th level (IIRC) thief. One of the other guys made a magic-user, another made either a fighter or cavalier, and the 4th I think made another fighter (amusingly, no cleric).

A half hour or so later Frank came back, gathered us up (maybe looked over our characters? I don't think he did), and led us upstairs into the banquet room where the gaming tables were set up - I could see my friend John at one of the tables nearby - and led us to where Gary was waiting. I waved at John to get his attention and we both made shocked expressions at each other. Since we had a small group we were all seated around a round table. Gary didn't use a DM screen and I don't think he had any rulebooks, but he did have his dice and his smokes (unfiltered Camels, which he pretty much chain-smoked non-stop), and a thick sheaf of typed pages and hand-drawn maps, held together with one of those metal binder-clips.

He was extremely friendly and engaging right from the start. He greeted us and told us he was going to be running his new adventure for us, that it was called Necropolis and was the toughest adventure he'd ever written. He quickly went over a few new rules that we'd be using - Joss, the BUC system of currency, and that a rolled 20 attack means max damage - and then gave us a choice of what we'd rather play - something action-heavy, or something based more on problem-solving. We all voted for the latter. Gary showed us the map of the adventure we chose not to play (the Temple of Osiris section of Necropolis) and told us a brief summary of how that adventure would have gone - that if we'd succeeded at it our reward would've been winning permission to explore the tomb, which is what we were going to be playing.

He then gave us some background and overview of the Egyptian-flavored setting of the adventure and showed us the map of the village of Aartuat, told us that it was pretty much like Hommlet to the tomb's Temple of Elemental Evil, and that there was a merchant there who sold "lucky" statuettes of the Egyptian gods that we might want to purchase. This morphed into a quick roleplaying scene with that merchant where we picked out which statuettes we wanted. On the merchant's recommendation I bought a statuette of the god Bes; IIRC each of the others also bought statuettes, but I don't remember of which gods (probably the usual - Osiris, Anubis, etc.) and then we were off to the tomb...