From: utzoo!laura Newsgroups: net.games.frp Title: Re: How to handle "pop-tart" players Article-I.D.: utzoo.2155 Posted: Fri Jun 11 05:15:55 1982 Received: Fri Jun 11 05:15:55 1982 References: alice.634 Hmmm. decvax has been down and I missed the original article. My brother had a similar one though. He is DMing a game of new players who are 8-12 years old. (He is 14 and has been playing for 5 years). The events took place at a local library, weekly, but the library official responsible had absolutely no idea about d&d. He instructed all the new players to have a character rolled before they arrived with appropriate posessions. My brother (who at this point didnt know he was to DM) arrived with a first level half-orc fighter-assasin, fairly rolled with 16 str, 16 dex, 15 cons and mediocre wis, int, and char --- well actually a charisma of 5 which is worse than mediocre!. He had chain mail, a long sword and a dagger, 2 weeks worth of food and a sling with seven bullets. Also a mirror, rope, garlic and various other items in a back-pack. Low and behold all the other fighters had 18+ strength, +5 plate mail, +2 shields, a +4 defender, or a girdle of Storm Giant strength -- a vorpal blade, ions stones, you name it. It seems that everyone had read the DMG and decided what was a bare necessity. The library person was informed of the need for a DM. David (my brother volunteered). He spent the first day talking about strategy, and outlining the history of his favourite world (A land on the border between Norse and Egyptian Strongholds where the intra-panetheon conflict is thick, containing some of the worst dungeonsI have ever seen....all designed by my brother. He could not, of course, get the new crowd to reroll -- they liked things the way they were. So David told the one other person with a fair character (he too had played before) to get himself a super-hero, to even things up. When he got home that evening I got a frantic fone call ... help -- what am I going to do with this crowd??? My first reaction was, quit -- but I said that their stupidities would prove their own downfall. In part I was right, but David found this remarkable beast called "The Disench- anter" in the Fiend Folio. THis is a magic snuffer which does for magic what rustmonsters do to metal. David's group seemed to meet a disproportionate number of these beasties -- it seems that their natural habitat is being steadily erroded, driving them out into the open and into small herds ..... Between these beasties, and the fact that they stupidly overstuffed a bag of holding with their magic items magic is now back to a more reasonable level .... 3 months later. Of course it is still a campaign of superheros, but that too can be fun. Tamar the Eternally Broke (ie I cant even pay for level changes! thats *broke*) decvax!utzoo!laura