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 dungeons  I 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