You take all the good parts of the game and you hide them away so that their first session is absolutely craptastic. So, what do you when a bunch of muggles asks you to introduce them to the game? How do you keep them from coming back? How do you avoid getting stuck running an extended campaign for a bunch of joyous, excited newbies who don’t know their a$&es from their proficiency bonuses? And more than two-thirds of those people had never played a tabletop RPG before I got my hands on them. If I only count extended games of three months or more – not conventions, not one-shots – I estimate I’ve run regular games for sixty or seventy people. Because, these days, players are a bunch of pussies who can’t get two rooms into Tomb of Horrors without running away in tears about “screwjobs” and “killer GMs.” So, if I want any pool of players at all, I need new players. The thing is, I go through a lot of players. And more often, I’d have to make the players. I knew from the beginning – I KNEW – that if I wanted a D&D game – or any other RPG there have been lots in my life – if I wanted a D&D game, I was going to have to make it happen.
I kidnapped two of my friends and made them play. I got a copy of the Mentzer Basic Dungeons & Dragons Red Box – the single greatest product for bringing players and GMs into the fold EVER – and I realized that if I wanted to play this game, I was going to have to make it happen myself. I got started with this crap back in 1988. Let me tell you a little something about me and my history with table-top RPGs. They are just wide-eyed, unrestrained, creative little children wandering through f$&%ing Narnia for the first time. They haven’t been warped and twisted by countless other crappy GMs. They aren’t so jaded that they need sixteen sourcebooks just to make an interesting character. They aren’t invested in petty fights about the rules. They have no preconceived notions about how things ought to work. Nothing ruins a good game of D&D like a new player.
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