I gave Luke Gygax £100
I'm not a regular attendee to many conventions, but I do enjoy UK Games Expo. The convention has somehow remained friendly and welcoming despite reaching around 87,000 unique attendees.
I grabbed my comfort game (Mothership), along with two modules I was readily familiar with and signed up to run games. I was getting ready to sign up for other games at the event when I saw something that made me ask a question.
Who pays £100 to play a game of D&D?
I am a not the target for an expensive game of D&D normally, not to be a hater of the system, it just doesn't excite me as much as it once did, and to an extent I favour variety. As opposed to the monolithic campaign that a lot of Dungeons and Dragons tables aim towards.
I'm also aware that One Hundred Great British Pounds is not the most that someone may spend on a game of Dungeons and Dragons. There are many things such as D&D In a Castle, or journeys to conventions making up a financially notable section of the hobby. After all, if you can only see distant friends once a year, why not make an event of it?
Curiousity struck when "Luke Gygax" was listed as a DM for a game targeted for a five hour window on a Friday morning.
Luke Gygax is in the D&D space for an obvious reason but if you aren't familiar with him, he is the son (not that one) of Gary Gygax - one of the creators of D&D. The name provides him a certain element of prestige; as well as being one of the lead organisers of GaryCon, Luke has recently been brought back into the fold of Wizards of the Coast for 5.5e to bring back Greyhawk as a part of the IP.
Gygax's scenario titled 'Once in a Blue Moon' billed itself as the following:
You have prepared your party for a dangerous trek across the Blighted Lands, a desolate desert environment rife with chaos magic.
Your dreams have been plagued by strange visions of a gaunt figure dressed in ebon robes wielding a wolf headed scepter, and of a dark temple half buried in a barren landscape that can only be the Blighted Lands.
You are all servants of the mighty Dalnur'ag, the god of luck, prophecy and the moon - Volokhai, the blue moon. Dalnur'agmust be sending you these visions; guiding you to this temple, but for what purpose....
To be one hundred percent honest here: I signed up with nothing more than a "Why not, I'm probably never going to do so again".
Who pays one hundred pounds for D&D?
Friday morning at 8am I made my way down from Birmingham to the NEC - I'd spent the previous night sweltering in a hotel after seeing the Pretty Good Film, Obsession.
Coffee spilled down my white t-shirt I indelicately steered my way around the convention hall to pick up my badge and then figure out where in the Hilton the board room actually was. The signage of the Hilton being almost a cruel trick, with arrows on them going off in random directions on LED panels that had no relation to the actual geometry of the hotel, arrows highlighting directions that led to dead ends.
I eventually looped my way around to a room where outside sat three getting ready to play games for the day - the first person from my group amongst them.
He was a frequent attendee to the convention, jolly and friendly we traded stories back and forth about our experiences of running games over the years and our own panics and failures to get out of bed this morning and the horrors of planning a route and arriving on time. Twenty, thirty minutes would pass and eventually someone would slink past us, opening up the door to the room.
Two more joined, long term friends.
We've been playing a game nobody else plays for years now, we love it and it covers everything we need... so we've just never switched!
One more showed up short after, a gentleman who had apparently played a reasonable number of games with Luke before hand.
Ah, he's a good DM. He doesn't like silly players though... you know.
Teasing this out of him, he didn't mean "silly ideas" (using a frost spell to put out a player on fire was his primary example), he meant that he had standards at the table. Search for traps, make plans and call out things.
This was shortly followed by the remaining players, a couple and a young woman.
During idle conversation whilst waiting for Luke to arrive a pattern between players became somewhat clear; very few people who had paid the fee to be here actually played D&D.
Four out of six played entirely different systems predominantly - many claimed they did not even know the rules to 5e nor actually have much familiarity with any prior edition of D&D.
It is intriguing that the name "Gygax" can have such pull with people in the hobby - even if they have no strong ties to Dungeons and Dragons itself.
Luke
Gregarious, there is a certain element of shrewdness to Mr Gygax also. His posture, gesturing and general presence in the room immediately makes you aware of him, a slightly gravelly deep voice which was perhaps an artefact of jetlag and exhaustion in the city heat.
He welcomed everyone and began to hand out trinkets and toys around the table.
Luke was in the military for several years, he'd share a few anecdotes about his time in it during the game - he tells another player this is the reason he wasn't involved in 5e when asked if he had anything to do with it.
The first gift was a military-like velcro patch advertising Garycon, wings spread out like an eagle across it.
I prefer Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, but to get new blood in you have you go with newer versions of Dungeons and Dragons really.
This is something I wondered if it would factor into GaryCon going forward with his renewed professional work with WoTC - can it continue to grow and replace. It felt like something he had been considering from the offhand, along with the recent Greyhawk annoucements.
The second item was a pen with Garycon printed over it with screwdriver heads, length measurements and a spirit level. After spending five minutes explaining the pen to us I asked "Is this your 'sell me this pen'?".
Perhaps.
I asked him a few questions about his feelings on the NSR space - he freely gave praise to Shadowdark for its 5e/OSR bridge.
However, you'd have to get me on a panel to discuss this stuff in much more detail.
The game rolled around, a pile of papers about twenty sheets thick were placed on the table to provide an overview of the world he had been developing, notably the religions.
Sheets were handed out in order of dice rolls, highest to lowest. After I was left with the last sheet - a rogue. Coincidentally, much like everyone who had not played 5e, I have never played a Rogue.
The party composition was made up of a mixture of multi-class barbarian-rogue, artificers, rangers, clerics and others.
This is where the first crack started to show a little for me, the sheets were largely incomplete print outs of D&D Beyond sheets containing run off sentences for suggested character personality traits, spells and spell slot information were missing from multiple sheets and since this was intended as a pick up game somewhat it was not clear whether this was intended to be 5e, or 5e 2024. Further to this, D&D Beyond then quite unfortunately stopped functioning for everyone at the table - asking them to subscribe. Much to the chagrin of Mr Gygax.
I'm supposed to have a lifetime subscription...
It was jokingly suggested that this may not include the new Dungeons and Dragons drops and maybe that was why.
We spent a reasonable amount of time rationalising items on sheets, asking for explanations of magical items that had no text next to them or to double check information. This isn't a make or break though - this is just something that for the cost of the game disappointed me, since it is a level of quality assurance that can be checked quickly.
The Game
One hundred Fahrenheit deserts lined the environment with brief reprise, the brits begged for celsius but we agreed it was just hot. Described as a mix of North African/Turkish environmentally.
A guard offered us a reward for the head of a Goblin Snotgobble, the band of Goblins had taken captive a group and we were to rescue them if possible, a reasonable setup.
We gathered rations, or at least meant to until a Cleric in the group realised she had summon Food and Water - an on the spot nerf of this skill was given immediately 45 pounds of food and 30 gallons of water was slashed in half due to the "chaotic nature of the magic" in the area. We agreed at least the food was poor quality rice crackers and marmite.
This hook took up the entire of the session - the group willed themselves to go into the desert to go investigate and find their camp and then delve deep into the caverns. An early combat encounter was triggered by the opening a trap door under the feet of me and a ranger.
This encounter took up the largest block of time and this is where I saw an element of his own style take over, where rulings over rules became the expectation - a handicap was given to Luke when D&D Beyond went down because it meant a removal of information that it felt he was less familiar with.
The play style that Gygax seemed to enjoy was very familiar to some of those involved with the OSR - search for traps, be cautious, ask questions and check everything.
This was not openly discussed at the start of the game that it would be an expectation of the players - it may be felt that it comes out naturally, however the group we had was largely quite green and it felt like this should have been called out clearer, unless it be felt unfair in some way to players not so familiar with that style of play.
Hauling bodies and fighting goblins, this dungeon made up our actual game time. We struggled through the rest of the caverns, sliced by traps and unlocking doors to find the settled home of an ogre and goblin, the goblin whomst head we needed to server from his body.
After a failed plan to create a gargantuan goliath to squash the goblin, we sliced and skewered and unfortunately found the captured barbecued.
The sour
Ah, so we're only half way through what we were supposed to do today...
This came at the end - one player asked him to summarise what would happen and he began to read off more information for roughly ten minutes.
I ran half this adventure in Dubai... I am still testing and tweaking and changing it. Guess I'll have to learn.
It is nowhere in the original listing that this would be a test. It reminded me of when a comedian tests new material - but in that case the audience signed up for something in particular knowing they would be the experiment.
Flicking through the papers he had written out post-game with his permission, it became possible this was again an element of differing gameplay styles and experience with older systems - to copy and paste some text from the helpful Edmo, I believe different stances may have been at play previously:
Actor stance - like, you’re acting as the character. Speaking the words as if the character was speaking, gestures, etc. First person.
Author stance - more storygamey, you step outside your character and speak about dramatic stakes, expose character’s internal thoughts, state things about the world external to your character’s agency.
Pawn stance - third person; “my character does X” “my character explains Y about Z to the NPC”; speaking player to player about the fiction not speaking character to character within the fiction.
Actor stance to me would be what a lot of people view their D&D experience being like - with the reality being author a lot of the time.
With the series of events happening here, I am wondering if he has largely played the adventure in a pawn like style. Hitting the abridged parts and moving quickly through the narrative.
You paid £100 to play D&D
I took away a signed book from Luke at the end - a freebie offered to me for making him miserable with my rogues' damage. We took photos and those around me got selfies, this was a positive experience - but I want my £100 to be an experience tested, QA'd and perhaps in something the DM is a bit more comfortable with rather than feeling rushed at the end.