Lessons From Playing With Frank Mentzer

At GaryCon 2, I got an opportunity to play AD&D with one of the game's early contributors, Frank Mentzer. Frank was the chief writer of the "Basic" edition of the game in the mid 80's. It was the game I grew up with. In the 5th grade, my friends and I would pull out Mentzer D&D at school and roll up some characters. But that's a story for another day.

At Gary Con, I played the quest "To Aide Falix" an RPGA module Frank wrote. It's an adventure for 7-9 level characters.

I enjoyed my evening playing with Frank. There were a few things he did that I liked and would incorporate into my own game. Here they are ...

Door Procedures

Instead of asking what we were going to do at each door, he asked us what we would do as a procedure at the door. This, then, became the door SOP (standard operating procedure, and pronounced "sahp"). At each door, unless we said otherwise, he would roll the dice and we checked the doors for traps, listened at it, and so forth.

Action Declarations

Another thing he did, that I think judges forget to do when using individual initiative, is to ask us what we wanted to do at the start of each round. In this way, he knew who was firing off spells and firing missles and could figure when the spell would go off in the round sequence.

Good Mapping Directions

Frank gave good, consistent mapping directions. And even though the dungeon map was fairly complex we, the players, were able to represent it on paper very well. Mapping directions is a skill learned by both judge and player. His experienced showed.

Role Play at Every Opportunity

Each trap, secret door, or dungeon contraption had a mechanism. There was method for how it operated. We were challenged to tell him what we would do with the mechanism to stop or otherwise interact with it. It wasn't just, "You found a secret door, do you open it?"

High Negs

If a modified to hit roll would hit deep into negative AC territory, Frank had us just declare "High Negs".

Keep the Game Moving

As I remember it, there were some 13 players at our table and Frank did a great job keeping that game moving forward with so many involved.

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