Welcome to Tavern Talk Thursday! This is a weekly column where we chat with a member of the TTRPG (tabletop role-playing game) community to learn more about how they found themselves at the table, what they love about tabletop gaming and other fun things. Think of it as a little sneak peeks into the minds of our fellow players and DMs.
Take a break from loading up the horses and settle in for another tale in the Tavern. We are chatting with heavy metal enthusiast and avid DM Paul Feldman this week. The man, the myth, the legend found his way to the table during the Satanic Panic and never left. Paul’s TTRPG and Dungeons and Dragons nerdy knowledge knows no bounds, and he has shared that love with the world for years. He recently brought his silly antics to the stage with The Vast Dungeon. Keep reading to learn more about his love for the community and what monsters are at the top of his list.
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Paul Feldman
Julia Roth: Let’s chat your TTRPG backstory! How did you find yourself at the table?
Paul Feldman: I rolled my first d20 at the height of the Satanic Panic in 1985. My parents got freaked out and confiscated my red box basic set. Later they came to their senses and lifted the embargo, but by then, I was already into Top Secret/S.I. and the original version of Warhammer 40,000. But I digress. Then, as now, it seemed to be my fate to DM. I was the DM for my first campaign, and since then, I’ve DM’d way more campaigns than I’ve played in.
(Although DM’ing is its own kind of play, methinks) I spent some time in the wilderness after college but was born again hardcore to the Gygaxian Faith in 2017 when I tracked down all the old yellow-spine AD&D sourcebooks and got a game going with some pals. I once read this great quote about everybody playing in that one campaign that’s so fantastic it ruins you for others. As a player, that particular campaign did it for me.
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JR: Favorite world to adventure in?
PF: I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but it’s a hybrid of Spelljammer and the other 1e settings. (I’m too lazy to learn 5e, all my games are run with a minimalist interpretation of the old AD&D rules) When they first released all that D&D In Space stuff, my rigid, genre-blinkered mind couldn’t let it in. But in my current long-running campaign, our heroes have sailed the void for over two years, and the Baron Munchausen absurdity of it all is fantastic.
JR: Favorite one-shot adventure?
PF: Does the original White Plume Mountain count as a one-shot? I love White Plume Mountain because it’s got a little bit of everything that makes a classic dungeon crawl great: Puzzles, a good assortment of monsters, the vintage nerd-snark of prank magic items and some really interesting and unusual rooms.
JR: Backstory or class first?
PF: Hmm. I’m pretty story-centered in my games regardless of which side of the DM screen I’m sitting on, so I’d have to say class. Once you know the class, you know where the backstory needs to land and can reverse-engineer it from there.
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JR: Favorite spell and why?
PF: Any spells from the Speak With… family of products. It gives the players a chance to be clever, and I like the challenge of getting into the head of whatever they’re talking to on the spot, deciding what its voice sounds like, and figuring out where its awareness and consciousness are at. So when someone asks the lichen growing on the rock at the bottom of the pool in the middle of the dungeon if it’s seen anything unusual, I know to reply, “No man, I can’t see anything from down here. Or anywhere. I don’t have eyes.”
JR: What has been your favorite character to play?
PF: That would be my character from the campaign I mentioned before. Zakk Goldenrod – human fighter and narcissist of average intelligence. Previously I always played some glass cannon mage and was oh-so-careful about everything I did. Don’t waste a spell! Don’t get a boo-boo! Zakk began thwacking people with his sword moments into the obligatory Opening Scene at the Tavern. (In Zakk’s defense, they were obvious baddies. And it moved things forward, so no regrets). Zakk was dumb and obnoxious and made horrible puns, and being consistent about that at the table was a blast, for me, at least. Eventually, the DM promoted Zakk to a Paladin, which makes sense seeing as he was such a tool.
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JR: Do you have a particular race/class you enjoy?
PF: I am a fan of making the more “cutesy” races evil AF. Like Hellraiser Cenobites, except they’re Hobbits. Or wait. Hellraiser Cenobites, except they’re gnomes. Gnomes would dig the clockwork puzzle boxes.
JR: Is there something you build into every character? A fun trait or a special item?
PF: For me, this usually applies more to the NPCs I create as the DM, but either way, I think the most important thing for any character in the game is to want something. For a player character, I try to make it some kind of emotional, abstract need the character is trying to meet through the physical action of the adventure. Like Zakk didn’t really want to be an adventurer, he just wanted to be famous for being an adventurer. So that gave me a decision-making template different from my own for Zakk, and that’s where characters can start to become something beyond the data on the character sheet.
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This applies as a DM, too. I once had my players go in the exact opposite direction of all the delights and horrors I had so painstakingly planned for them (an all too common occurrence), but because I knew what my bad guys wanted, I knew how that informed their actions, perceptions and plans, and at the moment I was able to put the track down in front of the moving train, like Gromit, the dog in The Wrong Trousers.
JR: What is your favorite system to play within?
PF: Original AD&D, Feldman Homebrew Edition.
JR: Can you tell us about the wildest adventure you have been on?
PF: Zakk and his pals once had to infiltrate a cult’s lair. We eventually laid hold of a middle manager type (an evil halfling!) and attempted to extract information. The subject was uncooperative, and we moved on to enhanced interrogation techniques, specifically threatening to chop off fingers. The subject continued to resist. We rolled a miss when attempting to cut off the first finger. The subject then bit the hand restraining him, broke free and hurried off to warn the boss.
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JR: What has been your most impactful moment at a table?
PF: Running a game for my son and his friends a while back when they were still little, like 2nd grade or so. I built in a callback where if they helped out a kobold in trouble at the start of the game, it would come back to help them in the end. The end of the adventure found them impossibly outnumbered by a kobold army. At the last second, the dude they saved called out “Wait!” from off in the distance and saved them in return, and the authentic joy the group emoted as recognition hit was fabulous beyond words.
JR: Favorite dice to use?
PF: Plastic, chunky, round edges. Bonus points for colors that would look good on a van with an airbrushed wizard. Anything but this one orange d20 I have that ALWAYS rolls badly.
JR: Would your rather face off against an entire dungeon of undead or charm your way through a royal court?
PF: Charm offensive. Combat gets boring for me very quickly.
JR: Favorite TTRPG Monster?
PF: Oh, man. This is a nerd-torture question. I’m restraining myself from consulting my books. OK. I swear I didn’t look at my books. Two-way tie. From the Fiend Folio: The Retriever, which is a giant demon spider with razor-blade legs and eyes that shoot One-Shot-One-Kill spells. From Monster Manual II, Froghemoth, which is a monstrous giant killer frog with tentacles and is objectively the best monster name ever.
JR: Good luck charms or rituals before a game?
PF: Mood-setting music. For me, that’s usually something by a band like Motörhead, Iron Maiden, UFO, Mastodon, etc.
JR: Who is sitting at your dream table?
PF: More Nerd Torture! OK. I’m DMing. At the table are Cliff Burton (original bass player for Metallica), Revered English actor Brian Blessed, Carol Burnett, Sammy Davis Jr. and God. I’m serious; that would be an interesting game.
JR: What are you most looking forward to within the TTRPG world?
PF: When the default music for D&D is a melodic heavy metal set at a gallop in 6/8 time.
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Who I Am: A nerd by the strictest definition. I enjoy diving straight into my favorite fandoms without a care in the world. I live on video/board games, fantasy movies and TV, and all things geeky.
