More D&D with kids. And Tarot cards.

[kesher]

By the irrepressible Tavis Allison!


How to introduce a kid to D&D before he goes into surgery


Very thoughtfully written given the context of the game, and I'll be d**ned if he didn't essentially create the basic framework for a whole new way to Adventure Fantastically.

And here's a follow-up:

Getting past rules when dming for kids

[DeBracy]

From the follow-up:

My experience has been that there’s basically no way to teach kids the full corpus of D&D rules (of any edition) in the time and attention span you’ve got available. It’s something they have to learn for themselves, by poring endlessly over arcane tomes and hashing out the implicatios through many hours of play. What you need to do is get them to hear the music, the sound of valkryies’ horns and axes clanging on shields, so that they’ll be inspired to invest that effort.

My emphasis. Isn't that just poetry? And darn it, I want to hear the music too!

[coffee]

Awesome!

That'll inspire a whole new generation of gamers.

[xerxez]

Good stuff. I have thought much about volunteering to run some games at a hospital for kids or veterans in a vets center, problem being some religious paranoia for games like D&D in the state where I reside.

I think the key is to have a lot of interesting playing pieces (miniatures or larger, evocative and well crafted art works) and have few if any set rules--heck, just grab a set of percentile dice and say that high rolls are bad and lows rolls good--and then design an adventure around your playing pieces.

Thanks Kesher.

[Finarvyn]

Apr 3, 2011 1:09:41 GMT -6 xerxez said:

religious paranoia for games like D&D in the state where I reside.

If you don't have any rulebooks handy, you're just story telling and not "playing D&D." Just type up a couple of handy charts (combat, maybe a list of a few non-offensive critters to fight) and tell some stories with dice.

[xerxez]

Thanks Fin--very true!

[tavis]

Thanks guys! Learning to play old-school was a great grounding in doing this kind of thing, for which I have y'all to thank.

kesher, I dunno if it's really anything new- but then it took David Megarry to explain to Dave Arneson why the dungeon was big and important. If you can extract what you think is unique here, I'll be in your debt!

debracy, if you're playing D&D now it's because you hear the music. The particular song I'm thinking of there is the one I've been hearing as I re-read Gene Wolfe's The Knight, and also in the session of my White Sandbox campaign where the players didn't for once take the scoundrel's way out and feed 80 barbarians to some wandering-monster balrogs, but instead brought in some valkyries who helped them kick demon butt.

I ran a RPG for my son's sci-fi themed birthday party this morning & will blog about it soon. This one definitely didn't even have the idea of D&D in my mind - if anything I was thinking about Rifts. The mechanics were:
a) your characters are robots, they can do anything you say they can, whether or not it was written on your sheet beforehand
b) if you want to do something that one of my NPCs can oppose, I roll a d20; if you beat my roll you succeed
c) PCs and NPCs can take three hits - wounded, bloodied, at death's door. Each step gives you a -2 on your dice rolls; other modifiers as the situation suggests. Each full five points by which a kid beat a NPC's dice roll caused an extra wound-step. For less important NPCs, I might say there are five of them to start with; when they're hurt, I say you destroyed one and mauled another, treating their wound levels like a collective phenomenon

This one didn't have any catharsis, just excitement and climax. Real NYC locations that were familiar to the kids plus giant attack robots made it come out like a short film made out of the previews for Transformer movies.

[coffee]

That's awesome too!

Have an exalt for all of this.

[kesher]

Awesome ^2! And since you responded to this thread, Tavis, that means I get to Exalt you, too!

[Deleted]

Apr 3, 2011 5:19:39 GMT -6 Finarvyn said:

Apr 3, 2011 1:09:41 GMT -6 xerxez said:

religious paranoia for games like D&D in the state where I reside.

If you don't have any rulebooks handy, you're just story telling and not "playing D&D." Just type up a couple of handy charts (combat, maybe a list of a few non-offensive critters to fight) and tell some stories with dice.

While I am not worried about religious paranoia, I do avoid real world occult stuff, which for many people includes Tarot cards.

[Deleted]

Apr 2, 2011 12:35:54 GMT -6 DeBracy said:

What you need to do is get them to hear the music, the sound of valkryies’ horns and axes clanging on shields, so that they’ll be inspired to invest that effort.

My emphasis. Isn't that just poetry? And darn it, I want to hear the music too!

I think this is the essence of OD&D, and I refer to the rulebooks as little as possible during the game, many the combat tables and a few other things here and there.