my son the convention DM

This is Javi wearing his Halloween costume: a green slime in disguise. He will not be wearing it while DMing, as the mask makes it hard to see the numbers on the dice.

In the early years of being a parent, people would talk about how the first year of a child’s life was the best time of all. I believe that this nonsense is part of the directed forgetting we evolved so that humans will have multiple kids and ensure the survival of the species. If we really remembered what it was like to change our shirts six times a day because spit-up leaked through the cloth forever worn over our shoulders, and be woken up at each of the hours of the morning that go wee, wee, wee all the way home, procreation would come to an abrupt halt after we’d done it once.

The thing that kept me going through the various torments of early childhood was the knowledge that the best times were yet to come. Not wanting to be the kind of parent who already has their kid’s college picked out or expects them to follow precisely in their footsteps, I didn’t have specific moments in mind. However, this is definitely one of them: my nine-year-old will be DMing his first convention game next weekend at Anonycon in Stamford, CT. Here is the description we came up with for his event:

D&D Classic – The Dungeons of Ramburgh (D&D 4e)
By Javi Allison. The people of Ramburgh are being tormented by undead monsters from the desert. Will your heroes find fame and fortune in the streets of the city and the dungeons beyond, or will your corpse soon join the ranks of those shuffling toward Ramburgh? This adventure was developed and playtested in the D&D afterschool program at Hunter College Elementary School. Javi is one of the program’s most talented DMs, and will have adult help managing the rules (4E Essentials), but grownups should still expect a different kind of D&D: fresher, funnier, weirder! Paragon-tier pregens will be provided, or you can bring your favorite 11th level characters from LFR or your home game. (Reminder, LFR Characters cannot receive XP, GP or items from this adventure … but players can still have fun. ;-))

The reminder was thoughtfully added by the convention organizers, who put together a great event every year. I’m looking forward to it!

D&D Kids Articles at WotC

On the official Dungeons & Dragons website, Wizards of the Coast is publishing a series of articles by Uri Kurlianchik, whose day job is teaching D&D to kids at Israeli schools and community centers. I’ve long heard that there is a thriving afterschool-D&D scene, and these articles are the most in-depth glimpses from that scene that I’ve seen in English. (Due to my low Intelligence score, I am unable to read any other languages.)

Character Generation talks about getting started when playing with kids. Interesting quote:

I recommend using this stage to give each player’s character a pet. Kids love pets. You should love them too because they create more opportunities for roleplaying, can save the group when the situation seems desperate, and add flavor and a chance for some goofy jokes to your game (passive-aggressive cat anyone?).

D&D Kids: Combat Encounters talks about battles, a subject near and dear to the hearts of the kids in our afterschool program as well. Interesting quote:

Younger kids (ages 7-8) often get very involved in fast-paced and exciting games. This is a good thing, but it is important to ensure they don’t get carried away and lose sight of reality. I recently joined the respectable club of people who had a shoe thrown in their face. The target wasn’t me, per se, but rather an evil wizard who taunted one of the heroes. However, it was not the wizard who took a purple shoeprint to the face, but me. So be careful—always be watchful for kids who get overly excited, and make sure to curb their enthusiasm. You should also be vigilant for friction between kids in and out of game. Disagreements in-game can lead to bad blood in real life. Bad blood leads to arguments, which can lead to physical violence. Strangle this demon in the cradle by spilling cold water on young minds that get too hot.

D&D Kids: Rewards talks about the fun stuff about D&D – what the author sees as the carrot. Interesting quote:

For me, it is fascinating to see how a group of young children deal with the responsibility of managing nations and shaping the fates of thousands. Some kids really enjoy it. One group in particular has designed a new religion, wrote a bible for it, trained evangelists to spread it across the land, and eventually raised a fundamentalist oligarchy of some 15,000 humans, elves, and dwarves with towns named after heroes. This religion now has a Facebook group and a fair amount of likes. Also, it makes the Spanish Inquisition look cute in comparison….

D&D Kids: Punishment talks about negative reinforcements as a tool in teaching D&D, and has raised some internet kerfuffle. Interesting quote:

Some kids are not serious. Some kids don’t come to play, but rather to socialize. Some kids do want to play, but their heads are up in the clouds. Some, likeBatman’s Joker, are a force of pure chaos. As a DM, it’s your duty to deal with them lest they deal with you (and your game!). The most traditional method of punishment is reduction of XP. Without a very good reason, don’t remove more than 50 XP at once—you want to warn the players, not cripple their characters. Severe transgressions, such as reading your DM notes, damage to people and property, or highly inappropriate remarks should be punished harshly. In rare cases, even the extreme measure of removing levels can be used, although this will often be a prelude to kicking the offender out of the group.

I hope to find time to say more about these articles soon; for now I’ll just point you to them as a very interesting parallel to the classes James & I are doing for kids the same age and at least theoretically using the same system (although both we and Uri diverge from canonical 4E in many places).

spells for the after school class

Explanation: Tavis and I are running an after school Dungeons & Dragons program for some elementary school kids.  Most of our prep consists of wishing we’d done more prep while on the subway to class.  But I made up this list of spells for the Magic-User.

Every morning, Magic-Users can cast different spells! Roll the d12 a number of times equal to your level, and look on the chart for the spell matching that number. If you roll a spell once, you can only cast it one time a day. If you rolled a spell more than once, you can cast it that number of times per day. So, if you rolled Fire Ball twice, you could cast it twice in one day, but not three times.

 

Roll	Spell	What Does the Spell Do?
1	Animate Dead	You create a number of zombies equal to your level, who obey your orders.
2	Anti-Magic Shell	For 1 hour a shimmering aura around you blocks all magic, including yours.
3	Charm Person	Unless the target resists with Will, he or she becomes your friend for 1 day.
4	Contact Weirdo	Ask an angel, demon, or space alien several yes-or-no questions ( # = level ).
5	Disintegrate	Point at a target. Unless it resists with Fortitude, it is destroyed completely.
6	Fire Ball	Everyone within 20 feet of the target must roll Reflex or take 5d6 damage.
7	Haste	For 1 fight, you and your friends move double-fast and attack twice a turn.
8	Hold Portal	Magically seals a doorway, trapdoor, etc. For 10 minutes, no one can open it.
9	Locate Object	Name an object: this spell will point you in the right direction to find it.
10	Phantasmal Force	You create an illusion that lasts for 10 minutes. Enemies resist with Will.
11	Polymorph Self	You can take the shape of any animal for up to 1 hour, but you cannot talk.
12	Wall of Ice	Your breath becomes a huge icy surface – a wall, a bridge, a dome . . .

 

Magic-User Research

Each time you gain a level, you can spend one thousand gold coins to research a new spell! The spell can be anything you want. This new spell takes the place of another one on the list. You can choose what spell it replaces. (Example: I don’t like Hold Portal, so my new spell replaces it.) If you don’t have one thousand gold coins, you’ll have to find more treasure or persuade people to fund your work.

Here are ideas for research. Ancient books mention these spells, but I don’t know what they do!

• Turn to Slime
• Perfume of Trickery
• Zolobachai’s All-Powerful Laxative
• Contagious Dancing
• Maldoor’s Lesser Apocalypse
• Hazart’s Infinite Sandwich
• Speak with Ghost Sharks
• Levitate Head
• Turn Light to Amber
• Summon Monkey Butler
• Xindi’s Cupcake of Insanity



Commentary: random selection isn’t just done for its own sake, but rather to force the children (especially little boys fixated on killing things) to think laterally.  The best part of playing a Magic-User in a “real” game is the Eureka! moment when you figure a great use for a seemingly lame spell.  The kids, in particular, are in love with Wall of Ice.  At one point in Tavis’s game, they proposed using Wall of Ice to create an airtight bubble to survive an ICBM flight outside of the Earth’s atmosphere.

super awesome lets pretend time (pt 2)

I managed to clear my schedule this week to help Tavis with his after-school D&D program.  I guess this is Week 4?  (I probably shouldn’t call this Part 2, since it’s the fourth week, but hey.)

My job was to help one of this week’s Dungeon Masters with her prep, and to help her batch of kids stay focused.  Five things were noteworthy:

1.  Our first sandbox!

Although Tavis had observed several railroad adventures in Weeks 2 and 3, this time around we had our first sandbox dungeon.  “My” Dungeon Master RaQuel, with help from her dad, obtained one of those poster-sized battle maps used in 4e: a small town adjoining the ruins of a castle.  The Dungeon Master had prepared a little encounter in each building, which could be explored in any order.  The encounters were plausible, interesting, and (weakly) interconnected.  It was delightful to see.  (I think Tavis said her dad used to be a gamer, and she admitted he helped her a little; I’m curious how involved he was with the design.  But regardless, it was very well done.)

2.   Our first GMPC.

“Okay . . . So, this fire goblin jumps on your head!  He is eating your brain!”

“Ha ha ha, my brain…. my brain . . . . it’s so big, it’ll be a big meal!”

“Okay, so when the fire goblin is eating your brain, he becomes good.  He’s a good guy now.  He is your slave because of your brain.  He is like, ‘Yes master!’ because your brain is so strong.”

(a round later)

“The fire goblin turns into a boulder.  [Places wad of tinfoil on the map.]  It’s a boulder made of tinfoil.  With eyes in it.  And the tinfoil is like really good armor.”

(a round later)

“Okay, you could run to the tower, but the Fire Tinfoil Goblin says, ‘Master, jump on me, I’ll roll there, I’m faster.’  Okay, so do you jump on him to roll there?”

(a round later)

“The prisoner won’t leave without his parakeet, but the parakeet wants food.  There’s a peanut in the tinfoil goblin!  It says, ‘Master, I have the food.  If you want it.’  Do you want it?”

3.  You Will Never Guess What Victor Did!!

The Dungeon Master wrote on the map “Adohna’s Chest!”  But then Victor wrote down “MAdonhna’s Chest” and we opened it!  Hee hee hee!

(This was, to the 8 year old boys, indescribably hilarious.  They hero-worship the 12-year-old boys like Victor.)

4.  Elementary School Teachers are Vastly Under-Appreciated

Spending 80 minutes supervising 5 little kids and getting them to focus on something is hard work.  Oh man.  One kid was literally bouncing off the walls, doing flips over the sofa, doing weird postures that would break his neck if any other rambunctious child bumped into him.  (As a lawyer, I look at this child and see FUTURE PERSONAL INJURY PLAINTIFF written on his forehead.)

I don’t know how teachers handle 30 of these little dudes.  I leave the classroom and want a belt of rum just to steady my nerves.

5.  These Kids Like D&D

Leaving the session, I asked Joan (one of the other Dungeon Masters), “So, hey, is this stuff fun?”  And Joan responded, “Yes!  It’s my favorite game, even more than chess!”  Which made me feel really happy.

Instruction in the Responsible Conduct of Dungeons & Dragons

I’ve just finished working on a grant for my day job which would create a program for training emergency medicine physicians to do clinical research. One thing this means is I’ll have more time for posting. Another is that my head is full of phrases from the bureaucratese you use to communicate with the National Institutes of Health.

NIH policy says that any time you want them to give you money for a research training program, you have to demonstrate that it will include instruction in the responsible conduct of research. This means that one of the things you’re required to teach is ethics, or why you shouldn’t intentionally infect Guatemalan prisoners with venereal disease.

Last night, as we were preparing for the third Dungeons & Dragons afterschool class, James and I decided that it was time for some instruction in the ethics of roleplaying games. We decided to go about it by breaking up the kids into discussion groups before we get down to playing.

The first thing we’ll do is to have the kids talk about a time that their character made a mistake, and what happened as a result. After everyone’s answered, we’ll ask: Did you have fun when that happened?

If the consensus is yes, making mistakes is as fun as succeeding because it makes exciting and unexpected things happen, we’ll move on to the message: Since making mistakes is part of the fun, you don’t have to listen when someone else tells you what your character should do. There’s no right way that they know and you don’t; it’s all about making your own decisions and enjoying the consequences.

For the second discussion, we’ll switch from talking about the game to talking about real life. Here’s a list of things that have happened to everyone; talk about one time it happened to you.

• You were excluded; other people went off and did something in secret, intentionally keeping you out of it.
• You made a mistake and other people yelled at you and tried to make you feel stupid.
• You were put down; someone acted like they were better, smarter, more powerful than you.
• You were robbed; someone cheated you out of something you had, or the share you deserved.
• You were attacked; someone used words or violence to try to hurt you.

The message here is that it feels bad when these things happen in real life. D&D is not real life, but it still feels bad when someone treats you badly. Playing a role-playing game is a way to have fun with your friends; treating one another badly makes it less fun for everyone.

The last idea I’ve had is that I don’t have a lot of control over who these kids are. Everything that some young boys do is going to become an acting-out of their pecking order and its internal struggles for dominance over one another. Some boys are going to be attracted to D&D because quantifying the abilities of their alter ego gives them a tool in this struggle: I’m better than you because my character can beat up your character, thanks to this 18 ability score I “rolled” or the optimized choices I made.

What I do have some control over is what characters the kids play. The world of D&D is a dangerous place; in order to survive long enough to become a hero, your character had to become a trustworthy team player. Trying to enforce pro-social behavior will drive me nuts; encouraging the roleplaying of a pro-social character is what the game is all about.

super awesome lets pretend time (pt 1)

This afternoon Tavis and I played a home-brewed version of D&D with ten 8 year old children at an afterschool program in Manhattan.  Let me front-load with the cute stuff:

• Two of my five players were girls.  One of them, Joan, ended by saying, “That was AWESOME.  That was, by far, the best game I have EVER played.”  We loaned her a copy of the new 4e Starter Set to read this week – God knows what she’ll make of it.  So at the end of the session, a copy of D&D ended in the hands of an enthusiastic new (and female) player, which is what this is all about.  I am awesome (Tavis is more awesome, but gets second billing on this).



• Joan initially was disappointed that there were no “normal girl” miniatures, but at the end of the session said, “I wish I could keep this, I LOVE her” in regard to her black-leather-clad dual-wielding female Doomguard.
• “Okay, as you’re travelling along the old bridge road, you see a strange little lizard man, about 3 feet high.  He is astride a giant weasel, and looks to be having a nap in the saddle.  What do you do?”  “Kill it!  “Um, kill it.”  “Ooh, ooh, I attack it and then kill it!”  “Let’s just kill it!”  “Okay . . . Roger, what do you want to do?”  “I guess . . . I chop off its head, and then kill it.”
• In the process of killing it: “I chop out its eyes!”  “Whoa cool!!  It can’t see!!”  “Nice one!”  “Yesssss!”  (twenty minutes later) “In the dungeon, you find Sir Justin.  The monsters have chopped out his eyes, leaving him blind.”  “That’s horrible!!”
• All of these kids were 8 years old.  They showed strong ability to do D&D-type reasoning: “It sounds like this route is very direct, but dangerous.  Let’s try an indirect route and get there a different way. . . . Let’s stick together so the monsters don’t get us . . . This key probably unlocks a dungeon cell, let’s take it along with us. . . . This monster invited us to dinner: it must mean he’s planning to eat us!”  So all of these signals from the DM are immediately understood correctly.  I delivered these signals in a slightly exaggerated fashion, but the children had no problems understanding the big idea and how stuff fit together entirely on their own.
• RaQuel said, “My second sword is also a cell phone.”

The idea is that we’d get a whole bunch of kids at the elementary school to role-play, using the Dungeons & Dragons brand as a bait-and-switch.  The idea would be to teach newcomers that these types of games exist, and Dungeons & Dragons is a fun thing to do.  And for kids who are already D&D players (there are a few in this bunch), we’d show them how to do things in a more Old Skool kind of way–which is to say, just imagining stuff and having fun, without worrying about “builds,” rules, feats, and other stand-ins for status-mongering.

Some of these kids are new.  Several of them that I was playing with had no prior role-playing experience, and were very frightened and worried about trying something totally brand new.  So I did a lot of work reassuring them that, “This is a game that is fun.  It helps you imagine.”  We would play as a team (“Yes!!  I’m so glad we don’t have to compete!”) and while unexpected things might happen, you’re never out of the game.

Tavis home-brewed some super-simplified version of 4e which was still too complicated for me to understand, much less teach.  My bunch played pretty fast and loose: roll + stat bonus = hope for the best.  Basically, my version of it was a D&D 4e Skill Check type system, just without skills, and 5 kids managed to accomplish 5 encounters (with 2 combats) in just over 40 minutes.

Maybe some day soon I will post up the little adventure I drafted, if I can figure out how to do it.

Afterschool D&D Mad Libs: Monsters and Dungeons

 

Sadly, I don't think they'll let me smoke a pipe during class, but I'm totally going to sit on a big d6.

 

This Thursday is the first class of my D&D afterschool program, so I wanted to get feedback on some of the materials I’ve developed for it.

First, though, some background. On the plane to Gen Con this year, my seatmate was Itamar of Hamis`hakia, The Hebrew Gaming Podcast.

Note 1: It’s awesome who you meet flying to from NYC Indianapolis on that particular day, for example people for whom this is the second leg of the flight from Israel!

Note 2: Itamar was telling me about a blog post he read about a D&D game at an art studio party, and I was like “hey, that was me!” Amazing that such a small world is nevertheless to be found all over the globe.

Anyway, I seized the opportunity to pick Itamar’s brain about gaming in Israel and particularly the afterschool RPG scene I’d heard about. For more information, he later pointed me other places he’s talked about it: this thread at Gamegrene, where he posts as zipdrive, and episodes 204 & 205 of the Fear the Boot podcast.

One of the things he said really struck in my mind: that although it was cool that the afterschool programs exposed lots of kids to RPGs, as a rule those kids didn’t continue to play as adults. Some of this was the usual “when I became a man, I put away childish things, fearing they would prevent me from getting laid.” Some was due to those kids going on to serve in the RPG-suspicious Israel Defense Forces, which made for an interesting digression. But the part that concerned me was that, by packaging the D&D experience into something that your parents signed you up for and you passively enjoyed at the feet of an adult dungeon master sitting on a giant dice, Itamar felt the afterschool programs stood in the way of kids learning to do it for themselves.

The sense I got was that it wasn’t in the program’s economic self-interests to teach kids that they didn’t need a class to have fun rolling dice and making stuff up. Also, since personnel is usually the biggest expense, the programs tend to have lots of kids per grown-up and it’s easiest to use the existing structure of the game to keep them all under control: wait until your turn in the initiative order comes up, then tell me who you’re attacking.

I like attacking things as much as the next guy, and I’m certainly approaching this afterschool class as an opportunity to get paid for the actual activity of roleplaying rather than for writing things that people don’t really need to do that activity. But I want to teach the kids how they can use the D&D structures, like turn-taking and cooperative problem-solving, for themselves – to help their gaming experiences when they don’t have adult supervision be less about social dominance struggles and a horrific degeneration into the worst moments of social breakdown.

I welcome input on how to approach that part of things. But this post is specifically about some tools I made to help kids get started creating their own  super-awesome-let’s-pretend time.

Imagine each of these printed on a single piece of paper, laid out with bigger blanks and space for drawing:

Draw a map of your dungeon. Write a name for each room on the map.

This dungeon is called ______.

The dungeon looks _____ and _______.

Heroes might hear _____ from the _____ or smell ____ from the _____.

Heroes might go in here to _____ or in search of ___.

Which rooms are dangerous? ____ Why? ____

Where are the treasures? _____

A Strength roll of ___ or better in the _____room will _______.

A Constitution roll of ___ or better in the _____room will _______.

A Dexterity roll of ___ or better in the _____room will _______.

An Intelligence roll of ___ or better in the _____room will _______.

A Wisdom roll of ___ or better in the _____room will _______.

A Charisma roll of ___ or better in the _____room will _______.

Easy = 8 or better; Medium = 11 or better; Hard = 14 or better.

The next is for monsters to populate dungeons with:

Draw a picture of your monster.

This monster is called ___.

It calls itself ___.

This monster is here to ___ the ___.

It is afraid of ___ and ___.

It loves ___ and ___.

How could this monster help the heroes? ___

How could this monster get the heroes into trouble? ___

Choose your monster’s scores by circling one in each row:

	Low: 6	Middle: 4	High: 2
Defense:	10	12	14
Attack:	+1	+3	+5
Damage:	2 dice + 2	2 dice	2 dice +2
Range:	One hero in arm’s reach	One hero in sight	Every hero in sight

Hit points:___

To figure out a monster’s hit points, add the columns you chose. For example, a giant is so big that it’s easy to hit (low defense = 10) and clumsy (low attack, +1). It’s very strong (high damage, 2 dice +2) but its club can only hit a hero who’s right up close (low range). So it has 20 hit points: each low score adds 6, plus one high score adds 2.

Let me know what you think of these, esp. if you have kids at home to serve as a captive audience for playtesting!

EDIT 1: I should have thanked James for setting aside time to help run the first class! I am much more confident in the outcome knowing that he’ll have my back.

EDIT 2: Tony Dowler’s Microdungeons totally exemplify the scale and tone of the dungeon maps I’m thinking of for these mad libs; I’ll be handing them out to the kids like candy.