Chaosbutterfly

I had a great Thanksgiving.  I stayed a couple of days and had to babysit for a little bit so I took advantage of the time and got to introduce a couple of my nephews to the joy of Table Top Role Playing Games.  Dungeons and Dragons to be exact.  It was a rough start.   The youngest, Brandon is around 5 or so and well, he can’t sit still enough for something like that, neither can my oldest nephew Nicolas for whatever reason.  More on that later.    However, Victoria ( age eight ) and Cameron (I think age 10) both took to it like ducks to water.  It was a little touchy herding the cats into character creation. I agree, that has to be the most boring part of gaming.  Thanks to helpers like character creation programs, much of that can be expedited to some extent.  I am limited to what I have on pdf.  It’s a problem to keep a lot of gaming books when you have limited storage space, so all my books have to be available on pdf format or I don’t have it.    This limits the passing around of books to the passing around of a laptop or fighting a printer.  The printer wasn’t properly networked in, so I had to print out character sheets to pdfs and email them to the kids and have them print them out that way.  My sister has a mac that was graciously provided by my dad, but the mac doesn’t run the D&D program so pdf it is.  Anyway, that took a lot of time, but Victoria I think was particularly interested.  She made a curious comment to me about if this was something that only boys can do, I said, “Heavens no!  You can do whatever you want in this game.   No restrictions at all.”   Who has been filling her head with that patriarchal crap???  Anyway, when it came to the RP part, they were naturals.  I started them out pretty simply game wise.  Everybody is a 1st level character.

Me:  “You all find yourselves in the forest near your village.   The town has been over run by orcs.  Your parents have told you to run as fast as you can to the forest to hide.   You haven’t seen them since and as far as you know the Orcs have burned down your house.  You are there with a few other kids from your village and you are all hiding in the forest.”

Cameron: “What’s an orc?”

Me:  “They are humanoids, tall, scary looking with tusks and such… and they have been burning down your village.”  I show them a picture of an orc from the players hand book.  They all look eagerly.  I ask, “What are you doing?”

Victoria:  “Ahh… I cast … hmmm.. I send my owl to go up and fly around …”

Me:  Your owl flies around and catches a rabbit.  The young paladin with you looks very worried, “I want to find out what has happened to my family, tell your owl to look at the village and see if they can see my house.”

Cameron:  What’s a Paladin?

Me:  He’s a young warrior and a friend you know from church.   He’s got a very nice sword and is hiding with you, his name is Adrian.

Cameron: Is Nicolas there?

Me:  Yes, Taco Fingers is there.  He’s hiding along with you.  (Everyone snickers.  When Nicolas lost interest, his character was christened “Taco Fingers” by his siblings.  I went with it.)

Ok, so we go on with this little adventure for a bit and I finally corral them to exploring the town and looking for what had happened to the parents, and where the orcs have taken them.  They figure out how to cast magic and do things very quickly.  I was amazed how quickly too.  I’ve seen 30 year olds struggle to grasp flinging dice after many weeks of playing and these kids caught on to even the most complicated rules like it was nothing.  Little sponges of wisdom they are…

Finally, they find their parents.  They are held in a pen with all the other village folk and are tied up.  The orcs have a couple of guards and the rest have gone to sleep.  Now’s their chance….

Victoria:  Ok, I’m going to sneek in and try to untie my parents!

Me:  Ok, roll to see if you can do that silently.  (She fails!)  Aoo… the orcs catch you and you are now tied up along with your parents!

So, there we were, orcs everywhere, and Victoria captured.  Oh no!   Victoria manages to cast a noise cantrip that manages to get the orc guards distracted enough for Cameron and his npc friends ambush the orc guards in the forest and they soon leap in there trying to untie everyone else.  After a bit of combat, they go out and stab the sleeping orcs.  Coup de gras all around!

The village is saved.  They are heroes and now level 2!  You never see kids that excited over a video game.