CornfedCommando
2019-08-07, 10:14 PM
I’ve been playing D&D for 28 years now. First picked it up when I was 12, back in the good ol’ days of 2E. Stayed with it through 3.5, skipped 4, came back for 5.
The game is near and dear to my heart. I lurk on these forums, reading up on the best ways to optimize certain concepts, what kind of changes to make to substandard classes, what spells are the best. All that minutiae. I love it; or so I thought.
Three weeks ago, my 10-year-old daughter asked to play D&D with me. I thought, “Okay, this’ll last about an hour before she gets bored and wants to watch Minecraft videos.” I couldn’t have been more wrong.
She loved it. Our first session, just her and me, ran for five hours. Our second was also five hours. She was upset when we stopped for the evening. She rarely broke character. She insisted we act out nearly every interaction her character had. She gathered props from around the house. And she taught me how to love this game again.
Her character is the least optimized character ever, though she instinctively made some halfway decent choices. She choose to be an Aasimar, because they’re “half-angels” and have “glowing eyes.” She choose Paladin as her class, because it was thematic (and thank God cuz it’s pretty decent for a solo game). She has zero clue about most of her special abilities. Couldn’t care less about her spells and that includes Divine Smite.
She choose Urchin as her background, because her parents were murdered. She doesn’t want to wear armor. I had to convince her that a chain shirt could be worn under her normal shirt. Her character wears shorts and has a pet cat named Toby (which I upgraded to a tressym because wings).
Her Constitution is a 10 because orphans have bad health. And when she picked her oath at 3rd level after our second session, I roleplayed out her choices without even bothering to tell her the mechanics (because she wouldn’t have cared anyway).
She choose Oath of Ancients because it was in keeping with how she was playing the character. I called it the Lightkeeper; she agonized over that and the Avenger (Oath of Vengeance) because she wanted revenge for her parents’ murder. The Oath was presented to her in a dream with her guardian angel.
And all of a sudden, I get the game again. It’s not the math exercise I had turned it into. It’s not about DPR or action economy. It’s about telling a story. And having fun. It has given me common ground with a 10-year-old girly girl who surprisingly loves fighting zombies, but wants to spare the goblins (and now has one as a companion; his name is Fork, because he has a fork).
My daughter talks in character with an accent and writes down the names of people she meets and would gladly spend a whole session just hanging out in town learning people’s stories. And she’s not the spaz she normally is; she was focused, she engaged in critical thinking, she sorted out moral dilemmas, and acted twice her age. It was amazing.
I don’t know how many of you are parents, but if you’ve got youngsters, play this game with them. I was shocked beyond belief at how much my daughter took to it. And it has been a blast! It has totally rekindled my love of this game.
The game is near and dear to my heart. I lurk on these forums, reading up on the best ways to optimize certain concepts, what kind of changes to make to substandard classes, what spells are the best. All that minutiae. I love it; or so I thought.
Three weeks ago, my 10-year-old daughter asked to play D&D with me. I thought, “Okay, this’ll last about an hour before she gets bored and wants to watch Minecraft videos.” I couldn’t have been more wrong.
She loved it. Our first session, just her and me, ran for five hours. Our second was also five hours. She was upset when we stopped for the evening. She rarely broke character. She insisted we act out nearly every interaction her character had. She gathered props from around the house. And she taught me how to love this game again.
Her character is the least optimized character ever, though she instinctively made some halfway decent choices. She choose to be an Aasimar, because they’re “half-angels” and have “glowing eyes.” She choose Paladin as her class, because it was thematic (and thank God cuz it’s pretty decent for a solo game). She has zero clue about most of her special abilities. Couldn’t care less about her spells and that includes Divine Smite.
She choose Urchin as her background, because her parents were murdered. She doesn’t want to wear armor. I had to convince her that a chain shirt could be worn under her normal shirt. Her character wears shorts and has a pet cat named Toby (which I upgraded to a tressym because wings).
Her Constitution is a 10 because orphans have bad health. And when she picked her oath at 3rd level after our second session, I roleplayed out her choices without even bothering to tell her the mechanics (because she wouldn’t have cared anyway).
She choose Oath of Ancients because it was in keeping with how she was playing the character. I called it the Lightkeeper; she agonized over that and the Avenger (Oath of Vengeance) because she wanted revenge for her parents’ murder. The Oath was presented to her in a dream with her guardian angel.
And all of a sudden, I get the game again. It’s not the math exercise I had turned it into. It’s not about DPR or action economy. It’s about telling a story. And having fun. It has given me common ground with a 10-year-old girly girl who surprisingly loves fighting zombies, but wants to spare the goblins (and now has one as a companion; his name is Fork, because he has a fork).
My daughter talks in character with an accent and writes down the names of people she meets and would gladly spend a whole session just hanging out in town learning people’s stories. And she’s not the spaz she normally is; she was focused, she engaged in critical thinking, she sorted out moral dilemmas, and acted twice her age. It was amazing.
I don’t know how many of you are parents, but if you’ve got youngsters, play this game with them. I was shocked beyond belief at how much my daughter took to it. And it has been a blast! It has totally rekindled my love of this game.