Welcome to D&D for the Kids!

Hi! I'm Clint. I'm a teacher, a dad, and a gamer with strong roots in old school D&D. My first experience was running the old black box for my mom and her friends. I played Second Edition AD&D throughout high school and college, moving to 3.5 during my first few years of teaching. After many years and many iterations (and a long hiatus while I went through a painful divorce and custody battle and spent a lot of time playing MMORPGs... and was incidentally saved from the pain that was 4th edition), I've come back to D&D. This time though, I'm running the game for my kids and their friends!

The Famous / Infamous Black Box

I set up another website to house the resources and game stuff we're doing, called "The East York Rollers" with a mission to provide family friendly D&D sessions for kids to play with mentors either online or live in York, PA. Unfortunately "we" are not an open organization. We do not have the resources to vet mentors and check their clearances etc. I looked online and not a lot of people are talking about this, so I decided to set up this blog to further share my resources and insights for any parents that want to run games for your kids and their friends to get them started, teachers who want to run clubs at school, or community centers that want to provide this as an activity. After all, there are a lot of benefits to this kind of play for kids, from social / emotional to Interdisciplinary Learning to childhood development.

What qualifies me to talk about this? Well, in addition to being a teacher, a dad, and a gamer, I also teach game design. I teach kids in school how to design fun games. If that's not enough, well, I'm doing it. I took the plunge and am running two very diverse groups of kids through two very different campaigns. So, I hope that some of this will help you.

Comments

Perfectly Perilous

As I've mentioned here before, I am a Middle School teacher and I have a D&D club during our school clubs period. This is a super popular club with great attendance and others waiting to get in. It poses a unique challenge, though, being a part of the school day, rather than an after-school club. Basically, I have 30 minutes once every 2 weeks, to introduce D&D to kids with little to no experience, who are with me for a trimester, roughly 6 - 7 sessions if we're lucky. Free Club Kit Wizards of the Coast sent me their free club kit, which included the a copy of the recently released D&D Starter Set: Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, instructions and guidelines for club organizers, a quick demo and learn-to-play guide for Dungeon Masters, easy-to-read character cards, a poster to advertise your club, flyers, a Campaign Case: Terrain, and a Campaign Case: Creatures. This was a great start. Especially useful was the a quick demo and learn-to-play guide for Dungeon Masters: &

Middle School D&D Club

So, I finally did it! I had the opportunity and support to start a D&D club at my Middle School building. Now this isn't a big after-school program or anything. This happens during the school day in our "clubs period" every other Tuesday. Joined by my friend and colleague, Jared Reck (read his books!), I ventured to come up with a club that would introduce our students to this awesome hobby. The Setup The advertisement we put in our middle school clubs catalog looked like this: D&D is exceptionally inclusive. All you need to join is an imagination . Playing is like creating infinite stories that you and your friends write—and rewrite and re-rewrite—together. You’re all active participants in writing a unique adventure through different, fantastical worlds and scenarios. There is no winner. Instead, the goal is to deepen your understanding of your character by interacting with other players and their shared environment. Participation in tabletop cooperative role

Crazy Clinto's Handy Homebrew Hacks Part 2 - Go West!

I wanted to follow up on my recent post about homebrew hacks with some practical and free resources that you can apply today to create your own Gygaxian / Westmarches style campaign for your kids or students. I’m going to focus much more on materials and resources in this post than on theory and technique. I will link to some great articles and videos to cover theory and technique. This post was inspired by a recent video by Professor Dungeon Master and his son over on the Dungeoncraft channel. That video was inspired by a recent video by Questing Beast about time keeping in your campaign. For your convenience, I've embedded the Dungeoncraft video here: On the off chance that the above video didn’t give you a good handle on what this kind of campaign is, here’s the original source of this term, Ben Robbins explaining in detail. The Setting & Your Home Base I talked a lot in my previous post in this series on creating your homebrew setting. I’m not going to rehash all of tha

DnD For the Kids

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