DnD For the Kids

How many of us parents / teachers / guardians have had a talk with our kiddos about needs and wants? Well, this post is all about needs and wants. What do you need to run D&D? What makes it cool for the kids from a best-bang-for-the-buck perspective? What is completely unnecessary overkill? I'm going to cover everything from money-saving ideas to flagrant consumerism, and hopefully you will find something you can use somewhere in between.  So, what do I need to buy? So, you may be wondering, what the forward investment is to successfully run a D&D game for kids or in general. This is a two tier answer and largely depends upon your level of creativity as a Dungeon Master (DM), and how much DIY work you're willing to put in. The Free Route Wizards of the Coast ( WotC from here on out) wants you to play D&D. They have done everything they can to bring down barriers to entry. Yes, the Players Handbook still retails for $49.95, but the basic core rules are absolutely ...

All D&D games go off the rails from time to time. It's part of the fun. A game that's always off the rails, though, that is chaos and not a game at all. DM-ing for kids is an art and a science that's similar in a lot of ways to my day job. I'm a Middle School Computer Science teacher , and I use a lot of different classroom management techniques, many of which center around gamification , which intrinsically rewards the behaviors you want, rather than penalizing those that you don't. So, I'm going to share some table management techniques, many of which deal with in-game rewards, which are totally legitimate and won't wreck your game, I promise.  Before I get into this, I need to give a shout out to Mike Shea , whose podcast, The DM's Deep Dive , has provided the seed for a lot of the ideas presented here.  The sandwich on the side Before I talk about anything else, I want to talk about the Sandwich on the side. For most of the rest of this post, th...