DnD For the Kids

Wizards of the Coast does not determine your fun. This is a sentiment that I've heard Mike Shea (aka Slyflourish ) share multiple times. I wanted to start today's post with it because it informs much of what I will be saying today.  Where is this coming from? I recently read an article entitled " Spelljammed ", by Graeme Barber  (which is a very good read, by the way) on the recommendation of Sam, the Educational DM . In the article, Graeme lays out the main problems with Spelljammer from a game design and thematic perspective. The main issues presented were: The supplement lacked sound mechanics, with an example of the lack of rules for things like ship-to-ship combat. The setting had serious tonal inconsistencies: some aspects being campy while others were heavy & deadly serious. The "facts" of the setting had a serious lack of impact on / coherency in the other settings. The lore was inconsistent or contradictory. I'm not here to argue any of thes

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

Recently, RPG Match on Twitter posed the following question in of of their prolific polls:      Clearly, the majority of the 1,627 participants felt that, "Yes, they definitely should." I found this question interesting enough to blog about for the following reasons: I've run into this question on many occasions and have dealt with it inconsistently.  I DM mostly for kids, which makes one feel like a mean bully for vetoing anything. The reactions seen in the replies were as visceral as one would expect from Twitter, but quite thought provoking.  In thinking about this question, preparing to engage the poll myself, and considering my past actions and self-reflection on this topic, I came up with a rule of thumb to guide our approach to this that I believe answers a lot of the replies I saw. There are great arguments to be made for and against vetoing character ideas, but as it is with most things, the real answer is somewhere in the middle. Why not veto character ideas? I