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...

I'm a nerd... an absolute geek. I spend my man-chore time listening, not to music, but to podcasts about D&D , Wheel of Time , and being a better DM (okay so also D&D). I discovered Dragon Talk , the official D&D podcast in March, and the first episode that I listened to had Maude Garrett on as a guest. LIFE CHANGING. Okay, so I use hyperbole like punctuation, but this was the very first thing I applied to D&D with kids. Maude Garrett is the creator of Geek Bomb and Fungeons & Flagons (a D&D inspired improv show that is not for kids). Her approach to character creation is absolutely inspired! I borrowed (stole) directly from this in my session zero for my first group. I actually made the questions into a Google Form and posted it on Discord (not ideal, but we were all in quarantine). Ideally, I would interview each kid as a part of my "session zero" (actually a combination of mini sessions -- more on this later) Here are the questions I asked:...

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 m...