D&D General 5e H E L P! Teacher in need of rescue!

[GothmogIV]

We cannot access D&D Beyond on our school accounts because God hates me and wants me to be sad.

 

[Mort]

What about that new 'adventure' everyone was supposed to be able to get on D&D Beyond for free? It sounds from folks reviews that its a simple couple of encounters with a nice map. Maybe that would work?

Even if he could access it, it's for 3rd level PCs. I think the kids made first level characters.

 

[Mort]

Let me be more clear: imagine that reading more that 2 pages was a Sisyphean task. I'm talking basic stuff here. 10 rooms with descriptions and stat blocks.

I asked my son (he's in high school now, but was in D&D club in grade school).

He ran Lost Mines when he was in 7th grade, and suggested that. Said he and his group had no trouble picking it up. The first encounters are only a few pages.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Hey, fellow classroom teacher here. While I have not actually done D&D in a school setting I did run and/or supervise it at a summer camp over several summers for similarly aged kids. That was under the aegis of a creative writing project, so we used nothing prepublished except the rules, and I tried to incorporate materials made by the kids (including one summer having the whole adventure take place on a map one kid drew). Most of the time in my experience once the kids get going they require minmum help, and while I have not experimented with prepublished materials I suspect most middle schoolers would not stick to them for long, so really the key is to give them something as a jumping off point.

My personal preference in your situation is, as others have suggested, for Lost Mine of Phandelver from the original 5e starter set. It's a modern classic if anything is, the module has more DM supports than a typical WotC product, it is a slim handbook with all the monster and magic item stats in the back so the DM only needs MM or DMG if they add something, and it's usually cheap on Amazon. It is a bit of a sandbox for when the group inevitably goes off the rails. I personally DMed it having never played 5e D&D before, and it was fun.

A strong alternative is the new Heroes of the Borderlands starter set. It provides even more DM support, is even more of a sandbox, and comes with all sorts of bells and whistles like all the maps you need and tokens for all the monsters. The tokens, maps, etc. might be useful for other groups as well. It is also set up so that DMing can be shared out between various people, with three seperate booklets for the Keep, the Wilds, and the Caves of Chaos. The drawbacks are that it is $50, has lots of items to keep track of and try to fit back into a packed box, and that it relies on so many fancy apparati (having cards for all the monsters and npcs, etc., not making you draw your own maps) that I don't feel like it really encourages a DM to improvise beyond the provided materials or to generally develop the skills they need.

In your shoes I would probably decide on the best option based on my best judgement of what was a good fit for the would-be-DM.

If you haven't requested an official D&D for educators kit yet you can do so at https://dnd-support.wizards.com/hc/en-us/articles/9485614877588-Educator-Resources

 

[GothmogIV]

Thanks, friends. I am going to use a few really short ones from Kobold Press's Prepared! scenarios, as well as a printed out version of the Goblin one on D&D Beyond. I'm also going to bring either Shadowdark or OSE to help those who have never played an RPG before. 5e is incredibly complicated for a person who has never played any TTRPG , especially is they don't have an experienced DM to guide them.
My headache just went away 3.5 hours after...chaos. Like standing in front of a jet engine while people throw live chickens at you.

 

[Charlaquin]

Let me be more clear: imagine that reading more that 2 pages was a Sisyphean task. I'm talking basic stuff here. 10 rooms with descriptions and stat blocks.

That is a pretty significant restriction. Given that, have you considered looking into one-page dungeons? There are a ton of them out there, and the one-page dungeon contest has an enormous catalogue of them. You can get compendiums of their annual winners and honorable mentions on drivethruRPG for like four bucks each (each year’s compendium, not each dungeon), and one of those is bound to have at least one that will be of interest to your players.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Thanks, friends. I am going to use a few really short ones from Kobold Press's Prepared! scenarios, as well as a printed out version of the Goblin one on D&D Beyond. I'm also going to bring either Shadowdark or OSE to help those who have never played an RPG before. 5e is incredibly complicated for a person who has never played any TTRPG , especially is they don't have an experienced DM to guide them.
My headache just went away 3.5 hours after...chaos. Like standing in front of a jet engine while people throw live chickens at you.

I do think people who haven't worked with 2020s middle schoolers would struggle to imagine how difficult many of them find reading at all, much less reading of reference type materials and on paper no less. Really while you should definitely give them something to work off of, the assumption should be that they'll drop it almost immediately in favor of making up their own stuff, and probably mostly their own rules if there isn't an experienced player at the helm. Kids these days are just as creative as they ever were, especially when its in service of not having to actually read something.

On two seperate occasions when I was doing summer camp D&D I came upon small groups of kids that told me they were "playing D&D" with no books, character sheets or obvious rules whatsoever. Just rolling a d20 for a broad sense of whether their characters succeeded or failed in the DM's story and doing whatever they liked.

In terms of simpler games you might also consider Bugbears and Borderlands. It's a simplified 5e clone. The pdf is available for free and the creator is a frequent ENWorld visitor. It also is perhaps a little less explicitly geared towards those with old school D&D nostalgia, something most your students will presumably not have, than something like Shadowdark.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The original Delian Tomb by Matt Colville is four rooms, I think, and dirt simple. Good for teaching both players and DMs.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I also ran Heroes of the Borderlands the other day, and I do think it's definitely doable for a middle school crowd, especially if you keep them in the wilderness initially and cut down the spider encounter to one giant spider (and maybe chop its hit points and damage output in half -- it's a wildly unbalanced encounter for level 1 characters who might start off trapped in a web).

 

[Liongo]

Sly Flourish has posted a bunch of resources for educators.

Free and School Club RPG Resources

Hope that helps.