A Cool Story of New D&D Players

[vetanda]

WotC Adventure for Kids

Great story! It's awesome to hear about kids really getting into D&D--and finding the necessary support from local adults. When I was a kid, I had to pick up PBM style games, because there was no one else around who played until I was in middle school. I would have loved it if we'd had parents like you around .

For WotC-supported Kids D&D Adeventures, check out the D&D homepage on the 26th of April. I just finished work on a Mini Adventure for kids that's based on Monster Slayers, a D&D YA novel that comes out next month, and it should be posted for free downloads (spread the word!) then. I've strived to capture all the flavor of D&D, but in a quick, fast-playing format, based on what I've learned running pick-up games for kids at local gaming stores. And if it's popular enough, who knows where it could lead?

Try it with your kids, and then let me know what they think!

******

Susan J. Morris, Editor
Wizards of the Coast Novels
http://community.wizards.com/bookclub
http://twitter.com/susanjmorris

 

[Aus_Snow]

There are three kids (very young atm) who seem to be curious about this strange pastime of the grownups around here. There have been a few questions, and the answers haven't exactly seemed to put a damper on that curiosity so far!

So some time, maybe in a couple of years or so. . . who knows? Anyway, it's pretty awesome, as I said in the XP comment, to read such things.

 

[nedjer]

I have poked Trevor to come take a look at this thread and suggested to him that they might get in contact with local teachers/university professors for stuff like this.

I'm not up to speed on the WotC connections but Thistle Games is all about helping out/ promoting RPGs for fun and learning. No need to go further than this thread for anyone who's interested in how you might go about popularising tabletop RPGs and getting them into homes, schools and libraries.

I'm up to my neck in marking for the next week or so but I can post some relevant persepectives in summary fairly soon. I'll 'download' in direct proportion to any interest. If a publisher is genuinely interested in such matters PM for an academic email address and I'll asap

 

[Shoe]

I cant wait till my kids are older...my son is 4, my daughters are 2 and 6 months....one more to go and I have my playgr....er...family is complete

But seriously, my eldest daughter's first word was Dice

 

[nedjer]

I cant wait till my kids are older...my son is 4, my daughters are 2 and 6 months....one more to go and I have my playgr....er...family is complete

But seriously, my eldest daughter's first word was Dice

Is that because you called her Dice, which would also be cool?

 

[Shoe]

Is that because you called her Dice, which would also be cool?

nope, she had a plush dice since she was old enough to enjoy stuffed toys and always wanted to play with my ACTUAL dice. she still loves gaming cards and dice and pretends to be playing games with the occational few I let her play with.

 

[nedjer]

Said I'd come back to this when the workload eased up a bit. The Thistle Games blog is part blog, part building up a resource on 'kickstarting' imaginitive play. There's a fair amount of material on getting kids into imaginitive play there already, which is easily accessed by selecting the learning category.

There's plenty more to be done as well. Including sections specific to tabletop RPGs. However, the post I fired off this morning is about the value/ benefits of 'priming' kids for imaginitive play. In other words, if you want a ten year old to get enthusiastic about shared, participative gaming the 'work' starts when they're about three. Non-parents will probably not want to read it all.

There's another thread floating around about helping girls get interested in RPGs. Today's blog post definitely applies but I've more to post on this. In particular, I was asked to redesign an active learning exercise for a couple of hundred students several months ago (the majority girls). I built in a variety of roleplaying elements, which ran over about ten sessions for each kid. The evaluations now suggest that the girls were more involved, more 'open-ended' and, by a small margin, enjoyed the exercise more than the boys. A post on what worked best will follow when I've finished checking the data.