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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Matthias" data-source="post: 5647244" data-attributes="member: 3625">Here is an update for any that might be interested.The campaign I am running for my folks is pretty basic--there's a dragon raiding the local farms, and the PCs have to into the caves in the mountains to track it down and kill it (and run into traps and minor baddies along the way). It seemed fairly monotonous at times [hence this thread] but with the changes I made, the little players have gotten more interested.Things I tried:* Out-of-game 'wish lists' (my fiancee and the oldest son really seized on this one)* Explaining the combat actions more fancifully (every important hit gets a graphic description)* Hamming up the captured goblin prisoner the party took. Never intended as an NPC, this was one of those rare situations where a memorable character just sort of "happens" as a result of the interplay between players and DM. I borrowed heavily from the film version of Gollum, though the players thought the goblin's emergent personality was a lot like Dobby from Harry Potter--which was unnerving in its own way when, a couple days after, I saw Chamber of Secrets for the first time. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />* My mountain dungeon (and all my dungeons, as a general rule) are plotted to a 5-ft precision, so there is never any question of how wide or long a given corridor or room is. I prefer to just play out all the battles on graphic paper maps passed around on a clipboard, but the players wanted to use their miniatures and a battle grid <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> In the battle with the goblins & orcs, the oldest son had plotted out the "3D" map slightly different from what I had drawn on paper. I was about to correct him, but I realized part of his fun was setting up the battle lines and the walls, and while the room wasn't *exactly* what I had designed, it was better to let it be, and play out the encounter using the 3D version.In summary, fun was had by all until everyone was too tired to take the game seriously. And you know when you've had a good session when the players still want to roleplay and talk to your NPC or plan for the next session even after everyone's pretty much ready to call it a night.</blockquote>

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