D&D 5E Very little kids take D&D VERY seriously

[EvanNave55]

Wow I probably wouldn't have had a party member turn on another and try to kill him with such young children, but who knows.

I myself started dnd when I was only 3 or 4 myself, though I don't remember much about that campaign. I think I played a druid in a party that actually got up to level 17 from first in 2nd edition, but I'm not certain of the details.

 

[KarinsDad]

When your Five year old turns to you with a strait face and says" Crush your enemies, see then driven before you. Hear the Lamentations of their women" You know that you are truly growing your own D&D group.

Not so cool if he says this at the breakfast table, just before going to school.

 

[Rabbitbait]

Not so cool if he says this at the breakfast table, just before going to school.

The other day my 7 year old was being particularly naughty.

Me: "Stop that. Why are you being so naughty?"
Him: "I'm not being naughty. I'm being an evildoer"
Me: "Well if you keep being evil you'll be going to sleep early tonight"
Him: "EVIL NEVER SLEEPS. BWAHAHAHAHA".

Honestly, sometimes I feel like I'm the dad from Calvin and Hobbes.

 

[Talmek]

Wow - and here I was posting (on another thread) about whether or not I believed 8 to be too young to understand the game. I'm finding that D&D can be an awesome kids' game, depending on how you spin it for them.

For instance, all of my children (11, 10, 8 & 7) are familiar with multiplayer gaming and MMOs as we have played Minecraft using a multiplayer server via LAN before and WoW for the older children. This has helped them immensely in terms of learning to work together to accomplish more efficiently. As a case in point - when we were all playing Minecraft before I turned them on to D&D, one of the older children was attempting to build a house...of course the youngest could not stand by and watch this and started assaulting the other child (in-game) causing the older child to die and lose their equipment. From that point I made sure that any vengeance would occur in-game rather than outside it and that it's 1:1.

As all of this is ongoing my significant other and I are playing in the same server, building houses, collecting resources, etc. By the time the children worked out their drama, they couldn't help but ask how we had managed everything that we did so quickly. The answer (obviously); working together rather than trying to tear down one another's accomplishments.

Fast-forward to D&D time...

Yesterday I ran my first D&D game for my 8 & 11 year olds, with the significant other as a third player. Using The Fey Sisters' Fate by Goodman Games as a one-shot adventure, they totally jumped to the idea of working together in order to overcome obstacles, whether or not it involved combat and actually looked for ways to resolve conflicts without violence. I find this strange because they could have just as easily used violence (I didn't openly incentivize a non-violent approach to encounters) in order to move the story forward. It was a great experience for me overall and one that humbled me a bit because I had previously believed that D&D was "an older kid's game" and there would be no way it could hold their attention for a long enough period of time to actually get through an adventure.

Of course, I was all wrong. The first question they asked as soon as I walked in from work today was, "Can we play? Right now?"

I loved it!

 

[Azurewraith]

Oh i cant wait to play DnD with my kids just a bit young atm one is 2 and the other is well -6months... to young right? Mainly because my a few of my adult players have issues with meta gaming.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

My son is 3 and we play "tell me a story" where he chooses minis for his characters and I choose monsters for them to fight. I also choose the battle maps. It's then up to me to tell the story of how Knight (sword-and-board fighter, Spear (longspear-wielding fighter), Claymore (goliath with fullblade), Book (wizard with tome), Axe (dwarf with axe), and Warpig (Axe is mounted on a dire boar) rescue the farmers (the minis with the farmers holding pigs) from a beholder, dragon, dragons, or beholder and dragons.

I had one story where the BBEG was going to be a Huge bulette but my son snatch that mini away and Shark, as he calls him, is now on their team. My wife thought that was particularly amusing (I try to get him to tell her the story in his own words after we've finished as a creative exercise).

I've tried to get him to make up little bits of the story from time to time but he's struggling with that right now. Maybe in another year, when he's closer to 5, I can get him to become more of a protagonist in our stories.

Oh, and this is a long way of saying I'm rather envious of those of you with kids who are old enough and willing to play!

 

[Herobizkit]

You know, we all were kids, and most of us watched the cartoons. We can remember whether we added the red back in.

I didn't. While I understood very clearly that the violence in the cartoon would be horribly bad if it happened to a real person, it was clear that the cartoons weren't real people.

You know, to this day, I am still disturbed when I see a cartoon character bleed (outside of hyper-violent or 'realistic' anime).

 

[TwoSix]

Not so cool if he says this at the breakfast table, just before going to school.

I always put my boys in the bus with the same reminder each day. "Have fun. Listen to your teachers. Valar morghulis."

 

[Saeviomagy]

I always put my boys in the bus with the same reminder each day. "Have fun. Listen to your teachers. Valar morghulis."

Do they respond with valar dohaeris?

 

[TwoSix]

Do they respond with valar dohaeris?

Obviously, I didn't raise savages.