I am too exhausted (after yesterday) and too pressed for time (the soccer begins again...in about one hour), to write my own blog post today, so instead I'll direct my readers' attention to this great post over at The Tao of D&D. It's absolutely amazing...definitely worth a few moments of your time...and, well, amazing.
[haha...that last sentence is a joke for Alexis]
; )
It's a riff off my own recent post about teaching D&D to others (and how that's done), and Alexis ably points out some of the issues that crop up when you start skipping down that path. Check it out.
Happy Friday, folks!
I think feel like kids instinctively know how to Role Play. When I was a kid we would pick a GI Joe, He Man, or Starwars action figure and Role Play as that character. Getting the DM part down is not natural for most kids.
ReplyDelete"Ok guys we are playing GI Joe. Everyone grab a good guy figure, except Jane she is going to play all the bad guys but not in a adversarial way just to make our play more exciting and structured." Is not as common. But I think you can teach that part regardless of edition.
In fact I would say that you teach that part first and then layer in rules.
"Ok this time Jane is going to detail another mission to infiltrate Cobra But now we will roll a dice to see if when you shoot someone it hits"
That's how I would teach D&D to younger kids.
Hm. No, that’s definitely NOT how I teach kids. Despite RPGs being games of imagination, I don’t really want them focused on the pretending bit.
DeleteI actually have a lot of (well…a few) thoughts on how to teach DMIng skills to kids. That’ll be a different post.
HOWEVER your comment reminded me: I saw a really awesome-looking GI Joe RPG in Leavenworth the other day. Have you seen that? Does anyone have any info about it? Wow. Great art…reminded me of the old Marvel comics (I was a big fan of the unfortunately named “Snowjob” character).
; )
Never having taught kids, other than when I was a kid, I'm not saying my method would work. But as Kid I used playing GI Joe's then adding dice to settle to hit role debates as gateway to actual role playing games.
DeleteI saw the GI Joe game online at I am tempted to buy. Never read the comics but collected as many figures as my meager budget would allow. Probably like 10 at the most.
That would be more than me. My action figure total was something like six if I remember correctly…given to me as birthday gifts at a time when I’d already grown out of such toys.
Delete“Stormshadow” did have some cool accessories.
I can tell you for sure I HATED the cartoon…at least in the comics they used bullets and grenades and killed folks. What kind of stupid moralizing goes with a kids show about war fighters? What the hell is that supposed to be about?
As a small child, I had the older, larger (18”?) Joe figures that had been produced in the 60s/70s…these were a gift from my uncles circa age 3 or 4…something to play with when I had a broken leg. However, they swapped a lot of the snazzy uniforms of the 80s for actual kit, bullet bandoliers, rifles of various sorts, etc. Mm.
If you get the RPG drop me a line and let me know what it’s like.
What I would like to know is how did the original "Elders" learn to play. I had the books as a lonely kid (mid-80s), but never had anyone to play with. When I did play later in the late-80s, my DMs were fully proficient. Maybe they learned from other "Elders". But how did the original Elders actually learn the how to run the game? I'm from a fairly remote eastern part of Canada, but by mid-80's there were skilled DMs in my neck of the woods. No internet back then, so no way to know if you are "doing it wrong".
ReplyDelete(I have a fond memory of my first introduction to D&D. I was probably 11 (1982) and my friend had a module... no rule books. Somehow we played it out using the pre-gens... and whenever one of us would get hit we would yell "shield!" and if there was a shield on our character sheet, the blow would be blocked! If only it was that easy.)
It's a russian nesting doll situation, where the people running the games learned from older brothers/sisters who learned it at college (the melting pot of intellectuals/nerds) where the people teaching them learned it from people at the original creators' tables (Gygax, Arneson, etc)
Delete3l, that's definitely part of it. "and she told two friends... and so on..." exponential growth. But I think also that in those early days, you read the book and you played the book. A game has rules and instructions, and you follow those. The idea of "house rules" or comparison to "other RPGs" just wasn't a thing back then. So, maybe the rules aren't so clear and organized, but it's all that new DMs had back then, with no outside influences or previous experience other than structured games.
DeleteI don't think learning from the book is possible with OD&D, since it's a disorganized mess constantly referring back to a different game (Chainmail). Hence the need for explanatory/educational versions (Holmes, etc)
DeleteSir Robilar, house rules existed in every game I played starting from 1979 on. Virtually every player of D&D had a long history with wargames, and the complicated rules thereof, and had adopted an attitude that it was necessary to create rules to account for game instances the designers had failed to address.
DeleteWhen a game lacked rules, including D&D, the rules of some other game were imposed. Remember - there were literally hundreds of wargames produced in the 1960s and 70s; most of the elders I knew had a passing experience with at least fifty or sixty of them.