Joe Cummings

May 17, 2019May 17, 2019

Top 10 Dungeons and Dragons Lessons Learned

One of the best things about running a Dungeons and Dragons adventure is never, ever being able to predict how a group of characters will react to any given situation.

However, some things should have been predictable. Here are my top 10 Dungeons and Dragons lessons learned about running adventures for 12-year-olds.

They need a mentor non-player character to help them out, to inspire them in some cases, to guide them to their next adventure, and to explain what may or may not work, without taking them out of the story. It’s why Gandalf is there with the hobbits, why Moiraine arrives to talk to Rand Al’Thor, why Dumbledoor advises Harry Potter. I goofed that one up.
They are completely uninterested in learning about the backstories of the people in the world, the politics in the town, or the greater world as a whole. Maybe this will change, since a ton of stuff was thrown at them on the first day, but right now, it’s ‘where do I have to go and what do I have to kill?’
Sugar intake control is vital to playing a successful game. Too much too soon, and they become like Vikings bent on looting and pillaging everything in sight. Or, to use the new Dungeon and Dragon adventure terms, they become murder hobos. Kill everything. Take everything.
Fighting rats is not fun. Gosh, why didn’t I see that one earlier. Sure, they are tough, and, statistic-wise, a pretty good challenge, but who wants to go home talking about killing rats. To be fun, the players needed to overcome something with swagger, something they can brag about, something larger than life. Doh!
To simulate healing potions, I bought small vials, washed them thoroughly, and filled them with Gatorade. When the boys had to heal themselves from wounds in battle, I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be cool to have them drink the Gatorade vials? However, what I should have foreseen is that they like Gatorade and so would take damage just so they could drink the Gatorade. (sigh)
Never let the characters damage each other. In the game, when the players roll a ‘1’, something bad happens, but if you let that ‘something bad’ be hit another player, then that player wants revenge and pretty soon they’re swinging swords at each other. It’s funny, for a second, then the whole party dies and everyone is mad at everyone.
A good fart noise goes a longer way with 12-year-olds than with adults. Ok, wait, no, it goes a long way with adults as well…but be careful, if you let one boy make a loud fart noise because one failed ‘1’ roll, then they all start wanting ‘1’s so they can make that noise. Over and over and over and over again… and, perhaps to no one’s surprise, sometimes those noises are not faked. Never make this a farting game. Ever. No.
I stressed and stressed about painting miniatures for the boys. I spent hours making sure their characters looked amazing, but, being nearly blind in my old age, and with shaking hands and a rather feeble ability to paint small things in the first place, I wasn’t able to really do anything to a pro-level (despite watching 200 YouTube videos). However, it didn’t make any difference. The boys were so excited to have painted miniatures of their characters and didn’t care that I’d not been able to paint a microscopic belt buckle.
Food matters. There’s a post on what happens when there’s too much sugar, but not feeding them is a bad idea as well. Balance is the key here, and I don’t mean lots of carrots and celery sticks, no, just better management of pop, chips, candy and, for supper, pizza. Failure to properly control the food results in an alien-like transformation of good kids into scary, drooling monsters.
They knew nothing about the rules but what I told them. I was so used to running dungeons and dragons adventures with people who knew more than I did so I had studied hard for these sessions, but it really wasn’t necessary. So what if I forgot about ‘opportunity attacks?’ So what if I goofed up how minor illusion worked? So what if I didn’t quite get how ‘sneak attack’ works? I will make sure it to make it fun, first and foremost.

May 14, 2019May 14, 2019

2nd D&D Session

D&D halfling NPC — **Devon, their halfling guide.Why would anyone want to kill this cute little guy?**

Phandalin Adventure

Day 2

Once, again, I couldn’t wait to start my D&D adventure with the boys. I’d done my prep, printed out my handout, (even a very cool ‘weathered’ map), and bought enough munchies to feed an army of starving goblins.

But therein lay my first mistake, and it may very well be why this session didn’t go as well as I’d planned.

To recap, they had been told by their hobbit guide, Devon, that bad guys held his family hostage. Now that he told the group about last session’s ambush, he begged the group to help.

But as I set up the music and sorted my paperwork, the boys voiced thoughts of killing their guide, Devon, the one person they were supposed to help!!!

Why? I have no idea, it seemed to come out of the blue, but then I had to start the session out by telling them what they couldn’t do. Or at least trying to dissuade them for doing something evil.

Then they tore into the candy like rabid dogs. Before their characters even reached the hobbit’s home, they’d began to vibrate in their seats. Then they bopped up and down in their chairs. Then, I had to take a break so they could literally run around.

It looked like getting them to focus on the game would become, well, a bit of a challenge.

Their mission though was simple enough. Rescue the hobbit’s family by sneaking in via a secret entrance. But, they were told, the evil guys were expecting a rescue and would be watching the doors and windows, ready to kill the hobbit’s family.

Their hobbit guide, Devon, led them to the secret entrance beneath his home, (an old, underground dwarven forge, long abandoned), that the hobbit used to grow mushrooms – Lots of tasty mushrooms fertilized by the finest poo in the county.

Only one problem – The boys didn’t want to do go through the secret passage.

Full of sugar rage, they wanted to charge in and attack the evil, nasty bad guys. No matter who dies!

My hobbit was horrified. His family would die.

However… The boys didn’t care. Like Vikings, they wanted to fight.

NOW!

Battle, battle, battle, battlebattlebattle, BATTLE!

But I, (playing the hobbit), managed to convince them to try to sneak up on the evil, nasty bad guys, and that’s where I made my second mistake.

Running a game like this means you give the players as much leeway as possible to do whatever they want, and I’d railroaded them into going one route.

Had they gone their route, it’s not likely the little hobbits would have lived, and that’s a consequence that maybe they needed to have.

But forcing them to do something makes it harder for them to be invested in the game. However, NOT forcing them would lead to the death of little kids, and in story-telling, that’s a HUGE no-no.

I was in a pickle. Or ,rather, I’d pickled myself.

Not super interested in their choice, it took an hour for the boys to focus on killing 5 giant rats.

An.

Hour.

With their usual outstanding grasp of tactics, they defeated the rats quite quickly once the fight happened, but it soooooo wasn’t exciting for them. I could see that.

As soon as they won, though, they were hit by a sugar crash and acted like slow-motion turtles eating a leaf.

The session ended without a sense of major accomplishment.

That’s never good.

Would they run home and tell their parents, mom and dad, guess what, we killed rats, OMG it was amazeballs, rats, mom, rats. How cool is that?

No. Not cool at all.

Dammit, I’d goofed.

After I dropped them all off back home, I vowed to do better. However, being nearly impossible to predict what would actually happen in any given adventure, all I knew was that I needed to do 3 things better.

I needed to control the sugar intake a LOT more than I did.
I needed to find stuff they would care about, something magical and fun. Not fighting rats.
I needed to create those epic moments they will talk about for weeks. Or at least hours.

Next week would be critical. I had to be a better DM.

August 30, 2016

New York, New York, Vegas-Style

Ny, Ny, in Vegas. Oddly, the sky looked just like this. It should have been a warning — NY, NY, in Vegas. Oddly, the sky looked just like this. It should have been a warning

This was to be The-Youngest’s day. Down to NY NY, play some arcade games, see the candy stores, (“Joe, did you know they are 3 stories tall and all the floors have candy?”), then head to the High Roller and see Vegas from a 782’ Ferris wheel.

A simple plan, but once, again, something cropped up that we never, ever would have expected.

To be honest, we weren’t in a rush, though by ‘us’, I mean everyone but The-Youngest. He wanted to get going and going NOW. However, inexplicably, he wasn’t being a pest. Although he couldn’t keep still and kept walking around the hotel like a caged badger on speed, he didn’t bug the rest of us who were moving with sloth-like swiftness.

We ended up buying food in the gift shop. At $120 for breakfast, we had to rethink our approach and so bought milk and cereal at the gift shop. Sure, it wasn’t Walmart-cheap, but it was less than $15 for all of us.

We ate back at the room, cleaned up the mess after The-Youngest managed to spill his entire cereal box and milk onto the bed, and then dressed for the day.

By 11, we were out of the hotel and roaring down to NY, NY, which is not quite at the far end of the strip but far enough to make walking a bit difficult. We chose to use a cab since getting a 2-hour bus pass for the 4 of us costs more. If we’re going to use the bus a lot it makes total sense to spend the money, but if it’s just to zip down to one hotel, then cabs are the best way to go (or Uber which we still might try).

roller coaster at ny ny — The roller coaster at NY, NY, Vegas. Wow

Originally, The-Youngest planned (nay, dreamed!) of going on the coaster at NY, NY. But El Loco scared him so badly that he decided, in a very rational and contemplative manner, to wait until he’s 86 to go on the more adult roller coasters.

The-Oldest and The-Prettiest-Girl-in-the-World, however, HAD to try out this one. Frankly, I was happy to stay with the-Youngest and listen to the facts about roller coasters around the world that he would one day do.

The-Prettiest-Girl-in-the-World came back with her hair messed up and a look on her face like a soldier who’d just come back from a tour in Bagdad. I asked her if she was ok, and she looked at me bashfully and told me that the ride made her bra come off.

What? How the hell does a roller coaster do that?

She shrugged. Who knew someone could be sexually harassed by a rollercoaster.

We’re still not sure how it happened, but we’re blaming her front-loading bra. I guess the excitement was just too much for the ‘girls’ and they wanted to be free.

The-Oldest, though, had the look of someone who’s just eaten a bag of chocolate covered coffee beans, the biggest grin on his face. They both had a great time!

An epic game of air hockey, brother vs brother, no prisoners taken.

Then we played in the arcade. The-Youngest made the mistake of reminding me that I lost to him the last time we played air hockey, so I kicked his butt this time. The real challenge, though, was stopping him from playing all the gambling games to get 1000 tickets which can then be used to buy a small, rubber ball.

Playing was no longer important. Winning was. A game where you shoot zombies in the nuts became un-fun, while a game where you could win a ticket if you guessed the right number became super-awesome. In the end, he got to play only a few of those, however, and for that privilege, he was treated to 20 minutes of me lecturing him, again, about gambling and obsessive behavior (which I freely admitted, I can do as well.)

Then it was time for food since we refused to let The-Youngest into a candy store before he ate. And, to be honest, there was no way I could go in a candy store on an empty stomach. You have no idea how much chocolate I would buy. I might even buy the store.

So we went to eat at the BEST area in Vegas, in my opinion.

We had no idea of what was happening outside.