The Forge Archives

You can't get rid of me

Anyway-

Update: My brother (Ryan) is now allowed to play D&D and I live in Nebraska again.  Yay for me.  Anyway-

Well Ryan and his best friend Shane (my best friend's little brother) bugged me and bugged me into submission and were able to tear me away from my precious little Electronic RPGs.  Yeah, they're 9 and I was pretty excited.  Here's the setup:

Totally innacurate reccolection of my conversation:
"Okay, you guys.  There's a lot more to RPGs than just playing.  I want to teach you guys how to play."

"There's more to it... like what?"

"Uh... like setting, your characters... style of play... a whole lot of stuff."

"What is an RPG anyway."

"Uh... it's kindof like a shared story creation... sortof...kindof...mission-quest-thing."

"Okay..."

"Here are some things... What game do you want to play?  There's D&D... Shadowrun...Star Wars... Risus...and a bunch of-"

"How about D&D?"

Ryan had probably memorised most of the 3rd Ed. players handbook (he could tell me the exact pages where some information appeared on anyway) so I figured that it wasn't a bad thing.

"Okay, fine whatever.  Now we have to choose a world.  We have Forgotten Realms, Planescape, or I could just make on up."

"How about you just make one up?"

"Fine whatever.  You have to make characters though."

Well I got Ryan's twin sister involved and we were off.

Anthony (Shane's brother) printed out a few character sheets without any reluctance and I spent a long time helping them create characters.  I suggested them character classes, skills, feats and the rest of the extranious crap.

So here are my thoughts so far:

D&D isn't on the top of my list for games to introduce people but I don't think it's that bad either.  Here's my reasoning.  It's fairly easy to learn (Relative to SOME things) and it's very standerd.  I dunno.  I'm certain that there are worse things I could have attempted.

I wanted to give them experience in what RPGs usually involve and that oftentimes means before-game preperation and social contract.  If I give them different exposures they will have things to build upon.

We've ran 3 short sessions and I'll explain about those in further posts but I'm tired right now and I'll let whomever is still reading this to get the basic picture before I accidently write something too long and boring to keep anyones attention.

May the wind be always at your back,
-Pyron

Hi Eric,
Yeah, there are worse choices and better choices than D&D for an introduction to the hobby. Sounds like you're handling the teaching pretty well. Definitely keep us posted on how the sessions went!

I agree that having a "hook" to draw players in is one of the most important things in introducing roleplaying to someone. If in this case the hook is the system, I think that more than makes up for any difficulties in learning it.

I do think that it's great that they wanted you to create your own setting -- because you can brainstorm with them (coming up with off-the-wall ideas is something nine year olds are great at), and then it's their setting as well.