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I'm in my third year of running a Dungeons and Dragons Club at the public Middle School where I'm working as an English instructor. The first year the club was started by another teacher, and I just dropped by to see what was going on after I heard about it on morning announcements. The teacher in question didn't really have any clue about the game and wasn't overly interested in learning. They were mostly playing host for another student who wanted to run a game. When the club got way more interest than the student was able to handle, I volunteered to DM a second group. Ironically, the kid who started the club was a bit of a "That Guy" DM who spent more time arguing with his players than actually playing, so my group and those from his group who wanted to keep going were the only survivors, hence why I ended up taking over the club the next year.  It's probably worth noting that I kept the club as the "Dungeons and Dragons" club for branding purposes. This is a very rural and poor community. The nearest LGS is almost an hour away, so if their parents aren't already into Tabletop games, they've got no way to engage with the hobby, but if they're interested then that'll be the one they know about thanks to Stranger Things, the recent movie, and general cultural osmosis. The local Wal-Mart has a starter game and you can get RPG dice sets from there or the Gamestop, but good luck finding a PHB, let alone anything outside the D&D Brand. At the start of this year (and last year) I pitched them options outside D&D, but only a few showed any interest (mostly in World of Darkness) while most were set on sticking to the one they'd heard about. Last year interest was fairly overwhelming. Almost 20 kids showed up to the first meeting, and virtually none of them had ever played the game before, so multiple groups wasn't really an option. This problem ended up self-mitigating to some degree because a lot of kids who showed initial interest were not committed to showing up to a weekly club, or their parents weren't interested in allowing them to do an after school activity, or other various thing. I still had 10+ once the first couple weeks of attrition claimed kids. This number stayed relatively consistent, but the children, funnily enough, did not. Which brings me to my first big challenge: consistency of attendance. Pre-Teens are notoriously flighty creatures, and Zoomer Preteens aren't exactly known for their attention spans. Add in socio-economic issues and you have a recipe for kids who will show up one week raring to go, vanish for 2-3 weeks in the middle of a battle without warning or explanation, then reappear wanting to continue play like nothing happened. This was so bad last year I actually had to cancel a couple of meetings. So many kids skipped out that the encounter we were in the exact middle of would have turned into a TPK, or a climatic moment in the story would have been missed. To counter that problem this year, I'm instituting a similar policy to the sports teams. Joining the D&D club is a commitment, and if you're not willing to be there every week, you're not going to play. Excused absences are allowed, but you need to warn me in advance, not just silently fail to show up. Consistent no-showing will result in being permanently barred from play. This year interest has still been large, somewhere around 15 students, and again they are almost all new to the game. The good news is my making it clear that I expected consistency from the start has led to consistency in the kids showing up for the "Session 0" meetings where we are making characters. Sadly, my returning kids aren't interested in DMing and want to remain players, so the first challenging is managing an exceptionally large group. Playing a very rules-lite version of the game is, of course, a given in order to keep things moving, especially in combat. Spell Prep, for example, is basically run along the lines of "Everyone is a Sorc." Making everyone prep specific spells from their list is too much book-keeping, especially because game sessions are only allowed to be between 60-90 minutes and because most of these kids are so green and likely to make mistakes when tracking everything on their sheet. One of my most crucial tools last year was a timer. We've all had groups that get bogged down in decision making and debating merits of different plans or puzzle solutions, and when that group is 15 large it can be total chaos. If the kids want to ask me anything I require raised hands and silence from anyone not speaking to me, not unlike in the classroom, and once they start to form a few plans of action I'll set a timer for them to come to a final decision. It worked well as a motivator last year, though I'll have to be vigilant for that possibly causing kids to check out if a few "plan makers" dominate the party's direction. Character creation is on-going (we're starting at level 1 for simplicity due to the number of new players but I want to get everyone to level 3 pretty quickly), and I'll be finalizing my ideas for a campaign once I know what I'm working with. I like to tailor where and what the story focuses on based on the party while also leaving flexibility to change things based on ideas the party floats, which worked great last year. So far, I can say that the majority of the party are Dragonborn or Drow (plus a few other non-Drow Elves), and the bulk of the party in terms of class is four Druids, three Rangers and three Sorcerers. Nobody is playing a Fighter, Monk, Barbarian or Paladin, so it's going to be a fragile group in terms of overall HP and AC. I have some ideas on how to deal with that if it becomes a problem. We should be able to finish character creation next week and play our first session the week after. Hopefully this will all go well.
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Aug 22, 2023 17:14
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 01:58 |
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Leperflesh posted:I wonder if there's any possibility of pulling in an additional member of staff to run a parallel group? Honestly with so little time per session, at 15 players you'll have some kids who only get to say or do one thing per session, and maybe some who do nothing at all. Even with a streamlined game system that isn't D&D I'd be worried about engagement at that group size with such short sessions. I will say that we managed a group of 10 pretty well last year. Combat tended to drag, but I learned a few tricks to pick up the pace over the course of the year and I never had any complaints. One thing that was successful was to have less formalized turn-based combat using the full rules suite and more "cinematic" combat where the players would make attack roles and use spells to deal with a quick tussle without going through initiative. Giving them more opportunities to use their skills, even for things that more experienced groups might not bother with, can also help them feel engaged. Putting a large emphasis on roleplaying, even if the kids weren't able to "do" much on any given day, helped kids "contribute" through both in-character reactions to events, and one thing that I saw a lot of was one character wanting to step up, hesitating, and the group sort of "brainstorming" with that player to refine their idea before the actual action happened. It was a very cool, hyper-collabortive story-telling energy that you never see with more mature players who get very protective of their individual character and agency over them.
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Aug 22, 2023 22:05
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aldantefax posted:Accessibility is definitely a key thing that you touch on that I’ve been thinking about recently. Particularly for D&D in its most recent format, there is a lot that goes on that is hard to keep track of and scale for all ages. The good news is that a lot of the popular conceptions of D&D are decoupled from the nitty gritty of the actual rules. The kids know what they've seen in media, on the internet, or in their parent's games, and its doesn't take a ton of work to comport the basics of the rules to those while leaving a lot on the cutting room floor. This has helped me a lot while trying to run large groups the last two years. The basics of the combat system remain highly intuitive and in-line with the depictions they see in media or online. Anything that isn't just gets left on the cutting room floor, or we improvise something. Skills are also very intuitive once the kids have the vocabulary to recognize what they are meant to represent. In execution its a lot of "Can my character do X?" and then me saying "You can try. Give me an X check." It doesn't take long for them to be looking and their skills or spells and evolving to "Can I use X to do Y?" Unlike with most groups where I like to say "Yes, but" with these I can't be afraid to just say "No," but I always make sure that I give them a reason so they can understand their limits within the context of the D&D world, rather than within the context of the rules. As long as they're getting to roll the dice, use their spells and take their actions in a way that's copacetic to their imagination of the game and there is consistency to how the simplified version of the rules operates, they're happy and the game moves along despite the size of the herd I'm wrangling. If there's one tricky bit, it's spells. I bought a large collection of Spell Card decks to help with that. I tend to be extremely liberal with their interpretation of what the spell does, excepting actual damage.
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Aug 23, 2023 20:06
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