My Son Wants To Play Dungeons & Dragons!!!

I was watching the D&D episode of "Community" for the first time yesterday and my 8-year old son was watching a bit from the next room. The jokes were going over his head, but what he saw fascinated him. After the episode was done he looked at me with wide eyes, raised eyebrows and a hopeful grin. "Do we have that game they were playing?"

"Actually, yes I do!" I told him. Though I only have the current edition Players Guide.

"Could we play that game sometime?" He asked, as his face brightened and widened even more.

"I would LOVE to do that! Just give me a few months to learn the rules..."

$70+ spent at amazon later and I'm already imagining the golden age to come.

It's always cool when your kids become interested in something you love.

I think I just got my son hooked on Star Trek.

That is awesome.
It is great when a father and son can find something cool to do together.

For instance, someone, and I wont point finger, but his name starts with P and ends with aeter got me interested enough to try Shanarra Chronicles, and then my son (18) saw me watching and now he loves the show. (in a sarcastic riff trax kind of way)

mikel.withers wrote:That is awesome.
It is great when a father and son can find something cool to do together.

For instance, someone, and I wont point finger, but his name starts with P and ends with aeter got me interested enough to try Shanarra Chronicles, and then my son (18) saw me watching and now he loves the show. (in a sarcastic riff trax kind of way)

Nice. Funny that he enjoys it to make fun of it. He's a lot closer to the target demographic than WE are! Hope you guys keep "enjoying" it together!

D&D5e is an excellent system, but if you've got the book you already know that! My son (12) has officially joined our regular 5e game, after sporadically playing in the Fate and Savage Worlds games. Congratulations, you now have advantage on your next Cha roll to intrigue....

Yeah I'm super stoked. Both boys enjoyed "Hero Kids" when I ran a couple games for them. But I want a system with tons of existing adventures for it so that I can do as little prep as possible. Even Hero Quest takes a bit of setup and cleanup and gets a little more fiddly when you have to take a photo of the board for next session since you can't finish the dungeon in a single sitting. Hence the pull to D&D. My oldest getting intrigued was not orchestrated by me, but maybe that's Yahweh providing an opportunity for me and my boys to spend more time together. We'll see!

Just ran the first two sessions with my boys (5 and 8 years old) over the weekend. The youngest is a female rogue named "Rogue" and the oldest is a Final Fantasy inspired "Black Mage/Wizard" named "Presto" (which he pulled from the D&D cartoon).

I've tried different dungeon crawl board games with them in the past. HeroQuest primarily. Thought that would be easier for them than a real RPG. But I found those experiences to be boring for me. This time around... I had... a BLAST! And so did my boys, who have been hungry for more ever since!

Despite simplifying rules and story for the boys and easing off my usual descriptions of blood splatters and gooey-ness, I still got to have my own "grown-up" version of events playing in my head and had just as much opportunity to role-play the monsters dramatically and produce some wide-eyed smiles from my players.

Speaking of which, this is the first time I've ever GM'd for a game that I didn't feel any pressure to impress my players!

Finding things to do with my boys that I'll actually enjoy has always been tough. But if these first two sessions are any indicator, a golden era may have just begun. Wow.

Third session was yesterday. Our five-year old lost interest and left the mage alone halfway through a dungeon. Still, our 8 year old has a 5th level mage in a 1st level dungeon with the ability to rest anywhere that doesn't have monsters immediately present (I play Neverwinter Nights alot), so I think he's good to go.

In fact after sending a zombie tumbling down a dungeon hallway in flames (fireball spell) he looked at me and said, "I... am... AWESOME!"

Now that's the heart of a gamer if I ever saw one. ;-)