On Dungeons and Dragons and the Sonars... a rambling

Backstory

The Sonars often engage in very enthusiastic make-believe play.  They travel to the far-reaches of time and space, hunting treasures, battling bad guys, and saving the universe.  Often, they each take on a special persona, with a name, special powers, a background, a special mission.  They still surprise me with the detail of their fantasy play.  And their earnestness is hilarious. 

Fantasy play is their default mode.  And has been for years (no exaggeration)  Oh sure, sometimes they play with Lego and K’nex, or with bike-riding or skateboards.  But even these mere toys are swallowed up by make-believe adventures.  That wacky, arty, pseudo-aesthetic K’nex thing? Oh, that’s the computer interface of a prototype time machine.  The bike?  Vehicle to chase the bad guys, of course.  

They glean detail from all of their media consumption and incorporate it into their games.  They play World of Goo on the computer (great game, by the way), and so their own Goo Ball creations appear in make-believe adventures through the yard.  Characters and elements from books regularly appear in their narratives.  Expelliarmus continues to be a favorite spell cast against invisible foes, even a year after we finished reading the Harry Potter books together.  

Fast-forward to this summer.  

Sonar X9 read a book from the library called The Elfish Gene by Mark Barrowcliffe. (No, we didn’t realize the content when he started reading it, but we really can’t pre-read everything anymore. Yes, we have ongoing talks about adolescence, addiction, drug use, sex and bodies and finding balance in life).  This is a book about growing up a first-wave player of Dungeons & Dragons in England in the 1970s.  

Kids soak up a lot from all of their experiences, and we can’t always tell what they’ll take away from a particular experience, or in this case, book.  X9 took away from Elfish Gene a curiosity about the actual game.  

The ideas of Role-Playing.  The DICE.  The joke about MU’s.  He wanted to know more.  Partner and I never D&D’d ourselves but we know people who did.  We looked up things on the ‘net, talked to uncles, and ultimately looked at bookstores for guidance. 

Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons has a starter kit (more on the editions later).  X9 had birthday money, so he got one.  Starter booklets.  DICE.  Grids and tokens.  Sweet.  

We start thinking this could be a fun activity.  Our kids are into board games, they’re into imaginative play, they’re bright.  This seems like a game they could enjoy, with some support.  The starter set gave us pre-set characters and a basic three-part encounter.  (I’m a Dragonborn Paladin, by the way.  Moria.  Charmed to meet you.  Watch out for the acid breath.)

The game is complicated for newbies.  There is a lot to think about, a lot to develop and manage.  X9 is convinced he wants to be the Dungeon Master, but he needs a lot of support right now.  X4 wants to participate, pays attention, listens, dances around the table, and fiercely defends his right to make his own choices about his character, but does better when we help narrow down and describe his choices.  X6 seems to relish all the detail.  All the choices.  All of the things he can REMEMBER.  

At first we were caught up in the mechanics of the game and neglected the story, the imagination.  The story is what makes this game so alluring, and we’re getting better at incorporating story and PLAY into our play.  In addition to some pre-fab characters, the Starter Guide gives a Very Basic introduction to building your own encounters and a handful of monsters to populate them.  This guide does not teach you how to build your own character, to the disappointment of the Sonars.  Building their own Characters captivated them before we got the guide, and continues to do so.  

So we headed back to the ‘net and the bookstores.  Must have a Player’s Handbook (one of the three Core Rulebooks, together with the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Monster Manual, that are the foundation of all gameplay).  The books have been through many editions over the past thirty years, leading up to a drastically revised fourth edition released last year.  The books are pricey when new, and too new to readily find local used copies.  We did find a used 2nd edition Player’s Guide.  We hesitated.  Spend $10 on an older version of the game, or save that money for a new edition compatible with the Starter set we have?  X9’s impatience won out and he bought the 2nd ed. guide.  It was educational, but not user friendly.  And not at all compatible with our beginner’s guide.  We began to understand the history, the classes and races available for characters, and the complexity of character building.  But something big had shifted in the numbers between the 2nd ed. and the 4th and we couldn’t work it out.  

Flush from our summer travels, we were rummaging through another bookstore and came across a new 4th ed. Player’s Handbook.  MSRP $35.  Ouch.  But we flipped through and liked what we saw.  Much better interface from 2nd ed.  The kids had already rubbed the cover off the beginner’s guide, reading every page, trying to understand the way things could work.  Building basic encounters.  This is a game that captures their attention and their imaginations.  We decided to go ahead and buy the new guide. 

Talk about throwing gasoline on a bonfire.  The kids thumb through it, they read it, they study it, they imagine, they argue about it.  I should be more accurate here.  Mostly Sonar X6 pours over it.  X9 regularly reads and checks it.  X4 reads some of it here and there (when he can get it away from the other two).

They have Built Their Own Characters.  A Tiefling Warlock.  A Dragonborn Warlord.  A Human Cleric (nice that one of them isn’t bashing things).  

To be sure, they need help to play (we sometimes feel like WE need help to play).  This is not a game we can Send Them Off to play.  We ALL play.  We might make it to Christmas before we break down and get a Dungeon Master’s Guide and a Monster Manual.  Maybe. 

It still takes us ages to get through every round of play in an encounter.  Tonight it took an hour-and-a-half to play two rounds.  But we were all there together.  We were all there engaged, even X4.  

So, to sum up this seemingly endless ramble…

On the plus side:  

Heavy use of imagination, togetherness (collective awwwww), teamwork, the management of several ideas at once, the advantages of studying and remembering.  

Drawbacks:

—Cost.  The books are pricey, though a little imagination and a willingness to Build Your Own adventures will get a lot of miles out of them.  

—Obsessiveness.  Barrowcliffe addresses the addictive potentialities of the game in his book.  It is easy to get drawn into the details.  It’s easy to obsess about those details.  It is almost the only thing the kids talk about.  Here again, a little play goes a long way, and we have to emphasize balance.  

—Violence.  The game can be a little grisly and a lot violent.  The focus is on the powers and weapons and equipment you have to bash and curse the bad guys.  For family play, we have steered away from Killing Strokes.  When an enemy drops to zero Hit Points, it’s OUT.  End of story.  Ok, except for when we take its weapons and search its pockets at the end of the encounter.  We’ve got to pay the imaginary bills, after all.  We hope to build more adventures that focus on exploration and puzzle rather than combat.  It’s difficult to eliminate the combat altogether.  The Defeat of Adversaries seems sort of essential to this Game of Heroes.  But we hope to think carefully about the rhetoric of the game as well.  

Overall, I’m hopeful that this will be a good game for us to explore as a family, even though the kids are quite young.  Who knows how long their interest will last or what the lasting effects of the game will be for them.  I’ll keep watching.  

I just hope that X6’s first-grade teacher doesn’t freak out when he doodles Morning Stars, and Flails, and Bastard Swords during Writer’s Workshop.