Week 2: Maybe you shoudn't've eaten that goblin raw

Yesterday’s gaming session was less chaotic, if not precisely calm. I let the boys run around the school playground for about 15 minutes again first, which also gave C’s father time to go home and get the character sheet C had left at home. C’s father had also given me two (!) Player’s Handbooks and a generous supply of snacks provided by C’s mother -- overly generous, I thought, before the five boys proceeded to put away a half-dozen packs of Pirate’s Booty, an equal number of Annie’s chocolate chip snack packs, and two boxes of chocolate-cookie-dough Larabars over the next 90 minutes. Her wisdom in choosing individually wrapped items was proven by the fact that the boys didn’t fight over nearly as much as they had over the bowl of potato chips I had last week. I also may need to find a drink option that’s faster to serve than the OJ and seltzer combo I’ve been giving them -- I can see our pile of recyclable cans stacking up into the future, argh.

Food (and wise and unwise choices) proved to be a theme of the day. Having now four copies of the Player's Handbook, A having brought one as well, we started with 20 minutes of remedial character detailing. I’d gone through and put Post-Its on character sheets asking people to fill in or explain things, e.g. “Why does the half-orc fighter have 14 HP?” (that was a mistake with the Con modifier), and I had them do a bit of some background development too, especially B and T, who were supposed to be brothers (which they adjusted to “old friends” because they’d picked proficiencies suggesting pretty different backgrounds). Then the party finally got to attack those four starter goblins, which they put away at the cost of only 6 HP of damage total to the four characters, reduced to 3 HP when the Tiefling warlock used his soul-drinking healing capability to heal up [note to self: must check correct name and stop thinking of it as “Uses Morganti weapon/Stormbringer/vorpal whatsit” as any misspeaking incites mockery with this crowd, generally led by D: 5th-graders are a brutal audience]. They searched the dead goblins, but I had to hint heavily to get them to check the nearby area and discover the path to the goblin hideout with its traces suggesting the recent dragging away of a couple of large bodies. (I paid them back with a short lecture on Why You Should Always Search the Area – which they’ll take from me, being 5th graders, but be bored by, being 5th graders, so maybe that’ll larn 'em not to make the DM have to explain such things.)

Before proceeding, they decided to take a short rest, reconstituting their hit points, and make a meal from one of the dead horses (cooked, once A had checked that their adventurer’s packs contain fire-starting apparatus), and B, one of the wood-elf criminal buddies, decided to try some goblin as well. He didn’t say whether he cooked it, and the other characters didn’t want it near them, so I’m going to say he did not. They continued up the path, with D’s dwarven cleric in the lead hollering “Maceface!” (the name of his clan), but since D has a perception score of 16 due to high wisdom (ha), I gave him a pass on both the snare trap and the pit trap: he managed to see both of them before falling in (in retrospect I should’ve put my thumb harder on the scale there, with maybe a -10 adjustment for distraction, but I didn’t think of it).

They did draw the goblin guards near the cave entrance by having a loud argument over their next move -- a nostalgic moment: that's a lesson everybody has to learn the hard way -- but the guards rolled a 3 for initiative and all the players managed 13 or better, so the party killed both goblins before they could do any damage. The lesson about actions and consequences will have to wait until B's constitution roll next week.

Week 1: The cat is not a weapon

Last Friday, I kicked off an after-school Dungeons & Dragons group for my 10-year-old son and four of his friends. This may have been a bit ambitious, or maybe it was a mistake to accept that last freelance piece earlier in the week, or maybe I'm just prone to procrastination and should have finished rereading the Player's Handbook -- and probably gotten an extra copy -- and made myself more extensive cheat sheets. And, granted, the last time I DM'd was during the Reagan (or more pertinently Trudeau père) administration, meaning my expertise is now four D&D editions behind, and back then I was DM'ing mostly 10th and 11th graders rather than 5th.

In any event: Things Got a Bit Wild. I made the mistake of going to the bathroom, and emerged to find that D's best friend C, the Tiefling warlock, had run the boys upstairs -- they weren't supposed to go upstairs! -- with a cry of "The weapons are in D's room!", and next thing I knew they were running around like mad things waving plastic swords and lightsabers and the padded quarterstaff my husband got D in a moment of insanity. Then D picked up Hermes the cat and basically pointed him like a weapon, threatening to set him loose on C (he's clearly been reading too much Order of the Stick), and I had to raise my voice for the first time. But not the last.

We did eventually get the characters rolled up, although B, one of the two wood-elf rogues, still needs to finish choosing equipment. And I managed, with some more raising of the voice, to get through the intro section of part 1 of The Lost Mine of Phandelver, and as far as rolling initiative for the inaugural goblin fight before the first parent turned up for kid pickup. We're only going from about 3, when I bring the boys all over to our place after letting them run around the school playground for a few minutes after dismissal, to 4:30ish because A, the half-orc fighter, has capoeira class at 4:45 (and tbh I wasn't sure I could take it for longer anyway, and am still not).

But I'm not stopping now -- if anything, that told me that these boys badly need the practice learning how to control themselves and work together to roll-play an enjoyable campaign. We have the characters, we have the dungeon, and D has been cautioned that he needs to help keep control, not lead the charge toward anarchy, on pain of my dropping the group. I will preface today's session with a short but stern directive about keeping the weapons and the chaotic evil behavior inside the game only.

And now I'd better go reread the Player's Handbook some more.