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.