Back in high school, a pure white boxed set of paper bound books came out with two-color covers and a lid on the box. I bought them because I'd just moved to a new city for my senior year in high school and the misfit boys that I'd ended up being friends with after school were playing D&D. But my friend Alfred had mixed his own version of it, set in feudal Japan, with samurai swords, daimyo, and oni instead of the more standard fare and monsters in the book.
I got my first rude shock when I wanted to play a girl, since I was one, and they all said that girls couldn't even speak, much less fight anything. Of course, I looked up Tomoe Gozen and Marishi-Ten (in the library back then, there was no Usenet, much less Internet then) and showed the boys the books and, of course, they were still unimpressed, but she got her own naginata and laid waste to those that attacked her lord's castle. That was deemed fitting enough. I remembered the naginata later when playing Legend of the Five Rings and did very very well with a girl in the horse clan.
Of course, now I know that one of those high school boys is now the vice president of Dark Horse Comics, and another is an artist at a different comic company. The curiosity and imagination did us all well.
Just in the last month Jet decided he was interested in Dungeons and Dragons and how someone might be represented in nothing more than six attributes between three and sixteen in value. *laughs* That was a blast from the past. I asked Carl, and he talked with Chris H. of Endgame in Oakland about what would make the best start for a kid wanting to play D&D. I didn't actually tell them that Jet wanted to run the games, but they came up with a really excellent set of D&D source books and an introductory adventure with tokens, a map, and pre-genned characters.
Jet ran the game for John and I. I think it says something about our relationship as a family that we just jumped in and started letting Jet run the show. He had a great time, too, after the shock of killing one of John's characters in the very first battle. It was a little traumatic, but it helped that both John and I were each playing two characters, and that John was so used to netHack that entering a dungeon and dying wasn't a bother to him at all. It balanced the play, too, as Jet often was juggling four monsters at the same time. We've all really liked how that worked. We just casually decided that the unicorn in the first adventure owed us, so the characters that died just got taken to it and brought back. That made Jet feel a lot better. We have now done five sessions and three adventures under our belts. Characters are starting to level up, and Jet's starting to draw up his own dungeon with monsters from the monster handbook.
It's fascinating and fun watching him get creative with all of this, and start to bend the rulebook and the story presentation in the dungeon master's book just to make it satisfy him. Encouraging him to do that has been a lot of work, but the results have really made him happier and made the game more fun. He's gotten confident enough that when a friend of his mentioned that he had a character he'd gotten in a game an uncle had run, Jet invited him to play in our game. That was really cool. So Jet's starting to think of putting together a gaming party for his friends.
And the door opens onto a lot of possibilities. He still remembers when I ran a Faery's Tale for him and he loved his little brownie, who could clean anything and fix stuff. Now, though, he rather likes the battles of D&D and is fascinated by the Gelatinous Cube. *laughs*
I got my first rude shock when I wanted to play a girl, since I was one, and they all said that girls couldn't even speak, much less fight anything. Of course, I looked up Tomoe Gozen and Marishi-Ten (in the library back then, there was no Usenet, much less Internet then) and showed the boys the books and, of course, they were still unimpressed, but she got her own naginata and laid waste to those that attacked her lord's castle. That was deemed fitting enough. I remembered the naginata later when playing Legend of the Five Rings and did very very well with a girl in the horse clan.
Of course, now I know that one of those high school boys is now the vice president of Dark Horse Comics, and another is an artist at a different comic company. The curiosity and imagination did us all well.
Just in the last month Jet decided he was interested in Dungeons and Dragons and how someone might be represented in nothing more than six attributes between three and sixteen in value. *laughs* That was a blast from the past. I asked Carl, and he talked with Chris H. of Endgame in Oakland about what would make the best start for a kid wanting to play D&D. I didn't actually tell them that Jet wanted to run the games, but they came up with a really excellent set of D&D source books and an introductory adventure with tokens, a map, and pre-genned characters.
Jet ran the game for John and I. I think it says something about our relationship as a family that we just jumped in and started letting Jet run the show. He had a great time, too, after the shock of killing one of John's characters in the very first battle. It was a little traumatic, but it helped that both John and I were each playing two characters, and that John was so used to netHack that entering a dungeon and dying wasn't a bother to him at all. It balanced the play, too, as Jet often was juggling four monsters at the same time. We've all really liked how that worked. We just casually decided that the unicorn in the first adventure owed us, so the characters that died just got taken to it and brought back. That made Jet feel a lot better. We have now done five sessions and three adventures under our belts. Characters are starting to level up, and Jet's starting to draw up his own dungeon with monsters from the monster handbook.
It's fascinating and fun watching him get creative with all of this, and start to bend the rulebook and the story presentation in the dungeon master's book just to make it satisfy him. Encouraging him to do that has been a lot of work, but the results have really made him happier and made the game more fun. He's gotten confident enough that when a friend of his mentioned that he had a character he'd gotten in a game an uncle had run, Jet invited him to play in our game. That was really cool. So Jet's starting to think of putting together a gaming party for his friends.
And the door opens onto a lot of possibilities. He still remembers when I ran a Faery's Tale for him and he loved his little brownie, who could clean anything and fix stuff. Now, though, he rather likes the battles of D&D and is fascinated by the Gelatinous Cube. *laughs*
I had a stunted upbringing and never played D&D. I did play NetHack later on and that's enough to cause the phrase "fascinated by the Gelatinous Cube" to send chills up my spine. Have fun!
ReplyDeleteHack is pretty close!! As John can attest, but yes... it did give me pause when that was the one he got fixated on. *laughs*
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