I have been roleplay gaming with my husband and friends for 14 years and I love it so it only seemed natural to introduce our children to it when they became a suitable age. They have for many years looked at our funny shaped dice waiting for the day they would be able to touch them. Finally we allowed it, my best friend them Gurumel has the D&D adventure First Quest so we all decided to start there.
The first session involved only my daughter, my son was 3 and harder to get focused. Maddie (8) surprised me by being really really creative and imaginative and completely relaxed. To her it was just another game. When I first started playing, aged 18, I was much more reserved and in some cases terrified. It was something completely new to me and nothing I'd even heard of so it took me sometime to settle down and get into the flow. The advantage of being a child is that you can act silly in front of everyone without fear of being judged or laughed at for the wrong reason. Doing that as an adult is hard.
Within minutes of the session starting she was trash talking a group of gnolls:
"I'm going to walk you to the river tie a stone around you and throw you in, you smell like a dog"
This disturbed me a little I won't lie, but we all laughed and laughed and she continued to come with ideas that made me so proud. Ideas such as cutting the meat off the dead gnolls so we can eat it later. We then had the age old debate about eating meat from talking animals and she agreed not to, but I am proud nonetheless that it crossed her mind, and she was right we didn't have any food.
In her second session this weekend, she decided to trash talk a giant toad, along the lines of "I'm going to cut off your legs and feed them to the french" instead she stabbed it through the head with her quarterstaff, job done. It was in this session that Xander, now 4, got interested.
He wanted to roll the dice more than any other aspect of the experience so he became Slinker the thief. Whilst his attention wasn't always in the game he certainly listened for the combat. In one particular combat the DM announced a room with 4 Hobgloblins and played the track on the CD. This was his reaction, followed by tears, followed by backstabbing one to death.
It was beautiful to see both of my children playing and enjoying the fun to be had in a world of imagination. They have done me proud and it's a better start to their roleplay gaming life then I could have hoped for. I am certain there will be many more good times ahead and I will update folks as and when.
I remember d&d games from when I was about 6 or 7. For me it was swings between boredom and confusion, and taking a very long time to understand what was happening in each encounter, then hilarity and action and dice rolling, which I loved :D It's a solid start in life I say :)
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