Last night I introduced my 12 year old younger brother to Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to introduce him to an hack’n’slash alternative to videogames and stuff, and he was very excited about the whole thing.
The results where, as expected, hilarious.
The story was a very simple megadungeon sandbox – there was a main city, a temple of Thor in the middle of the forest, near the megadungeon, and the megadungeon itself, near the lake. He built a warrior, and named him G. the Killer, armed him with a two-handed sword and some cool looking supplies (chain, 10-ft pole and lantern – bedrolls are uncool, it seems), and headed into the world.
Since it was his first RPG game, I decided to make it a little bit railroady, and leave big “signposts” for him to follow, while also leaving open the possibility of him ignoring it completely, and following his own path. So he arrived in New Vlachia on a boat (Fortunately, he did not complain about being in a boat), with instructions to meet a man in a tavern, who would tell him about the megadungeon and the city.
He met the man, Cass, in the tavern, after walking around the town a little bit. Cass told him that there was a temple of Tor near the dungeon, and that he would ask a guide to take G there once he finished his preparations. Everyone whom my brother met asked him if he was REALLY SURE he wanted to enter the dungeon by himself, but my brother would have none of it (“Of course I’m going in by myself, no I’m not crazy, no I don’t want your bloody mercenaries”). He told Cass that all his preparations were done, and Cass asked Johan to take him to Thor’s temple.
After a brief tour of the temple, Johan showed G the place where he would sleep, and said he would meet him in the morning.
Then the fun began.
My brother said G was just pretending to sleep, and would rise as soon as soon as a the priest left. Then he started to sneak around the temple, telling guards he was just “looking for the bathroom”, until he found the priests’ quarters. He started stealing things from the sleeping priests, and when one of them woke up to give him a “stern warning”, he just pulled his morningstar and crushed his head!
A chase began as G the Killer tried to make it out of the temple and into the woods, but not before he cleaved three of the surprised guards in half. A warrior with 15 strength, scale mail and a two handed sword was more than a match for the wimpy 3-4 leather armored guards I left doing the night shift of the temple.
After that he managed to blunder through the forest to the megadungeon, only bruising his shoulder on a trap by luck of the random encounter rolls. Once there, though, his luck ran out and after about two hours exploring he ran into a large group of fire beetles, who made short work of him :-P
Some lessons learned:
– The younger they are, the less respect they have for virtual human life :-P
– It is cool playing with people who are not “spoiled”, and have no idea what a fire beetle, goblin or a morlock is, and who are not into the meta yet.
– I can be even more railroady, that he will probably still be able to throw my game out of the window (probably after finally exploring a few rooms).