Adventures In DND With 11 Year Old Boys
Or guess how many times I said, "You cannot hurt the children" 🤣
Where do I begin? I ran a 3 hr game for a group of five 11 year old boys and it was the most glorious thing I have experienced. Wild, does not cover everything that happened but everything that happened was E.P.I.C.
For context, two of the boys had played in a game with me at the local game store and that is how I was hired to run this game. I had to do some explaining to the other boys and we moved quickly to the game.
Before I break down the shenanigans, let me offer a few tips for playing with this age group and gender. These are general rules and might not apply to every table of 11 year old boys.
Call it early, they’re going to break your game. It’s ok.
They most likely will not read what their character can do and will go straight to their imaginations for what they want to do. Let them do it but give them limits.
Be ready to improv like never before. I did a ton of Yes and/No, but and everyone got to shine.
To save time, I did group initiative instead of individual initiative and then went clockwise. Worked like a charm and I may keep it this way going forward.
In my last post I talked about how I want to run E.P.I.C games and help other GM/DM’s do the same. Let me lay my E.P.IC template over this adventure and you tell me if it was E.P.I.C or not.
Evolving Characters
This was a one shot game so I did not expect too much evolving to happen, especially among 11 yr old, but as a whole, I saw glimpses of character evolution, when one player was not wrestling another on the ground, that is.
Passionate Storytelling
This adventure was written by the birthday boy himself. I’ll share his adventure and how I dressed it up a bit in another post.
Inspiring Creativity
This adventure was all creativity, let me share some examples.
One character, who I’ll call Double D was an elf with a bow and decided because he was an elf he wanted to combine powers like water and electricity into one arrow.
The birthday boy built a character which could, once a day, swap from a sorcerer to a barbarian.
Creating Celebratory Moments
This adventure was about time and a Chronomancer who wanted to destroy it, for reasons. I had no idea how the third act was going to play out.
The adventure came down to a showdown on top of a clock tower. A woman (I’ll explain in the next post) was tied to a pulsating hourglass. The strands of time were unraveling. I told them, “you have 5 seconds to stop this” I counted down , 5, 4, 3,
When one of the kids I had to keep saying to “You cannot hurt the kids” said, “I throw my ax at the hourglass”
I said, roll for it. And I kid you not, a nat 20.
Hourglass destroyed, time reversed, cheers went up around the table.
It doesn’t get any better than that.
All in all, it was one of my favorite adventures I’ve ever run
because of the chaos
because I was given an adventure outline to work with
because I had no idea how it would end
If you get a chance to run a dnd game (or any other rpg) for 11 year old boys, I highly recommend it, just be prepared for things to go off the rails early and often.
You may be wondering, “Wait, how did they want to hurt the children” in short, a couple of kids kept wanting to throw kids back into a Cyclop’s cage that had a sign hanging over it that read, “SNACKS”. Sick puppies :)