DreadPirateMurphy
Explorer
A couple of years ago, I posted about trying to introduce my then-8-year-old son to D&D. I made some bad DM choices, and he didn't really get into it.
Well, his dad has plenty of time now thanks to the pandemic (furlough for me, home-schooling and no summer camp for him). Time to try again with the 10-year-old. Of course, I haven't been gaming much recently other than video games because of work, moving to a new state, etc. I had to re-read large portions of the core rulebooks (3.5, because that's what I know the best). I chose the original Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path (pre-Pathfinder version), and it went relatively well. He played an aristocratic ninja from Tien who had a barbarian man-servant/aide/babysitter. The plus to that is that Burnt Offerings is actually a pretty good adventure. As a novice DM, though, it kind of fell apart at the fight with the quasit. I talked with him about it, and I asked him if he would be fine with starting up something a little different. He seemed cool with D&D, but frustrated by the stupid quasit, so he agreed.
Enter THE SUNLESS CITADEL. We jointly created a party of five characters for him to run made up of straight-forward core classes with fairly easy choices (fighter, cleric, rogue, sorcerer, bard). I then put him through the dungeon crawl and he loved it. Honestly, the character of Meepo the kobold seems tailor-made for kids. He thought the elf pudding was gross and funny, especially seeing as his fighter was an elf. While I had to fudge the dragon priest encounter a bit, he handled the shadow and evil druid (two possibly challenging fights) all on his own. It was a lot of fun for both of us.
We now just started on The Forge of Fury. I spent more time prepping, including creating a wilderness encounter table for the multiday journey to the dungeon. Of course, my first random encounter roll came up a 100 on d100, and his five 3rd-level adventurers ended up fighting a winter wolf on their first night in the woods. Heh. Welcome to the wilderness.
I'm slowly transitioning more of the character management over to him. Initial character creation was heavily based on my suggestions. Now I'm just recommending cool things to consider during level up and making sure the numbers are all updated properly. (And probably spending too much time thinking of cool options for the fun of it -- which is why the sorcerer has a celestial barn owl familiar, now.)
Other thoughts:
Well, his dad has plenty of time now thanks to the pandemic (furlough for me, home-schooling and no summer camp for him). Time to try again with the 10-year-old. Of course, I haven't been gaming much recently other than video games because of work, moving to a new state, etc. I had to re-read large portions of the core rulebooks (3.5, because that's what I know the best). I chose the original Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path (pre-Pathfinder version), and it went relatively well. He played an aristocratic ninja from Tien who had a barbarian man-servant/aide/babysitter. The plus to that is that Burnt Offerings is actually a pretty good adventure. As a novice DM, though, it kind of fell apart at the fight with the quasit. I talked with him about it, and I asked him if he would be fine with starting up something a little different. He seemed cool with D&D, but frustrated by the stupid quasit, so he agreed.
Enter THE SUNLESS CITADEL. We jointly created a party of five characters for him to run made up of straight-forward core classes with fairly easy choices (fighter, cleric, rogue, sorcerer, bard). I then put him through the dungeon crawl and he loved it. Honestly, the character of Meepo the kobold seems tailor-made for kids. He thought the elf pudding was gross and funny, especially seeing as his fighter was an elf. While I had to fudge the dragon priest encounter a bit, he handled the shadow and evil druid (two possibly challenging fights) all on his own. It was a lot of fun for both of us.
We now just started on The Forge of Fury. I spent more time prepping, including creating a wilderness encounter table for the multiday journey to the dungeon. Of course, my first random encounter roll came up a 100 on d100, and his five 3rd-level adventurers ended up fighting a winter wolf on their first night in the woods. Heh. Welcome to the wilderness.
I'm slowly transitioning more of the character management over to him. Initial character creation was heavily based on my suggestions. Now I'm just recommending cool things to consider during level up and making sure the numbers are all updated properly. (And probably spending too much time thinking of cool options for the fun of it -- which is why the sorcerer has a celestial barn owl familiar, now.)
Other thoughts:
- Even apart from having to update some things to 3.5 from the original 3.0 text, many of the stats blocks are really iffy. Like, SC says that in the first round, the druid casts barkskin on himself. Guess what he doesn't have on his memorized spell list or in any of his gear? Most of the mooks are fine, but updating foes with class levels is a pain. Templates can be a pain, too. The ogre skeletons in FoF are way too weak based on the 3.5 skeleton template.
- I read some complaints that SC as a module was too single-path and didn't really give the players many options. That's...kind of true? I'm biased because it made my job easier as a relatively new DM. It's more like there is a main path through the dungeon with a couple of alternate routes and side quests.
- The SC encounter right before the grove hands you a couple of vials of alchemists fire. My son did the logical thing and tried to burn the forest. It took me far too long to find the sidebar where they mention that the wood is too moist to burn. I was tempted to just let him do it...but it would have made the final confrontation potentially MUCH more complicated. Maybe after a couple of more adventures, I'll be confident enough to allow for something like that?
- After having to subdue the kobolds' pet, he made the assumption that he was supposed to use nonlethal damage on the two remaining NPC adventurers in the final fight. I made sure Belak explained in great detail that they were already as good as dead, which was good because the final blow of the fight was shooting a fleeing druid with an arrow, causing him to fall into the trunk of the evil magic tree while he was ON FIRE. I let him make a Dex check to save the MacGuffin fruit before the conflagration.
