One of us!

I have had one of the best second weeks of the year I could have asked for, which is pretty great. Lots of D&D, topped off going to take part in the Saturday of the Gaming Weekend at The Place Theatre in Bedford.

I went with Adventurers Wanted, the group I work with to help them create and share Live Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TTRPG) shows in theatres and online. We were stoked to be invited along but weren’t 100% sure what the day would entail. In 2018, myself and Chloe ran a day as part of the LGBTQ+ Fun Palace at The Pleasance in Islington so had a small idea of what this day would look like. We weren’t quite prepared for how busy it would be, though!

We had so many families pass through the day, many of them whose kids wanted to try Dungeons and Dragons and had dragged their parents along for that. Myself, Chloe, Leo, Chris, and Justin all rotated through the day to help make characters and dungeons with the young ones and gently coaxing the more apprehensive parents into games. We also ran a lot of games that day, and I mean A LOT.

The first family I worked with had two AMAZING kids and their dad who threw themselves right in from the moment they saw the character sheets. We ended up with a Dwarf Cleric and Elf Bard (the kids) who had stolen a diamond anklet belonging to the Halfling Rogue’s (Dad) mother! They teamed up with a reserved but skilled Dragonborn Druid (a boy who really loved the maths of it all but was very shy) and Robert O’Hare, a.k.a Hairy Bob (Leo) to find a Bag of Tricks at the end of the dungeon. Well… the Druid was in it for some special orange minerals for his potions. They made friends with the water mephit in the waterfall, the Bard sent a dryad to rest peacefully in a meadow filled with flowers and the Druid calmed down a wolf so well that they made a new friend! Our Cleric was itching for some combat though, but found a challenge of a stone golem whose head he hammered straight down through the golem’s body, smashing it to dust on the floor.

It was such a fun game to run and they had some amazing creative solutions of how to get out of fighting. By the end of it, our quiet Druid had come out of his shell and was excited to interact with the world and the other players at the table. The last game I ran that day was with three young boys VERY keen to fight with anything, but then felt very guilty about killing an elderly three-headed wolf. I won’t lie, I made them feel guilty so they would work more creatively. To be fair to them, they took the hint straight away! We had fun barrelling through the dungeon at breakneck speed to solve the puzzle of which book they were here for and which book would kill them. It was cunningly solved by a great use of Mage Hand from our Wizard who joined us late, but happy to take part in the chaos.

The boys asked if they could take spare dungeon rooms and character sheets away at the end so they could play it again at their sleepover that night and I pretty much died from the adorableness. We also got to speak to Olly for a large portion of the evening, a local 16 year old who is very into Warhammer and has a keen eye for design. Look out for him, he has ambitions as a designer for Warhammer and a plan in place to achieve them! If his campaign bible is anything to go by, he’s going to be amazing.

We rounded up the day with an evening stream of Kids on Bikes run by Alex, who organised and invited us to the day. It was a great system and we had a suitably silly time trying to figure out what was going on in the town we had built together. Nothing makes for a better stream than 6 people who love gaming that are deliriously tired! It was such a wonderful, enriching day. It also reminded me of why we play these games in the first place.

A few parents commented on how the game would be a really good way to spend time together with decreased screen time. We also saw children learning to communicate, work together, solve problems creatively and do some (basic) maths to boot! This might be my teacher side coming out, but D&D is such a useful learning tool in that it teaches you so many essential skills without you even realising you’re learning them! It also builds strong, lasting friendships that can be relied upon when you find the right people to play with. Hopefully, those are the kind of groups we saw born in that room on Saturday.