Playing D&D with three 6-year-olds
battlefield report
Yesterday, I managed to convince my fresh-faced six-year-old, with whom we had already played 1-on-1 sessions or with three of us with his mum, to invite his peers to play. The reason for this was the LEGO set produced for the 50th anniversary of D&D, which was perfect for playing "dungeons and dragons". The venture unsurprisingly proved instructive from the point of view of the 'origins' of role-playing games and their 'natural' form, because while Tadeusz's ttrpg approach stems from mine - from me he learns not only how to play games, but also how to tell bedtime stories or 'play with minifigs' - for his colleagues this was absolutely their first encounter with such imaginative play. I was curious to see how they would play!
Of course, I didn't want to overwhelm three six-year-olds with complicated mechanics or elaborate routines of who, what and how to do at the table, but Tadzio and I wanted it to be 'real' RPG, so - to have dice rolling, managing 'their' characters, telling a coherent story together. That's why I introduced the three important rules - 1) when someone speaks, the rest listen 2) everyone speaks in their own time 3) they have to listen to me as the game master and caretaker during the play. The mechanics were supposed to be simple, but not as simple as flipping a coin - when a character wanted to attack someone, climb somewhere, etc., we were rolling a d6, a score of 4+ meant success, to the score we were adding +1 if the character had a matching 'feat' to the situation, +1 if they had the right tool (depending on what the Lego fig was wearing) and +1 if someone helped them. In practice, the boys were only concerned with their 'feats', which we agreed together before the game, so we never added more than +1 to the roll.
To Tadeusz's despair, the boys quite quickly got bored with such structured play and looked for other entertainment, but after a break to run around the house with wooden swords and shields, they returned to the table. In total, for about 1.5 - 2 hours of total play, we had three such breaks. We managed to play out a coherent, exciting story about the theft of the dragon's egg and the search for it, before the dragoness burned down the Under the Watchful Eye Inn and the surrounding ruins out of revenge. Interestingly, while Tadeusz pretty much stuck to the established formula of 'exploring the module' in the form of a Lego set and taking things 'one step at a time', his colleagues at times tended more towards free-flowing fantasy and going beyond the 'current scene'. The guardian of the cause-and-effect sequence besides me was precisely Tadzio. M. was most interested that his dragonborn named "Little Dragon" - could be the son of a dragon who was yet to "physically" appear in the story (but as a Lego construction was tempting all the time on the table), while B. wanted his knight named "King" to "jump over" rooms where there were e.g. skeletons to defeat, in order to immediately confront the mage who had kidnapped the egg at the top of the tower.
The idea of the PC and the announced 'final boss' being linked by blood ties was very interesting, even if it went beyond the 'here and now'. At one point, all three of them were heavily invested to the question of who is Little Dragon's father if the red dragoness is mum - everyone put forward their own ideas about dad's fate, and there were some really cool explanations! M. also got his Little Dragon into troubles, deciding, for example, that a mimic had captured him with his maw and the other two had to rescue him somehow. B. once asked for a flashback scene with colour ('going back in time') because he wanted to establish that his character had had a good rest in the inn ('hotel') before going on the mission and got up first, waking the others. I was surprised that, without any suggestion on my part, the 'freshmen colleagues' were naturally reaching for tools straight out of Blades in the Dark. Tadzio stuck more to his character's scope, but operated creatively in this regard - for example, when a spider stood in their way, he declared that his warlock wanted to cast a 'take control' spell, and get a sidekick familiar.
The boys handled the 'failures' of their characters well - at times I felt that I was a little short of giving them time to wallow in frustration as I moved straight on to the next player after a failed throw, but contrary to my fears there was no 'drama' associated with a failed test. Even at the end, when Tadzio as the spider (who replaced the warlock as his 'main character') wanted to steal an egg from the dragoness' nose and sneak away with it, and a failed stealth test decided that the dragoness had spotted the thief and burned him, the character's death didn't spoil anybody's good spirit.
As far as I was concerned, the most surprising thing was how mentally exhausting it was to make sure the boys didn't get distracted and to stick to the rules set in play. Leaving aside interruptions for other activities, Tadzio's friends were very interested in being able to play with the bricks outside of the game itself, skipping ahead in scenes, jokes about farting and pooping (classic) etc. As I think about it now, I'm quite proud of a) Tadzio, who himself tried to keep an eye on the rules of play (he said that "this game has to be played calmly", even though he can be frisky) b) myself, that in this storm we nevertheless stayed the course of RPG play. Probably the hardest part was after Tadzio's character acquired a spider as a 'friend' - from that point on, everyone wanted 'their monsters', even if they hadn't met them yet in the adventure. Of course, everyone wanted a dragon, but there were double claims to the beholder or the displacer beast. In the end, however, these conflicts were resolved without fights or drama, and the story reached a logical shore.
Because of the aforementioned mental fatigue from coordinating six-year-old players, I am, frankly, not very impatient for another such session (I'm not saying no; we'll see if the boys ask), but I was pleased to find that Tadzio is probably ready to play a 'real' session with some kind adult as a player, other than his mum. I feel it could be quite amazing!