No Time Like the First Time

This past summer, while sitting in the hot tub with my youngest child (age 7), she announced that she had an idea for a D&D character.

Now, I am not a sports dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you for the first time to say they want to learn how to throw a football.  And I am not a musician dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you at a young age and tell you about the song they’re trying to write.  But I imagine that what I felt at that moment, in that hot tub, was comparable to those scenarios.

My two youngest spend a lot of time in the pool (mostly fighting, or playing, and sometimes doing both at once), and I like to sit out with them and work on my computer stuff and watch them.  Occasionally I get in, but, honestly, I’m not much for playing in the pool these days.  I still do laps sometimes—it’s really the only exercise I actually enjoy—but that’s not a thing you want to try to do while kids are playing (or fighting) in the water with you.  But, when they’re all tuckered out from playing and fighting and playfighting, they often get in the hot tub to cool down (figuratively, obviously).  My littlest one likes it way more than the middlest one: like her old man, she loves the heat.  The middle child will usually give up after a while, complaining “it’s too hot!” And then it’s just me and her.  Sometimes we play 20 Questions.  Sometimes we just talk about mostly nothing.  But, this time, she decided to tell me about her D&D character concept.

It’s perhaps important to establish that she’s never played before.  She’s watched us play many times, of course, and once I let her be a sort of pet character,¹ but she didn’t really do much.  Sometimes we listen to a D&D podcast in the car—specifically, the excellent Dames and Dragons, which is the one she really likes—but, overall, not any real prior experience.  And, yet, this was not a vague idea she was presenting to me.  This was a fully-fleshed out concept: this character had a name, a race, a class, hair color, eye color ... she even told me what type and color of armor she wore.  When she said, “now, her parents—well, she has kind of a dark backstory,” I almost squeed.  I’ve had thirty-year-olds who put less effort into their characters than this.  “Dark backstory”?  What kind of weird YouTube crap is she watching?  But, from a GM² perspective, it’s gold.

Now, some things changed as time went on, but the final character is remarkably similar to what she gave me that first day.  Corva Ravenstone is a half-elven ranger with turquoise hair and lavender eyes.  Here’s the current version of her backstory:

Corva’s parents disappeared into the jungle when she was just a baby.  Corva thinks they were studying nature, but she doesn’t really remember because she was too young.  When she was barely old enough to walk, they never came back from collecting herbs one day; the only clue Corva has is that some blood and black fur were left behind. From then on she was raised by her tiger friend Bone.

Corva dresses all in green, except for her light blue armor.  She carries a bow and has a monkey companion named Chip.

Please note that, although I helped put the thoughts above into nice-sounding sentences, I didn’t really write any of it.  None of it.  It’s all her.

So, naturally I decided that this deserved a corresponding effort on my part.  This couldn’t just be a throw-away character concept; this had to be a real character that my daughter played in a real campaign.  The problem, of course, is that creating D&D campaigns is a major effort.  I did a little bit of it for my eldest child, but mostly it’s just been using pre-written adventures for the last several years.  But for this I felt like I had to put together something memorable.  The other two kids are joining us, of course, for what we’re currently dubbing “the Family Campaign.” And I’ve probably put more time and effort into trying to write background and plot and adventure hooks for this one game of D&D than I have in the past 15 years.

Therein lies the problem, of course.  I bit off more than I could chew, and it’s taken me six months to get ready to go.  All this is pressure I put on myself; the kids, I’m sure, would be happy just to play whatever.  But, the more I thought about it, the more ideas I had, and the more the older two started to get excited as well, and the more complicated it all became.  Definitely no one to blame but me, but it just felt like it had to be ... well, not perfect, but at least special.

And I’m definitely not done yet.  But I came up with this wacky idea where each of my three children would play a short, solo intro adventure, which would set up the whole background, and then they’d come together.  I’ve taken to calling these “flashbackstories,” an over-obvious portmanteau word to be sure, but too cool to pass up.  They will each take place 5 – 7 years “ago”³ and they will tell the story of how each character left their original home and came to be indebted to a mysterious benefactor, who will then call upon them to perform a certain mission in return (which will be the kickoff to their shared adventure).  For this purpose, I’m designing mini-adventures that are specifically too hard for their beginner characters, but then pairing them up with a higher-level NPC.⁴  So, the idea is, basically, there’s a fight they can’t really handle alone, discovery of a greater danger, and a guide to help them get out alive and take them away to some relative safety, whence they, years later, come together at last.

Did I mention I was making it way too complicated?

Anyhow, I finally got to the point where I could start with the first flashbackstory, which is Corva’s.  And, this past Wednesday night, my youngest child played her very first game of D&D with her own character.  And it was pretty amazing.

She took to it pretty naturally.  There was the standard amount of newbie fumbling around with which dice to roll, and which numbers to add to the totals, but my eldest volunteered to help out with that aspect.  What is often harder for people to get into is putting yourself into your character’s position and really roleplaying.  That part she just instantly grasped.  She asked intelligent questions and made intelligent choices.  When she ran into her first dangerous encounter, she understood instinctively that it was a fight that she couldn’t win and opted to stay under cover while her much more capable tiger mentor went in to do the heavy lifting.  Then, in a twist that frankly astonished me, she correctly identified my NPC as a friendly and ran to her (staying hidden, of course), and said “I want to grab her by the wrist and help her run away and hide.” This was the character I sent to make sure she survived, you understand.  But my girl knew that Corva knew the jungle better than this outsider ever could and wanted to get her to safety ... she was trying to save her would-be-savior.

We played for a couple of hours before we called it quits, and the next morning she asked when we were playing again.  “Soon,” I promised.  “Maybe when you get out of the shower?” she asked hopefully.  “I have to go to work,” I pointed out.  She seemed very disappointed.  And she’s already asked at least twice more since then.

So I would have to say it was a success, and, assuming I don’t kill myself trying to do all this extra work, I think it will be a pretty cool campaign.  And I think my youngest child will, at age 7, be a pretty amazing player.  I can’t wait to see how it all comes out.

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1 For those of you who speak 5th edition D&D, I was playing a pact of the chain warlock, and so she played my improved familiar.

2 And, for those of you who don’t speak D&D, the GM is the “game master.” Sort of like the referee of the game.

3 That is, from the perspective of “today,” which will be whenever we start the full campaign and they all meet for the first time.

4 You might find it interesting if you’re a fellow D&D player (and especially interesting if you’re a D&D player from my old gaming group) to know that, for these NPCs, I’m using updated-to-5e versions of my own old player characters.  At this point, I’ve played for long enough that I have an old character for just about every occasion, and I found what I think is the perfect one for each of my 3 kids’ character concepts.