OK, my 15 year old (special needs) is desperate to play DND but is mostly non-verbal with anyone but me and has little to no social awareness online, so she doesn’t feel comfortable LFG/playing with strangers online. Her few friends she can talk with have zero interest in the game.
I don’t play. I definitely don’t DM. I was… adjacent to some people who played, a few decades ago, but (sorry) I was that girl who doesn’t really want to be there and just insta-killed my character jumping off cliffs or whatever in the few sessions I reluctantly joined.
But I love my kid, and I’m a bit of a storyteller, and an *avid* gamer, so I’ve done some similar stuff… figured “how hard could it be?”
We printed out some character sheets and used a website (dndbeyond.com) to help figure out character creation.
I read some forum posts around the web which mentioned duets and some mentioned allowing the player a sidekick.
And… I just started telling a sort of CYAdventure story, inserting stereotypical fantasy/rpg mobs/monsters, and we did our best to sort out the combat and XP stuff, looking common stats up as we went. For the first town and forest we just used maps we found on a google image search, but now we’ve made several villages and a whole cast of characters, and my laptop is starting to have memory issues, lol… and the lil diary of her adventures we started is approaching novel length.
Well. Now my daughter is totally into it and the story has snowballed out of control and she’s in love with her character and her sidekick and I ended up downloading a rulebook on uh… media.wizards.com and I have misunderstood a LOT.
Example: To keep it interesting, we have played minigames outside of the normal rules. She was talking to this old … Warlock? He’s kinda mysterious… in a sort of observatory. He had her look through a telescope and draw (daughter had to draw irl) what she saw through it (I had showed her a painting of a made up constellation, and she had 1 minute irl to memorize it)… He gave her 3 riddles to solve (these ones https://logiclike.com/en/nature-riddles ) and… few other things. As a reward, if she “won” several rounds of each game, we added +1 to the bonus for one of her (related) additional skills. (Nature for the nature riddles, Arcane for the constellations, etc). IDK if that’s cheated her character under regular sorts of rules and… ruined it?
And things are getting really technical. And she wants a pet and new spells and weapons and IDK how to do any of that and I don’t even know whether her character is valid or not, but she wants to keep using it if she ever finds a group… IDK the standard for that sort of thing?! And, again… we’ve practically written a novel. And the cast of characters she’s met is more convoluted than a soap opera. And we don’t have any like… dnd stuff. Just using Google nest to roll dice even…
It’s become an urgent thing because she was excited texting one of her friends about it and now they want to play and IDK what I should do… I don’t want to be teaching people to do stuff wrong or w/e but she’s so excited. 🙁 And her friend is going to stay over Friday and Saturday night, so we’re trying to really study the rulebook pdfs we found and make sure we’re doing okay but there’s *so much* information and I only understand about a third of it!
Anyway if anyone can tell me how bad I’ve messed up, or offer some resources to help, or suggestions or point me in the right direction to ask (or what to ask?!) if this is the wrong place, I’d be super grateful! Sorry I did try searching most stuff myself but it’s a lot and pretty overwhelming. I just want to know if I’ve done anything that ruins her character or would be a problem for actual dnd groups if these girls ever want to play for real?! Or any key things I’m not doing (like we don’t even have a board/dice, I’m just pantsing method writing most of the story as we go, I know usually dms have lots of …. paper? lol)
Thanks in advance!
submitted by /u/Adventurous-Wrap-617
[link] [comments]
r/DnD OK, my 15 year old (special needs) is desperate to play DND but is mostly non-verbal with anyone but me and has little to no social awareness online, so she doesn’t feel comfortable LFG/playing with strangers online. Her few friends she can talk with have zero interest in the game. I don’t play. I definitely don’t DM. I was… adjacent to some people who played, a few decades ago, but (sorry) I was that girl who doesn’t really want to be there and just insta-killed my character jumping off cliffs or whatever in the few sessions I reluctantly joined. But I love my kid, and I’m a bit of a storyteller, and an *avid* gamer, so I’ve done some similar stuff… figured “how hard could it be?” We printed out some character sheets and used a website (dndbeyond.com) to help figure out character creation. I read some forum posts around the web which mentioned duets and some mentioned allowing the player a sidekick. And… I just started telling a sort of CYAdventure story, inserting stereotypical fantasy/rpg mobs/monsters, and we did our best to sort out the combat and XP stuff, looking common stats up as we went. For the first town and forest we just used maps we found on a google image search, but now we’ve made several villages and a whole cast of characters, and my laptop is starting to have memory issues, lol… and the lil diary of her adventures we started is approaching novel length. Well. Now my daughter is totally into it and the story has snowballed out of control and she’s in love with her character and her sidekick and I ended up downloading a rulebook on uh… media.wizards.com and I have misunderstood a LOT. Example: To keep it interesting, we have played minigames outside of the normal rules. She was talking to this old … Warlock? He’s kinda mysterious… in a sort of observatory. He had her look through a telescope and draw (daughter had to draw irl) what she saw through it (I had showed her a painting of a made up constellation, and she had 1 minute irl to memorize it)… He gave her 3 riddles to solve (these ones https://logiclike.com/en/nature-riddles ) and… few other things. As a reward, if she “won” several rounds of each game, we added +1 to the bonus for one of her (related) additional skills. (Nature for the nature riddles, Arcane for the constellations, etc). IDK if that’s cheated her character under regular sorts of rules and… ruined it? And things are getting really technical. And she wants a pet and new spells and weapons and IDK how to do any of that and I don’t even know whether her character is valid or not, but she wants to keep using it if she ever finds a group… IDK the standard for that sort of thing?! And, again… we’ve practically written a novel. And the cast of characters she’s met is more convoluted than a soap opera. And we don’t have any like… dnd stuff. Just using Google nest to roll dice even… It’s become an urgent thing because she was excited texting one of her friends about it and now they want to play and IDK what I should do… I don’t want to be teaching people to do stuff wrong or w/e but she’s so excited. 🙁 And her friend is going to stay over Friday and Saturday night, so we’re trying to really study the rulebook pdfs we found and make sure we’re doing okay but there’s *so much* information and I only understand about a third of it! Anyway if anyone can tell me how bad I’ve messed up, or offer some resources to help, or suggestions or point me in the right direction to ask (or what to ask?!) if this is the wrong place, I’d be super grateful! Sorry I did try searching most stuff myself but it’s a lot and pretty overwhelming. I just want to know if I’ve done anything that ruins her character or would be a problem for actual dnd groups if these girls ever want to play for real?! Or any key things I’m not doing (like we don’t even have a board/dice, I’m just pantsing method writing most of the story as we go, I know usually dms have lots of …. paper? lol) Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/Adventurous-Wrap-617 [link] [comments]
OK, my 15 year old (special needs) is desperate to play DND but is mostly non-verbal with anyone but me and has little to no social awareness online, so she doesn’t feel comfortable LFG/playing with strangers online. Her few friends she can talk with have zero interest in the game.
I don’t play. I definitely don’t DM. I was… adjacent to some people who played, a few decades ago, but (sorry) I was that girl who doesn’t really want to be there and just insta-killed my character jumping off cliffs or whatever in the few sessions I reluctantly joined.
But I love my kid, and I’m a bit of a storyteller, and an *avid* gamer, so I’ve done some similar stuff… figured “how hard could it be?”
We printed out some character sheets and used a website (dndbeyond.com) to help figure out character creation.
I read some forum posts around the web which mentioned duets and some mentioned allowing the player a sidekick.
And… I just started telling a sort of CYAdventure story, inserting stereotypical fantasy/rpg mobs/monsters, and we did our best to sort out the combat and XP stuff, looking common stats up as we went. For the first town and forest we just used maps we found on a google image search, but now we’ve made several villages and a whole cast of characters, and my laptop is starting to have memory issues, lol… and the lil diary of her adventures we started is approaching novel length.
Well. Now my daughter is totally into it and the story has snowballed out of control and she’s in love with her character and her sidekick and I ended up downloading a rulebook on uh… media.wizards.com and I have misunderstood a LOT.
Example: To keep it interesting, we have played minigames outside of the normal rules. She was talking to this old … Warlock? He’s kinda mysterious… in a sort of observatory. He had her look through a telescope and draw (daughter had to draw irl) what she saw through it (I had showed her a painting of a made up constellation, and she had 1 minute irl to memorize it)… He gave her 3 riddles to solve (these ones https://logiclike.com/en/nature-riddles ) and… few other things. As a reward, if she “won” several rounds of each game, we added +1 to the bonus for one of her (related) additional skills. (Nature for the nature riddles, Arcane for the constellations, etc). IDK if that’s cheated her character under regular sorts of rules and… ruined it?
And things are getting really technical. And she wants a pet and new spells and weapons and IDK how to do any of that and I don’t even know whether her character is valid or not, but she wants to keep using it if she ever finds a group… IDK the standard for that sort of thing?! And, again… we’ve practically written a novel. And the cast of characters she’s met is more convoluted than a soap opera. And we don’t have any like… dnd stuff. Just using Google nest to roll dice even…
It’s become an urgent thing because she was excited texting one of her friends about it and now they want to play and IDK what I should do… I don’t want to be teaching people to do stuff wrong or w/e but she’s so excited. 🙁 And her friend is going to stay over Friday and Saturday night, so we’re trying to really study the rulebook pdfs we found and make sure we’re doing okay but there’s *so much* information and I only understand about a third of it!
Anyway if anyone can tell me how bad I’ve messed up, or offer some resources to help, or suggestions or point me in the right direction to ask (or what to ask?!) if this is the wrong place, I’d be super grateful! Sorry I did try searching most stuff myself but it’s a lot and pretty overwhelming. I just want to know if I’ve done anything that ruins her character or would be a problem for actual dnd groups if these girls ever want to play for real?! Or any key things I’m not doing (like we don’t even have a board/dice, I’m just pantsing method writing most of the story as we go, I know usually dms have lots of …. paper? lol)
Thanks in advance!
submitted by /u/Adventurous-Wrap-617
[link] [comments]