u/jackpotsdad

1. Look at all the cute photos! There are no bad ones.

2. Upvote all the posts, especially the ones with photos. I'm a sucker for photos of dogs with their mouth slightly open - the "Bichon smile".

3. Commiserate with owners who have lost their best friends and are still loyal Bichon allies.

4. Try to give helpful advice. I've been there with the potty issues and allergies.

5. Refresh to see more photos! This place is one of my "eye-bleach" areas on the Internet.

I've really enjoyed D&D 5E and 5.5. I started playing with the basic rule set (red book) and eventually had characters that needed the expert rules (blue book). The red book only covered levels 1 to 3, and back in those days, if your character actually survived their first few encounters, you'd get to the mid-levels quickly. In high school, I got into 1st edition, called AD&D back then, the version responsible for the Satanic panic over the picture of a demon on the Dungeon Master's Guide and the statue of a demon on the Player's Handbook.

Life came calling, and I dropped the hobby after high school and moved on with a career and family. As I've written before, I came back to the hobby because my kiddo's after-school Dungeons & Dragons club didn't have enough DMs. I crammed 5th edition over a weekend (I didn't have any of my older books) and started DM'ing for the club the next week.

I went from 1st edition to 5th edition and missed everything in between. I missed a lot. Back then, the official setting was Oerth/Greyhawk. It's been amazing catching up on the lore. I missed most of the Forgotten Realms (I caught snippets of it in related video games), Dragonlance, Planescape (did play the video game - one of my favorites), Darksun, Ravenloft, and even updates to the Greyhawk setting (I was shocked reading about Rary's betrayal).

The rules underwent a lot of changes - most of them good in my opinion. I still sometimes reach for a d6 when rolling for initiative even though it's been a d20 for decades. I'm glad they got rid of the sexist nonsense of having female humans maxing out at 18/50 strength, or some of the weird, convoluted rules around wearing armor when spellcasting (i.e., you can't cast wizard spells while wearing armor, but you could if you were a cleric dual-class. This also ignored the various exceptions with fighter/magic-user elves, etc.) I missed the changes introduced in the 2nd, 3rd, 3.5, and 4th editions. It seems that 3rd edition was a bit of a golden age, with the introduction of the OGL increasing the popularity of D&D and giving official sanction to homebrew/3rd-party developers. I don't think you have the modern tabletop hobby without the OGL saving it.

I like that the modern game blends role-playing and tactical play. Back in the day, roleplay was pretty much limited to the race and class you selected. You really weren't expected to act out your character, but rather fulfill a role in your party. Elves back then were a class and a race, and that was the extent of roleplay. Roleplaying has really opened up the hobby.

I'd say that back in the day, the people who played D&D weren't the popular kids, but the edgy loners and the artistic kids. At least that was my friend group. Now, you see wider representation. I like that the game is an analog to inclusion. The very premise is that a party of diverse characters unite to beat back the forces of evil. I love that it's more mainstream. You're not a weirdo for playing D&D. Even famous people play it.

I'd say the only thing I don't like about 5.5 is how dense the rule set is. The new PHB and DMG are huge. It feels like there is a rule for everything. And if you include the rule sets that come with each supplement, it's overwhelming. I realize the game needs these rules because various gameplay problems have made them necessary. However, it's a huge barrier for prospective players and DMs.

Back in the day, you rolled for surprise, initiative, and then players/monsters reacted in turn. Nowadays, there are bonus actions, actions that can be taken outside a player's turn, reactive actions such as shield spells, and the shenanigans that are counterspell and silvery barbs. The fights I run take a long time to adjudicate, and I'm constantly looking up rules to ensure things occur in the correct order. I'm sure there are some DMs that can handle this quickly, but that's definitely not me.

I kind of miss the looseness of the older rule set and the implicit idea that the DM makes a ruling on the spot if something isn't clear (I sometimes still do this to speed things up or to benefit the party out of a bad spot). But I can see where most players would prefer to have things better spelled out.

Anyways, I just wanted to weigh in because I've seen some posts here where a lot of older players rant about the state of the hobby. I'm not one of those. I love the current game's inclusiveness, most of the rule changes, and the blend of roleplay and tactics.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about my experiences in becoming a DM volunteer at my son's after-school D&D program. That post kind of blew up, and the comments were really great. I thought I would follow up with some of the things I learned about being a DM for a bunch of middle schoolers.

1. You get a crash course in Gen Alpha idioms. Some are easy to figure out by their context. "Are we cooked?" after the entire party got low initiative rolls. Some are a bit more arcane. Me: "The enemy looks unbeatable." Player: "Bet!" After a while, you kind of get it, and you can authoritatively tell your party to stop aura farming and get back to dungeon delving. Funnily enough, we made a rule change, and Charisma became Rizz. You don't make a charisma check, but a rizz check when you're trying to persuade that blacksmith to help you out.
2. Sort of related to point 1, but some of the Gen Alpha "customs" are pretty inane even for other middle schoolers. "6-7" can become a quick-spreading disruptive phenomenon if not contained (I had no idea!) I had a table rule that any mention of the phrase would cause a lightning bolt (1d10 damage) to strike them if they purposely or accidentally muttered the phrase. Fortunately, the phrase became out of style by the start of the new year, and I only had to roll for lightning damage twice.
3. As I mentioned in my other post, middle school attention spans are really short. As the DM, I had to constantly redirect their attention back to the action rather than to the near-constant distractions of being among their peers. One thing that helped was creating tangible items. Small cardboard cutouts of treasure, weapons, and other items they would find in their explorations. Maps, scrolls, and other visual aids were very helpful. I made a cache of non-magical trinkets, and they spent a whole afternoon just divvying them up. They got to take the trinkets home.
4. 5E character generation is too long and too detailed for a middle school attention span. While ability score generation is fast, asking a first-time middle school player to come up with an appropriate fantasy name and background is a lot to ask. It also breeds boredom because while one player needs help determining their starting hit points and armor class, the others lose focus. I went with pretty basic character outlines - each player got a name (I provided a few suggestions), a race, a class, rolled ability scores, a level, some basic equipment (so we could figure out armor class), and details like heigh/weight/age. The players preferred to roll their ability scores rather than use a standard array. I did try to arrange a session 0, but with up to 11-12 middle schoolers, this was the best I could manage. Fortunately, as the campaign went along, the players began to fill out their character details on their own, including drawing pictures of what they looked like.
5. Chaos goblins exist in middle school ranks. I had a couple of students who, while not overtly disruptive, would seek to subvert party plans if they weren't the center of attention. One player decided they were a cannibal and would constantly try to eat enemy remains and attempt to bite other characters to see what they tasted like. This was fine until the same player decided to try to bite friendly NPCs or eat monster bodies instead of helping with combat. I found that middle schoolers aren't very motivated or demotivated by hard sanctions like character death or loss of important equipment. What I found works was to reach into my dad's bag of tricks and tease them.

"Oh, you ate that dead goblin? You find that you have rancid breath. The merchant is visibly disgusted at what your breath smells like." "That lunch of goblin guts is giving you the urge to go to the bathroom like crazy. Strangely, you're also pretty gassy." You have to be careful not to cross the line, because middle schoolers find a farting party member unbelievably funny, and what started as innocent dad teasing can spiral into negative group bullying.

One player got cursed with lycanthropy, and they thought it was the greatest thing ever. "You mean I can turn into a big man-rat? Awesome!" It was great until I told him that he now had huge buck teeth and was abnormally hairy except for a bald spot at the top of his head. He quickly became motivated to find a cure.

Anyway, at the end it was as much fun for me as it was for the kids. I'll see if I can post a picture of some of the items I used.

My son found out there was an after-school D&D program at his school. He was excited because the D&D club at his previous school was full of cliques, and he only got to watch but never play. I even bought the 2014 5th-edition books for him, since they were required by the club. He never got to use them.

Day 1, and he comes home dejected. While the program is welcoming, there aren't enough DMs. The program is staffed by one teacher and a parent volunteer, neither of whom is familiar with the game. There is a single student DM, but the poor kid has his hands full with eight players, leaving 11 players who mostly just stare at the kids who get to participate.

History wasn't going to repeat itself. I hadn't played since The Player's Handbook had the cover with the huge red demon statue on it, but I figured I could create something quick and entertain a group of kids for an hour and 15 minutes on Friday afternoons. The hope was that my participation would inspire another student to take the mantle of DM, and I could go back to being just a parent.

So over the weekend, I gave myself a crash course on 5th edition D&D. Ow. That was hard.

It wasn't that the premise was unfamiliar. As a DM, you set the scene, set up challenges, and the party tells you how they react. But the rules had changed quite a bit. I discovered I was quite the D&D fossil. Back in the day, initiative was rolled with a d6, armor class ranged from 10 to -10, and rounds lasted 1 minute (not 6 seconds as they are now). Most of the struggle was in unlearning old habits and discovering that the mechanics of spells like shield and bless now worked differently.

I didn't want to go into the program unprepared, so I created an outline of an adventure that I had used decades before. I'm not familiar enough with the Forgotten Realms, so I placed the adventurers in the Shield Lands, on the borders of Iuz on Oerth (Greyhawk setting). This choice proved to be fortuitous. While the players had never heard of Iuz, they had heard (via Stranger Things) of one of Iuz's implacable enemies, Vecna. Being in a setting where they could possibly meet Vecna tickled their fancy considerably.

What I didn't account for is that the modern D&D game is quite different than the dungeon crawls of my youth. I've seen Critical Role before, but hadn't anticipated how much influence it had on the game. It gives you pause when an 11-year-old looks you straight in the eyes and asks what their character's motivation is.

This emphasis on story actually made things a lot easier. Instead of having to prep elaborate battle maps and set up challenging fights, we spent some afternoons haggling with a potion seller, rolling to see if a giant rat could be tamed (which made the game feel like Pokémon for a while), and divvying up loot, which mostly consisted of low-value, non-magical trinkets.

There were some surprises. The current generation of kids has extremely low attention spans. Getting them to focus on the scene in front of them took constant urging and reminders. Literacy was also pretty poor. The kids struggled to spell words like dagger, chaotic, and platinum. Blame this on the prevalence of phones or the interruption of their education by COVID. I gained a healthy appreciation of what teachers put up with.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. It's motivated me to learn more about the hobby and perhaps continue to DM my kiddo and a few of his close friends.