Children pick up hobbies and interests from a variety of sources. Parents pass their hobbies and interests off to their children. Sometimes, parents look forward to sharing their hobbies or love of something--a favorite movie, band, or book--with their children. Other times, it is a more passive right of passage; children pick up an interest in something simply by being around, accompanying their parents as they go about their daily routine. My dad took us fishing. Other kids' dads work with them in their woodshops, take them hunting, build box-car racers, or share their stamp collections. I ran with a guy in Florida who ran with his high-school age daughter, and you could tell her interest in running had been ingrained in her at a young age by her father.
I was never very handy as a kid or an adult. I brew beer now, and the kids are often around when I do. It will be interesting to see if brewing beer is something they will still be interested in when they are old enough to drink beer. (Hopefully, it is not something they become interested in before they are old enough to drink.) They wash and sanitize bottles for me, stir buckets of wort, and help fill and cap bottles like elves in Santa's workshop were his workshop a brewery.
I spent my childhood drawing and writing stories. Like my kids, I was more cerebral by nature. I played outside, buried Star Wars action figures in the dirt, and climbed trees, pulling the air plants off the oak trees and pitching them like arboreal grenades on the unsuspecting below. But what really engaged me and captured my attention for hours on end were realms of science-fiction and fantasy. I read voraciously. As Sam does now. Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, The Dragonriders of Pern, Dune, Elric of Melnibone. I devoured comic books, The Uncanny X-men, New Teen Titans, Swamp Thing, amassing dozens of long boxes filled with hundreds, nay, thousands of issues. I drew my own comic books, creating entire multi-verses of characters and villains. I was into role-playing games, mostly Dungeons & Dragons. I had a bag of dice, graph paper, and die-cast metal miniature figurines of centaurs, minotaurs, griffins, and, of course, dragons. I made up our own adventures and campaigns. I wrote our own monster manuals and spellbooks. Since, Sam has gained a love of reading, and Peter a love of drawing.
Not all the things I loved as a kid translate well to the present day. Fortunately, my favorite cartoon, "Super Friends", did. I bought the kids two "Super Friends" DVDs when we were in India and they watched them almost every day. While others, such as "Space Ghost"? Not so much.
Before we left India, I bought the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game Starter Set with plans to play with the kids during our two-month leave before we moved to Washington, D.C. When I bought it, I was little surprised the game still existed at all. I have since learned the game is enjoying a revival of sorts.
In a recent article in the New Yorker, titled, "The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons", Neima Jahromi describes the revival of the classic game. The name is ubiquitous, but I surmise the true nature of the game escapes many.
Jahomi writes, "When mainstream American culture was largely about standing in a factory line, or crowding into smoke-stained boardrooms for meetings, or even dropping acid and collapsing in a field for your hundred-person “be-in,” the idea of retiring to a dimly lit table to make up stories with three or four friends seemed fruitless and antisocial. Now that being American often means being alone or interacting distantly—fidgeting with Instagram in a crosswalk, or lying prone beneath the heat of a laptop with Netflix streaming over you—three or four people gathering in the flesh to look each other in the eye and sketch out a world without pixels can feel slightly rebellious, or at least pleasantly out of place."
I thought this juxtaposition between social norms from the late-70's to today especially interesting. Then, three or four friends getting together at someone's house to play a game was socially isolating. Today--when most tweeners and teens spend free time alone in their rooms on their phones--three or four friends getting together at someone's house to play a game is forging a community.
I became discouraged when the box came in the mail and said the game was for kids ages 14+. When I flipped through the rule book, it was way more complicated than I remembered it. There are rules governing everything, and a dice roll decides all. Perhaps, that is why it is so engaging. There is a barrier to entry created by the daunting complexity of the game. The learning curve is so incredibly steep, it keeps out the casual gamer. Knowing how to play D&D is a status in itself.
I kept the box on a high shelf in my closet for months. There it sat, intriguing interest in the kids. They knew I had the game. I told them they weren't old enough to play. The fact that it was forbidden perhaps made it all that much more interesting to them. When we moved into our house in Falls Church, the game moved to the drawer of my bedside table. There it stayed for the entire year and a half of our stay there. When we moved to Jordan, the box came with us. Sometime during the move, Sam and Peter got their hands on it. They started begging me to play. Every weekend would begin with them pleading with me to play D&D.
I was reluctant, because it felt like an impossibly daunting task to distill all those rules and dice rolls into something that kids Sam, Peter, and Clementine's age could digest.
For example, this is how combat works in D&D (paraphased): players have to roll a dice to see who has the initiative (i.e. who goes first), then they have to roll dice to see how their morale is (their morale will subsequently affect the effectiveness in combat), they will move, then either perform a missile attack (shoot an arrow, for instance), cast a spell, or engage in hand-to-hand combat, then they have to roll a dice to see if their attack hits, if it does, a dice is rolled to see how much damage it does modified by the victim's armor class, etc.
But one morning, when Elise was working, I gave in.
"Okay," I said, "We'll play."
The kids couldn't believe their good fortune. After nearly two years of anticipation, we were finally going to play Dungeons & Dragons.
They picked their characters. Sam was a swordsman. Peter was a rogue with a bow and arrow. Clementine was an elfin queen, the sorceress of the group.
I decided the only way we were ever going to be able to play is if I ignored all the rules in the box and made up the rules as we went along. In D&D, there are more than six-sided dice. There are four-sided, ten-sided, even twenty-sided dice. Seven, in all. I read the adventure to them as if I were reading a story to them, only in this story, they would decide how the characters acted. When it came to a point in the story where we needed to see if an action they decided to take was successful or not, we rolled a dice. Any dice. I made it up as we went along. They loved it.
The role of Dungeon Master--the person who guides the other players in the adventure through narrative--is the heaviest lift in the game. Perhaps, slightly more so when your players are all under the age of 10. The game needs to move quickly. One of the biggest challenges I found was to get the kids away from facing every problem by attacking it. If they encountered a group of goblins on a trail, I wanted them to understand that attacking them was only one of many possible actions they could take.
Another--similar--challenge was getting them move off an unsuccessful action and think of trying something else. Last weekend, Sam was trying to climb a 30 foot pile of rocks to enter the next cavern. Peter and Clementine rolled the dice and climbed up. Sam couldn't. After the third attempt, with hungry wolves barking at his heels, I tried to get him to come up with another course of action. It wasn't easy. Role-playing means problem-solving, too.
We've played twice, and they keep asking to play. I think it is good for their imaginations. Not that they are lacking in that area.
I was never very handy as a kid or an adult. I brew beer now, and the kids are often around when I do. It will be interesting to see if brewing beer is something they will still be interested in when they are old enough to drink beer. (Hopefully, it is not something they become interested in before they are old enough to drink.) They wash and sanitize bottles for me, stir buckets of wort, and help fill and cap bottles like elves in Santa's workshop were his workshop a brewery.
I spent my childhood drawing and writing stories. Like my kids, I was more cerebral by nature. I played outside, buried Star Wars action figures in the dirt, and climbed trees, pulling the air plants off the oak trees and pitching them like arboreal grenades on the unsuspecting below. But what really engaged me and captured my attention for hours on end were realms of science-fiction and fantasy. I read voraciously. As Sam does now. Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, The Dragonriders of Pern, Dune, Elric of Melnibone. I devoured comic books, The Uncanny X-men, New Teen Titans, Swamp Thing, amassing dozens of long boxes filled with hundreds, nay, thousands of issues. I drew my own comic books, creating entire multi-verses of characters and villains. I was into role-playing games, mostly Dungeons & Dragons. I had a bag of dice, graph paper, and die-cast metal miniature figurines of centaurs, minotaurs, griffins, and, of course, dragons. I made up our own adventures and campaigns. I wrote our own monster manuals and spellbooks. Since, Sam has gained a love of reading, and Peter a love of drawing.
Not all the things I loved as a kid translate well to the present day. Fortunately, my favorite cartoon, "Super Friends", did. I bought the kids two "Super Friends" DVDs when we were in India and they watched them almost every day. While others, such as "Space Ghost"? Not so much.
Before we left India, I bought the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game Starter Set with plans to play with the kids during our two-month leave before we moved to Washington, D.C. When I bought it, I was little surprised the game still existed at all. I have since learned the game is enjoying a revival of sorts.
In a recent article in the New Yorker, titled, "The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons", Neima Jahromi describes the revival of the classic game. The name is ubiquitous, but I surmise the true nature of the game escapes many.
Jahomi writes, "When mainstream American culture was largely about standing in a factory line, or crowding into smoke-stained boardrooms for meetings, or even dropping acid and collapsing in a field for your hundred-person “be-in,” the idea of retiring to a dimly lit table to make up stories with three or four friends seemed fruitless and antisocial. Now that being American often means being alone or interacting distantly—fidgeting with Instagram in a crosswalk, or lying prone beneath the heat of a laptop with Netflix streaming over you—three or four people gathering in the flesh to look each other in the eye and sketch out a world without pixels can feel slightly rebellious, or at least pleasantly out of place."
I thought this juxtaposition between social norms from the late-70's to today especially interesting. Then, three or four friends getting together at someone's house to play a game was socially isolating. Today--when most tweeners and teens spend free time alone in their rooms on their phones--three or four friends getting together at someone's house to play a game is forging a community.
I became discouraged when the box came in the mail and said the game was for kids ages 14+. When I flipped through the rule book, it was way more complicated than I remembered it. There are rules governing everything, and a dice roll decides all. Perhaps, that is why it is so engaging. There is a barrier to entry created by the daunting complexity of the game. The learning curve is so incredibly steep, it keeps out the casual gamer. Knowing how to play D&D is a status in itself.
I kept the box on a high shelf in my closet for months. There it sat, intriguing interest in the kids. They knew I had the game. I told them they weren't old enough to play. The fact that it was forbidden perhaps made it all that much more interesting to them. When we moved into our house in Falls Church, the game moved to the drawer of my bedside table. There it stayed for the entire year and a half of our stay there. When we moved to Jordan, the box came with us. Sometime during the move, Sam and Peter got their hands on it. They started begging me to play. Every weekend would begin with them pleading with me to play D&D.
I was reluctant, because it felt like an impossibly daunting task to distill all those rules and dice rolls into something that kids Sam, Peter, and Clementine's age could digest.
For example, this is how combat works in D&D (paraphased): players have to roll a dice to see who has the initiative (i.e. who goes first), then they have to roll dice to see how their morale is (their morale will subsequently affect the effectiveness in combat), they will move, then either perform a missile attack (shoot an arrow, for instance), cast a spell, or engage in hand-to-hand combat, then they have to roll a dice to see if their attack hits, if it does, a dice is rolled to see how much damage it does modified by the victim's armor class, etc.
But one morning, when Elise was working, I gave in.
"Okay," I said, "We'll play."
The kids couldn't believe their good fortune. After nearly two years of anticipation, we were finally going to play Dungeons & Dragons.
They picked their characters. Sam was a swordsman. Peter was a rogue with a bow and arrow. Clementine was an elfin queen, the sorceress of the group.
I decided the only way we were ever going to be able to play is if I ignored all the rules in the box and made up the rules as we went along. In D&D, there are more than six-sided dice. There are four-sided, ten-sided, even twenty-sided dice. Seven, in all. I read the adventure to them as if I were reading a story to them, only in this story, they would decide how the characters acted. When it came to a point in the story where we needed to see if an action they decided to take was successful or not, we rolled a dice. Any dice. I made it up as we went along. They loved it.
The role of Dungeon Master--the person who guides the other players in the adventure through narrative--is the heaviest lift in the game. Perhaps, slightly more so when your players are all under the age of 10. The game needs to move quickly. One of the biggest challenges I found was to get the kids away from facing every problem by attacking it. If they encountered a group of goblins on a trail, I wanted them to understand that attacking them was only one of many possible actions they could take.
Another--similar--challenge was getting them move off an unsuccessful action and think of trying something else. Last weekend, Sam was trying to climb a 30 foot pile of rocks to enter the next cavern. Peter and Clementine rolled the dice and climbed up. Sam couldn't. After the third attempt, with hungry wolves barking at his heels, I tried to get him to come up with another course of action. It wasn't easy. Role-playing means problem-solving, too.
We've played twice, and they keep asking to play. I think it is good for their imaginations. Not that they are lacking in that area.
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