Over the last few years I've run Basic D&D sessions for my Korean elementary school students every once and a while and they're great guinea pigs for testing out different rules and styles of DMing since they come in with zero expectations. I think running sessions for them has improving my DMing more than anything else I've ever done. Here's what I've learned:

1. Dungeon Crawling is Amazingly Intuitive When I let the students choose their own equipment the first question I got was "can I have a hunting dog?" When I chose their equipment for them they immediate started using ten foot poles for everything. Without me teaching them anything, they immediately fell into so many classic dungeon crawling tactics with "don't split the party" being the first thing students who had played before told the newbies. Within an hour I had girls who like drawing ponies in their notebook feeding their pets to ghouls to keep them busy while they made a break for the exit with big grins on their faces.

2. Black Boxing it Works Since I was pressed for time I didn't teach them any rules, just basically go over things like "what does constitution mean?" They never even saw a dice (I used a dice rolling program) and it worked beautifully. Of course with veteran RPers going full black box is a bit extreme but these days I try to move more and more of the adjudication behind the DM screen so the PCs don't know exactly what rules I'm applying. I find it makes things run a lot faster.

3. Old School D&D is Amazingly Fast Or at least it's amazingly fast when you don't let things bog down. My record was the players going through 8 "encounters" in 40 minutes. That's extreme of course but I had a lot of groups going through a couple combats and plenty of dungeon exploration in less time than it took some adult groups I've seen to run through one 3.5ed combat. Keeping things entirely focused, helps a lot and I've carried that over to my sessions with adults. I've found that this is self-renforcing as fast resolution keeps players busy which makes resolution even faster.

4. Small Groups Work Best What was really interesting is a couple times I ran three students through a dungeon and then did the same dungeon with six student. In almost every case the three students did better, got more treasure and suffered fewer deaths than the six students despite having half of the firepower. Generally the small groups were well-oiled death machines (impressively so for ten year olds) while the six students were stumbling incompetent door-kicking cat herds. Success in Old School D&D depends on operating as a team and if you have each person do their own thing and wait for their turn to come up again the wheels start falling off.

Now that I'm thinking more about the issue, I find that the same thing often applies to my groups of adults. Pretty much every session I've run that didn't go as well as I hoped had a large party.

5. I'm Never Going Back to Individual Initiative I've fallen in love with side-based initiative. It not only speeds things up but makes the players think of themselves as a team, i.e. "what are we doing to do now guys, it our turn" rather than "it's my turn now, you guys wait while I decide what to do" which makes a massive amount of difference in actual play.

6. A Cliche is Worth a Thousand Words For one early session I was running a hacked version of In Search of the Unknown and a statue of a naked women fem that module was approaching them will ill intent. Since I wanted to keep things PG, I told them that it looked like a Greek goddess. What happened then was:
Kid: OK which Greek goddess?
Me: Um, what's you're Intelligence?
Player: 17.
Me: *rolls* *Thinks fast, rolls randomly to choose on Olympian goddess* It's Hera.
Player: She's the mean one, there no way we can talk to her. Let's smash her!

And they did thanks to a weaponized house cat and a bag full of hammers.

The amount of information I conveyed by saying "Hera" did more to illuminate the situation for them than a big fat paragraph of boxed text would have. While keeping things fresh is also important, never underestimate the power of cliches to impart a large amount of information in a very short amount of time and keep everyone on the same page and keep things running FAST.

7. Options Are the Death of Creativity For the first few sessions I printed the list of thief skills on the thief pre-gen character sheets. It was a disaster. I had smart and creative kids announcing things like "I will remove a trap" immediately upon walking into a room because it said so on their character sheet. Sure I could explain how things worked and tell them they had to find the traps first and that they should narrate what they`re doing to remove it but that just took up time and left them confused. Things worked massively better when I just printed up "you can do thief stuff" on their character sheets and adjudicated the thief skill percentages behind the screen without telling them what they could do. The massive increase of creativity on the part of the thief PCs when I did this shocked me.

8. Livestock Are Awesome Kids love pets and kept on bringing them. So what I did was give a couple different pregens a cow to see what happened. Those cows were awesome. I had players drop them on ghouls, use them as improvised terrain and send them into stirge caves so that the stirges gutted themselves on cow blood and become to bloated and sleepy to fly.

The thing with "cow" on your character sheet is you have to figure out how to use that cow as you can`t just walk into a room and tell the DM you want to use your cow, and that's exactly the sort of thing that gets players thinking in the right way. Character sheets should be full of things like cows and have as few things like "remove traps" as possible.

9. What Hit Points Are For The purpose of hit points is to communicate clearly to the players that they are fucked, that if they meet challenges head on and fight fair they will die horribly. Nothing gets the creative juices flowing like desperation and nothing breeds desperation like being down to 2 HP.

10. Cheaters Prosper No victory is sweeter than that gained by screwing someone else over in a completely unfair manner. I have never been prouder as a DM as when some of my older boys cast Command on a critter to "spin" so that it got dizzy and fell down on a patch of well-oiled caltrops that they then lit on fire. They then poked it with ten foot poles from just outside the area of the fire whenever it tried to get up. I`ve never seen players spend five minutes laughing uncontrollably after choosing a tactical option from a list on their character sheet.

Awesome. I've wondered often about how much information players need versus what they are provided or given and how that impacts play outside of my own group.

Quote from: Daztur;721090a weaponized house cat

That's mah hobby.

I need your notes on this. I'm in Japan teaching, and while I have huge high school groups, it is something that I could think about using for a club activity. It sounds great!

Quote from: Daztur;721090Character sheets should be full of things like cows and have as few things like "remove traps" as possible.

That's one the most entertaining pieces of D&D-related advice (which also happens to be valid) I've read in a long time.  :lol:

Nice to see a school system that's (apparently) not as twitchy about pretend violence as in English-speaking countries.

Sounds awesome, Daztur!

Wow. Great post. I definitely want to hear more.

Quote from: Daztur;7210903. Old School D&D is Amazingly Fast Or at least it's amazingly fast when you don't let things bog down.

This seems to be a well-kept secret. I've mostly played OD&D over the past few decades, but recently have taken an interest in some newer editions. I find that in the "good old days" we could explore a decent-sized dungeon in a day, but in newer editions we get through 3-4 encounters tops.

Quote from: Daztur;7210905. I'm Never Going Back to Individual Initiative I've fallen in love with side-based initiative. It not only speeds things up but makes the players think of themselves as a team, i.e. "what are we doing to do now guys, it our turn" rather than "it's my turn now, you guys wait while I decide what to do" which makes a massive amount of difference in actual play.

I used the old MB board game "HeroQuest" as an RPG tutorial for some new players a few years back. This game has a pre-set order of initiative and we found this to be really great because it gave the players the chance to set up some strategy. "Okay, the dwarf opens the door, the barbarian enters the room, and the mage is ready with spells."

My only problem with side-based is that the players have to determine who goes in which order. I'd rather base it on dexterity or something like that, and then once the order is fixed let them play from there.

Quote from: Daztur;7210907. Options Are the Death of Creativity Things worked massively better when I just printed up "you can do thief stuff" on their character sheets and adjudicated the thief skill percentages behind the screen without telling them what they could do. The massive increase of creativity on the part of the thief PCs when I did this shocked me.

This is why I ditched skill systems in my OD&D. When I tried to install one, I found my players spent the whole time trying to decide what they could attempt and limiting themselves to what was on their list. Without a skill system they would tend to just try things and I could reply with "okay, make a strength check" or something like that. Lists killed creativity.

In fact, I took things a step farther. I give spell lists without details so when a player wants to cast a spell he has a general idea of what it does but can be creative. I'm pretty sure Warp Wood isn't intended to allow a druid to bend a tree to capture a foe, but I let my druid do it becasue he was clever.

Quote from: finarvyn;721192My only problem with side-based is that the players have to determine who goes in which order. I'd rather base it on dexterity or something like that, and then once the order is fixed let them play from there.

I have been using no set order side based initiative in my OD&D game and it has worked great. There have been great instances of teamwork when players didn't have to wait for a turn in a certain order.

Quote from: finarvyn;721192This is why I ditched skill systems in my OD&D. When I tried to install one, I found my players spent the whole time trying to decide what they could attempt and limiting themselves to what was on their list. Without a skill system they would tend to just try things and I could reply with "okay, make a strength check" or something like that. Lists killed creativity.

I'm not using skills at all really. I am using backgrounds which act as a catch-all for doing things outside of class abilities. Many of them are things anyone can attempt but having the background means the character is just better at them.

Athlete, Thief, Healer, Ranger, Scholar, Explorer are all backgrounds without any accompanying detail. So when a character with the thief background performs actions that fall  under that background, the chances of success are increased.

The player gets to choose an area of expertise for the character apart from class but is not restricted by a menu of action options.

Quote from: finarvyn;721192This is why I ditched skill systems in my OD&D. When I tried to install one, I found my players spent the whole time trying to decide what they could attempt and limiting themselves to what was on their list. Without a skill system they would tend to just try things and I could reply with "okay, make a strength check" or something like that. Lists killed creativity.

I found that if you are relentless in insisting in describing first, in natural terms, and rolling second. That the problem largely goes away even with certain mechanic heavy games like GURPS.

When I designed the ability system for the Majestic Wilderlands, I thought about giving the players the freedom to juggle bonuses around so that it is possible to have one burglar better at stealth than picking locks. But I opted instead for a fixed progression as being more in the spirit of OD&D

Finally thanks to Philotomy's Musings, theOld School Primer and other folks writing about OD&D, I made it explicit that any character can attempt any action.

In my campaigns, the combination of the above has generally led the players to talk about their options as if their characters are there. When it occurs the most common talk about mechanical effect is generally about spell area of effect.

I do think that if you plan on having classes that are good at things other than combat or magic there is no way around some type of ability/skill system.

Quote from: Silverlion;721101Awesome. I've wondered often about how much information players need versus what they are provided or given and how that impacts play outside of my own group.

Yes, the information flow is something that is really vital to a good game and small tweaks to it can really change game play. For example putting different things on a character sheet even if I'm doing resolution the same way really changed how the kids behaved. Playing with kids is a clearer way to see this than playing with adults since they're just going by what you show them, not previous experience.

Quote from: BarefootGaijin;721103I need your notes on this. I'm in Japan teaching, and while I have huge high school groups, it is something that I could think about using for a club activity. It sounds great!

Sure let me give more detailed information about how I ran this. For rules I started off with Holmes Basic and switched to Labyrinth Lord. I used either first or second level pregens (3d6 in order as the good lord intended) with the second level ones having one magical item rolled randomly from the 1ed DMG tables. I found that except for very small groups the first level ones worked a bit better as low hit point totals put salutary fear into them, but then I usually tweaked damage a bit low so that non magic-users could generally take one hit without dying and let emergency CLW or potion use save people who got killed if applied immediately.

For equipment I gave them basic weapons and armor, food, water, 5 gp and the either let them choose two extra pieces of equipment "anything that's not too big or too expensive" or rolled 1d30 twice for each pregen on the following table that I made up:
1 Bag of coins
2 Tiny diamond
3 Torches
4 Lantern and oil
5 Magic glow in the dark stone
6 Magic ultra-sharp knife (i.e. +1)
7 Extra weapon
8 Extra weapon
9 Two flasks of oil
10 Dog
11 Cat
12 Pony
13 Parrot
14 Monkey
15 An especially stinky dog
16 Caltrops
17 Rope
18 Ten foot pole
19 Healing potion
20 Climbing equipment
21 Lots of rope
22 Handcuffs and chain
23 Telescope
24 Your little brother
25 Chicken
26 Cart
27 Falcon
28 Fox skin
29 Goat
30 Cow

I made it animal heavy as I found that kids enjoy having pets. I got about equally good results with them choosing their own stuff or with random equipment, but random equipment is faster so I switched over to that after a few sessions.

For the character sheets I kept them as sparse as possible, remember I only have an hour to run this so I didn't have much time to teach them the rules so my goal was to get them through the dungeon door ten minutes into class. Just name, HPs, ability scores, equipment, and class specific stuff.

For thieves I found that not printing a thief skill list worked VASTLY better so I just put "Thief Abilities: you are good at doing sneaky and thief-style stuff and if you attack someone who doesn't know you’re there it hurts a lot."

For clerics and magic-users I randomly chose a number of first level spells equal to wisdom (clerics) or int (magic-users) minus ten and wrote up really short descriptions of each and let them choose which to memorize. For some reason I had a bunch of idiot magic-users with control normal fires as the best spell available. Shocking grasp, sleep, grease, command, protection from evil and cure light wounds were the most popular.

For adjudication I didn't teach them ANY rules EVER. I did all rolling on a dice rolling program and never told them anything I was rolling and why. I made one exception with one class as an experiment and found that they liked rolling dice but kept on asking why I was rolling dice for some things and why some dice should be high and others low and while they enjoyed getting some rules knowledge, just spending time to teach them wasn't really worth it in my opinion if you're just doing a one-shot.

In general I used ability score checks for a lot of stuff and used thief skills as sort of a "saving throw against being dumb," sort of a second chance if they would've failed otherwise.

The main sources of confusion were:
-Vocab for ability scores (easy to overcome).
-Why are my HPs so low!
-How many times each thing could be used, especially after I told them the very basics of Vancian magic (you can use each spell once!). I then had students ask me. "How many times can I use a sword?" "How many times can I use a rope?" Took a while to get through to them to just use common sense and run with it.

For the dungeons I used In Search of the Unknown and a pair of One Page Dungeon modules: http://www.onepagedungeon.info/one-page-dungeon-contest-2012 ("Tomb of Snowbite Pass" and "The First Casualty").

For running stuff I played it pretty free and loose and met the students half way when they came up with stuff. "You want to buy a flashlight for your equipment? Sure! "You want to tell you cat to launch itself at its face? Sure." *rolls charisma* *rolls cat attack roll* "Now the monster has too much facecat to see. Good job."

Again I can't emphasize enough how much hitting six or so students degraded the experience. The ONLY six-kid session that went well was one in which the party split in three and I could go back and forth between each group, which was cool since one group accidentally sent icicles falling on another group's face and whatnot but otherwise they just couldn't coordinate and it got to be a chore. 3-4s kids worked beautifully.

As for demographics almost all of the students were 5-6 grade (which is a bit older in Korea than in the states) and one group of middle school boys. Those two boys were awesome. They tore through a dungeon with 5 HPs between them. Interestingly enough, as long as the groups were small enough that the louder boys couldn't spotlight hog the girls tended to really get into it and on average display more Old School rat-bastard cunning than the boys. Probably my most cunning groups were the two middle school boys and a group of 2 outspoken girls and 1 shy boy who were a ruthless killing machine with great teamwork and everyone pitching in equally.

I'd love to take my classes through an encounter or two for extra credit - particularly classes that involve remedial English. I've used D&D for metaphors occasionally, but doing so is hardly ever successful. When I was teaching eighteen year olds a few of them would get it, but not enough to make it a worthwhile inclusion to lecture creation. Now that I'm teaching full adults (usually mid-forties), none of them seem to understand it when I bust out a reference to D&D (though one class last term did like my use of The Walking Dead as a way to discuss indeterminacy through metaphor).

Quote from: Philotomy Jurament;721134That's one the most entertaining pieces of D&D-related advice (which also happens to be valid) I've read in a long time.  :lol:

Happy you liked it and I think it's really important. If your character sheet has a list of solutions to problems then you start thinking about WHICH hammer to use to beat down every nail you run into. If your character sheet has a bunch of tools to use to solve problems then you have to think about HOW to use them and you get a lot better responses.

If your character sheet says "remove trap" then you can just say "I remove a trap" but you can't say "I cow." And that makes all the difference. I've been brainstorming ways to make "cow good, remove trap bad" the core design rubric for an OSR hack. It's basically my old school moment of zen

Quote from: Roger the GS;721166Nice to see a school system that's (apparently) not as twitchy about pretend violence as in English-speaking countries.

Yeah here you get kids wumping each other all the time and the teachers just shrug although corporal punishment is getting more and more frowned upon with stuff like kids taking cell phone videos of teachers punching girls in the face and then posting it online getting in the news.

Some D&D violence doesn't really register...

Quote from: Spinachcat;721171Wow. Great post. I definitely want to hear more.

Hmmm, any other good war stories? It all blends together after a while. As I said in the last post girls a freaking awesome at dungeon crawling as long as you don't have a bunch of nosier boys dominating the planning.

Had the kids bring hot water bottles and pour them over ice critters, tell dogs to grab the bad guys' ankles to slow them down while dancing out of range with reach weapons, cunning use of lassos and ten foot poles, throwing oil and fire and spider webs rather than getting within reach of the giant spiders, bribe animals with food, bribe kobolds with gold, all pretty standard dungeon crawling tactics, nothing too surprising except the great speed with which they took to them.

Quote from: Géza Echs;721220I'd love to take my classes through an encounter or two for extra credit - particularly classes that involve remedial English. I've used D&D for metaphors occasionally, but doing so is hardly ever successful. When I was teaching eighteen year olds a few of them would get it, but not enough to make it a worthwhile inclusion to lecture creation. Now that I'm teaching full adults (usually mid-forties), none of them seem to understand it when I bust out a reference to D&D (though one class last term did like my use of The Walking Dead as a way to discuss indeterminacy through metaphor).

Yeah, I haven't ever done it with high school kids and could imagine it failing with middle school kids who are a bit more jaded but pre-teens who love Marvel movies, Maple Story and Greek Myths? It's just as much crack to them as it was for kids in the 80's (again, as long as you keep the group size small). Had them begging me for months and months to play it again before I broke down.