Introducing Your Child to D&D: Part One - Telling the Story

They’ve rolled every die in your dice collection, they’ve claimed to have memorized each entry in the Monster Manual, they even helped you paint that custom Ancient Green Dragon mini—okay, they took a stab at priming the base. In either case, your child is begging you to play Dungeons & Dragons but now you’re asking yourself: where do I start? As many adults have experienced firsthand, D&D can be a daunting hobby to break into. Today we’ll explore some strategies for introducing your child to the wonderful world of Dungeons & Dragons.

Where Do You Begin?

Do you start by making a character with your child? Or explain what the different ability scores mean and what they do in the game? Maybe you start with the archetypal D20 Test, practicing various rolls until they understand the system’s core mechanic? The myriad paths before you by which you introduce your child to D&D can be overwhelming! And shouldn't playing D&D be fun?

Don’t sweat it! You, like so many geeky gamer parents before you, are overthinking the how of it all when you should be focusing on the what. And that is the story.

Story Comes First

Always has, always will.

Everything else is just the tools one game system or another uses to adjudicate the actions of the characters. In fact, you don’t even need the rules to play D&D. *Gasp!* What did he just say? Yes, it’s true! Even the rules, at times, can get in the way of a good story. They are really only useful in that they create a sense of reality and fairness at the table. This is what separates TTRPGs from games like Warhammer 40k and Dreadball. They both have rules, crunchy game mechanics, and a plethora of colorful game pieces available to geek out over. But D&D revolves around the story.

Remember when you were growing up and you’d get lost in an imaginative story with imaginary characters in an imaginary world? At its core, D&D is just like that. It’s the joint story we tell together around the table, the majority of which, if not all, takes place inside our heads. This is exactly where you should begin when introducing your child to D&D.

Let’s Tell A Story Together

Start by asking your child if they want to tell a story with you, one of those back-and-forth kind where you take turns suggesting characters, landscapes, events, heroes, and villains, with no end in sight, purely for the joy of creating something out of thin air together. Let the ideas go wherever your child takes them—the more imaginative, the better. Have fun and be silly! This is an exercise in daring to imagine the impossible. 

Next, try the same exercise but ask your child to pick just one of the things or characters they came up with to focus on—it could be anything from an old shoe that poops colors to a song that makes you burp to a time-traveling dancing dinosaur—and ask them: what sort of adventures this ‘character’ might go on? When they offer an idea (you may need to help prompt them with a few options if they’re feeling stuck or lost) ask if you can guide their character/thing in a story related to that adventure. This will help set the foundations of the DM and Player relationship, the give-and-take that (ideally) happens around the table. Expect a lot of interruptions, expect a lot of chaos! And be sure to give a lot of encouragement for listening and responding to your ideas in the story.

This kind of exercise should be relaxed, open-ended, and most of all fun! Try doing it together next time you’re in the car, or waiting in line somewhere. Ask your child to come up with different characters and different adventure ideas. Involve a sibling or friend or another parent. Challenge your young one to recall information from an earlier adventure you told together and ask how the characters or the world or the story has changed. If your child is having fun then you’re doing it right!

Characters Guide Everything

Adding Characterization

The next layer to add on is exploring characterization, that is, what makes a character feel awesome and authentic, not necessarily real. Since D&D—and pretty much all stories for that matter—revolve around characters and their actions, understanding the building blocks of a character is crucial in being able to tell a story. Far too many youngins (and a fair share of adults!) dive into a D&D campaign without so much as a thought as to how their characters might develop throughout the story. You can of course have a lot of fun playing this way—“I’m just here to kick some butt!”—yet there is so much more to glean from role playing when your character embarks on a transformative journey.

For this exercise, ask your child to imagine a new character or expand upon a previous one they’ve connected with. Tell them you’re going to make a “background” for this character. Start asking them questions about this character, beginning with the basics. What is their name? Where do they come from? Do they have any family or friends? What do they like or dislike? What is their biggest wish? What is their biggest fear? Encourage your child to build upon their answers to these questions, and if possible, have them come up with reasons for why they chose those answers. This can help them learn how to role-play by understanding the motivations of a character. It isn’t necessary for your child to explicitly understand this connection, just doing the exercise will be enough for them to embody the skills.

Walking in Their Shoes

With a solid foundation of who their character is, it’s now time to retry the story exercise with them playing only as that character. Come up with a compelling opening challenge for their character to solve based on the background you created with them earlier. Encourage them to find solutions that fit the character they created. For example, if their character is a time traveling tap-dancing dinosaur whose biggest fear is losing, set the story at a talent show plagued with issues they have to solve in order to win. “Your space-helmet-wearing dancing dinosaur is ready to walk onto the stage when she notices that one of her tap shoes is missing! What do they do?” If your child is stressed out by the introduction of stakes to the story, conjure up some allies or special powers that make solving their problems easier. This is a lot like actual D&D!

Bringing the Story Home

All good characters and stories seek to resolve a question or problem, that is to say, stories are about characters finding a resolution to a conflict. This framework helps storytellers and role players understand the arc of their characters and tell a story with meaning.

After honing your child’s storybuilding and characterization skills, try exploring potential goals or “quests” their characters(s) might go on. Bonus points if any of these goals align with the background you made previously. Having a goal that your child’s character is working towards is a big element of being a successful D&D player. After all, D&D relies heavily on player cooperation and what is everyone cooperating towards? A common goal! 

What a Character Wants

Understanding that there is something their character wants will help bridge the gap of cooperation and agency. When you know there is something you’re after, something you need to move towards, it empowers you to make choices and that can create agency. This moves the exercise away from telling the child what options are in front of them and towards that Holy Grail of RPG questions: “What do you want to do?”

When your child begins to drive the story forward with their ideas on how to achieve their character’s goal, then you know they’ve succeeded in taking aboard the exercises. Now the process shifts to how are they with understanding rules and limitations! We’ll address that topic in Part Two - Learning the Rules.