# Deforch's Adventures--my son's first game (updated 7/1/12)



## Cerebral Paladin (Dec 14, 2010)

Last Friday was a momentous occasion--my four year old son played his first Dungeons and Dragons adventure.  My son played a human ranger named "Deforch" (I'm spelling that phonetically--he named the character, and it sounds like DEAF-orch) who wields two swords, or rather, as he quickly and emphatically informed me, two lightsabers.  I had the good sense not to argue with him about lightsabers, so I just statted them up as longswords and moved on.  A girl had been kidnapped by skeletons, and Deforch was asked by her family to rescue her.  First, he looked for skeleton footprints (I was pleased that he came up with that idea without prompting), and one natural 20 later, he was on his way.  Deforch found that the trail led to a dark and dangerous cave, but my son decided Deforch wasn't scared because he had two flashlights in addition to two lightsabers.  (I explained that they were magic instead of like the flashlights we have.)  Inside the cave, Deforch was attacked by two skeletons, but he won initiative and smashed one to pieces before it even moved.  The other clawed him once before he could beat it, and there was a little upsetness about needing to let the monsters take their turns as well, but Deforch prevailed and the unhappiness passed.  

My son then declared that the skeletons were working for a dragon, at least in part because I had a white dragon mini out, and I figured, what the heck, why not?  So he went into the next room, where there was the dragon as well as the kidnapped girl.  So Deforch used his daily power to attack the dragon.  The dragon breathed ice and cold on him, and hurt him pretty badly, but Deforch persevered and triumphed.  I asked if the dragon was going to get away, but my son insisted that Deforch was going to beat all of the skeletons and dragons, so Deforch cut its head off.  He returned to the village with the rescued girl and with some treasure and it was the end of the adventure.  He then said that next time, he wants to play in an adventure with a nice dragon (about which more in my next post).  He also said, "now that I can play Dungeons and Dragons, can we play two adventures each day?"

I think we can categorize that as a total win.


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## thejc (Dec 14, 2010)

yes win indeed. Happy bonding!


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## ellinor (Dec 14, 2010)

Love it!  And I look forward to the friendly dragon.


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## Cerebral Paladin (Dec 14, 2010)

*Deforch's second adventure*

My son and I played another game of D&D yesterday afternoon.  As might be expected, it was another day of milestones.  He began by telling me that Deforch wanted to go to the castle where his family was.  I asked about Deforch's family, and he told me that they were all heroes, and that Deforch has a baby sister (who is not, I presume, a hero yet).  He also reminded me that he wanted there to be a nice dragon in this game.

The trip to the castle was convenient, because the adventure I had prepared (i.e. thought about vaguely in the shower) started with an encounter while Deforch was camping by the road.  So I said that the trip to the castle would take a while, and that Deforch would have to camp on the way there because it was farther than he could walk in a day.  My son agreed with this, because the castle was in Mexico.  (I was a little surprised by this, but I was happy to accept it.  He later said that the first adventure was in Germany, whereas this adventure was taking place in Japan.  This surprised me for two reasons:  (1)  I had no idea that he knew that Germany was a place and (2) if he's traveling from Germany to Mexico and he's currently in Japan, I think he's chosen a poor route.)  So I described how he had made camp, started a fire and cooked some food, and was now sleeping in his camp.  I then had him roll a Perception check (he was clearly very nervous about this roll).  Fortunately, his rolling was terrific, so I told him that Deforch woke up to the sound of some skeletons walking towards him.  He leaped up, drew his swords, and the battle was joined.  The trio of skeletons won initiative, but because he woke up before they got near him, they could only close part of the distance without being able to reach him (I haven't introduced charging yet).  On Deforch's turn, he ran up to the skeletons and used an encounter power which allows him to attack every enemy that's adjacent to him.  Some decent attack rolls later, and he had hit each of the skeletons.  They were only minions (although again, I haven't explained minions to my son), so almost as soon as the fight had started it was over, with three shattered skeletons at his feet.

In the morning, a great dragon appeared to Deforch.  It explained that its name was Califax the Gold, and that it needed to speak to Deforch.  Deforch introduced himself, more or less politely.  Califax asked if Deforch had recovered a gold cup in his previous adventure.  Deforch said that he had (the treasure from the previous game was 5 gold pieces and a gold cup).  When Califax saw the cup, he explained that it was a powerful magic item, the Cup of al-Faisal (which we can think of as the Maguffin of al-Faisal).  The cup has powerful magic for good, but it can also be twisted to evil, which is why the skeletons and the other dragon wanted it.  The dragon explained that the skeletons from the last night had been drawn to the cup, and that Deforch needed to go to their dungeon to stop the threat.  My son also helpfully clarified that the cup had been stolen from the dragon, who had kept it in his attic.  Sure, why not?  Its message delivered, Califax disappeared in a puff of smoke and fire.

Deforch found the skeletons' footprints, and followed them back to a spooky old abandoned graveyard, and in particular to an ancient crypt in the graveyard.  The heavy stone door was sealed shut, but there was a stone carving on the front of it:  four stone hollow columns, labeled 1, 2, (scratched out), and 4.  There was also a tray filled with colored polished stones in front of the door.  Deforch had encountered his first puzzle.  My son immediately figured out that the scratched out section had been another number, although he was a little unsure whether it was a 3 or a 5.  At first, he was a little reluctant to engage with the puzzle, but I encouraged him, and he tried putting one stone in each slot, counting them as he did so.  A brass cover came out in the 1 column, but nothing else happened.  He then tried removing the stones and counting with different stones, but there was no effect.  After a little while, he tried putting a second stone in each column as well--the second stone in the first column fell out, but a brass cover came out in the 2 column now that it had two stones in it.  That was enough for him to figure it out, so he put a third stone in the scratched out column and a third and a fourth stone in the 4 column, and the stone door swung open. 

Deforch bravely entered the crypt, although my son was clearly a little scared, and two zombies leaped out and attacked him.  He fought the zombies; it was a little dicey at times, but his rolls continued to be on fire.  Eventually, after having dropped the first zombie, he did his twin-strike attack at the second zombie and rolled a natural 20--his first critical hit!  It turns out that zombies have the special weakness that they're automatically killed by any critical hit, so that finished the second zombie off, and he had won the battle.

Deforch found a place for flowers at the back of the crypt, which was the ancient family crypt of the al-Faisal family, with the flowers knocked on the floor.  He hesitated about putting the flowers back where they should have been--he also wanted to bring the flowers to his mommy at the castle.  But finally, with some prompting, he put the flowers back and heard singing.  A box under the flower stand opened, and he found a potion of healing.  Califax then appeared again and explained that by making the ghosts happy, he had solved the problem, and there would be no more undead from this graveyard.  Deforch said that because the ghosts had gone away, he could now take the flowers to his mommy, which Califax agreed would be fine.  And so, Deforch set off again to head towards his family's castle, having eliminated another undead threat and having gained some flowers and a potion of healing.

Among the momentous milestones of the day:  Deforch's first critical hit; Deforch's first fight against multiple non-minions; Deforch's first puzzle encounter; and Deforch's first (useful) magical treasure.  All in all, another very successful D&D game with my son.


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## Cerebral Paladin (Dec 18, 2010)

*Deforch's Third Adventure*

I ran my son through his third D&D game today.

He insisted that the game had to begin with Deforch arriving at the castle and seeing his parents.  That was fine, so Deforch hiked for another week or so and reached the castle.  In order to open the castle gates, Deforch had to count backwards from ten--that was all my son's idea, although now I'm trying to come up with a plausible explanation.  My best guess is that there are dopplegangers or other impostors/possessed people who for some reason can't count backwards, so having people count backwards is a way of checking for impostors.  But we can leave that aside for the moment.  This was also quite funny because my son set the challenge, but then proceeded to have difficulty with it.  I counted up to ten, and then prompted him again, and at that point he was able to count down with only a little additional assistance.  (He often has trouble with the sequence 6-7-8, in either direction.)

With that accomplished, the guards ushered Deforch into the castle.  My son then insisted that we pick out miniatures for Deforch's parents.  I explained that we usually only need figurines for characters that are going to be involved in combat, and that the rest of the time we can just use descriptions and our imaginations, but my son was having none of it.  He was grudgingly willing to accept that we didn't need to draw out a map of the castle on the battlemap, but he demanded that there be figures for Deforch's parents.  So I picked out a female armored warrior-type figure for his mommy and a wizard figure for his daddy (after checking that it was okay to have his dad be a wizard), and we were able to move on.  I also asked if the castle was Deforch's parents' castle, or whether they were guests there, and he said that they owned the castle.  Apparently Deforch comes from a noble family--who knew?  He also said that this was their second castle, because their first castle had been destroyed.  I thought this was a great potential hook for the future, but my son then explained that Deforch's mommy didn't like the first castle, so she had it knocked down with a wrecking ball and built a new one.  Alrighty then...

Deforch spent a little while talking with a friendly dragon in the castle, which he kept on calling white but I insisted (somewhat successfully) was in fact a silver dragon.  My son informed me that the name of the dragon was "Freezie," which is very consistent with his overall naming convention of naming things by adding "-ie" as a diminutive to a descriptive word, but that also makes Freezie's draconic nature die a little bit each time his name is used.  Orichalcum suggested that it might be short for Freezax or something.  I'm not sure that helps...

Deforch then met with his parents, and gave his mommy the flowers he found in the crypt in the last game.  She was touched, and thanked him and mentioned that Deforch's daddy used to give her flowers from dungeons all the time.  Deforch's parents also complimented him on his accomplishments on his previous adventures.  We then had a bit of an issue:  my son wanted to speak for other characters besides Deforch.  I let him do so to some extent, but my son kept pushing for more.  

Anyway, at that point a cook rushed in, curtsied to Deforch's parents, and told them that one of the serving boys had been attacked by some form of monster in one of the store rooms of the castle while he was fetching some flour for the day's bread.  The boy's injuries were being treated, but everyone was very worried about the report of monsters.  Deforch immediately said he would go to deal with the monsters--I was prepared for his parents to send him, but I was glad that it wasn't necessary.  He said that he would go with Freezie, which did catch me a little off-guard.  I asked if Deforch wanted to fly on Freezie to get down to the storeroom quickly, and my son enthusiastically agreed.  After they flew down, though, he found that the circular staircase down to the store room was too small for Freezie to go down, so Deforch would have to go on his own.

Deforch failed a Perception check, so while he noticed some blood, he didn't spot or hear the monsters.  My son then said that the blood must be from a four-armed skeleton with blood on its swords, based on the Monster Manual picture of a "skeletal tomb guardian" that he had been very impressed with before.  I said that he wasn't ready to face the four-armed skeleton yet and that the monsters were something else, and he got pretty upset.  There's an interesting issue here--to what extent should I let the game move towards just freestyle make-believe versus trying to maintain some sense of actual adventures where he controls Deforch and I fill in the gameworld.  But it caused a little bit of tension--I also think that both my son and I were not quite at our best in terms of mood, focus, and so forth today.  But I insisted on this point, and once the game got moving again, he calmed down and seemed to forget the issue.

In any event, as Deforch went forward, he was attacked by four kruthik hatchlings.  For people who don't know the 4E Monster Manual well, kruthiks are kinda like dogs crossed with crabs with a large dollop of viciousness added--they're quadruped hunters with chitinous armor, nasty claws, and an aggressive willingness to attack people.  Three of them moved into position around Deforch, but only one of them could attack during the surprise round, and it missed.  On Deforch's turn, he did his encounter attack that attacks all of the enemies adjacent to him and hit all three, killing each of them (as they were just minions that only take one hit to defeat).  He then moved next to the last kruthik and spent an action point to take an additional action and to attack it as well, killing it.  With the kruthik defeated, he noticed the tunnel that they had dug to enter the store room.  With a little prompting, Deforch climbed down the tunnel to find if there were more of the kruthiks.

My son was insisting that Deforch was going to find a room filled with a bunch more kruthiks, or as he referred to them, "me-mes" (apparently the noise he thought they would make).  My son spent a while clambering around on all fours going "me me" as he imitated them.  It was very cute.  Fortunately, I planned on a kruthik lair as well, so he rushed out to find two more of the kruthik hatchlings and a kruthik young (which are a tougher type of the same creature).  The hatchlings won initiative, and one of them wounded him, but then on Deforch's turn he moved into position to attack all three and unleashed his encounter power again.  He hit the tough kruthik and one of the hatchlings, and then used another power to turn the miss against the last kruthik into a hit.  That eliminated the hatchlings, but the tougher kruthik hit him pretty hard on its action.  He then used his daily attack to hurt it very badly, but it hit him again.  At this point, both Deforch and the kruthik were bloodied (i.e. below half hit points), and my son was pretty nervous.  I was a little nervous too, but I knew something my son didn't:  the kruthik couldn't do enough damage to drop Deforch in one hit, whereas it only had three hit points left, meaning that it was almost guaranteed that any hit by Deforch would finish it off.  Sure enough, a round or two later Deforch hit it and won the fight.

My son recognized, correctly, that Deforch had to rest up and regain hit points.  He insisted on going back to the castle to do this, even though I pointed out that he could take a short rest in the caves he had found.  Still, no problem with wanting to rest at home, and this way he got to tell Freezie about what he'd found.

Deforch returned to the kruthik cave.  There were two exits--one was a kruthik tunnel that was too small for him to enter, and the other was a break into a square, carefully carved stone chamber.  Deforch sent Freezie's "younger brother, who's really small and can fit and can use his fire breath to burn up all of the rest of the kruthiks" into the tunnel--who am I to argue with a plan like that?  Deforch then went into the other room, which was a beautifully carved dwarven hall, with about a 7' ceiling and relief carvings of dwarves doing heroic dwarven things with hammers and axes.  My son was nodding along happily, when something occurred to me.  I asked him if he knew what a dwarf was and he said "no."  So I showed him some pictures and explained the basics of dwarves to him.  We then got back to the game, and I said that there was a fancy armor stand at the far end of the room with some very nice looking hide armor on it (like the armor Deforch wears) and a chest filled with gold.  i also pointed out a crushed kruthik midway along the floor.  My son figured out that the crushed kruthik probably meant that there was a trap, but Deforch headed across the room anyway, at which point a large stone cylinder swung through the room (like the clean-up bar that knocks down any remaining pins in a bowling alley) and knocked Deforch back to where he entered the room, in addition to battering him.  My son thought about how to get past the trap, and decided that he could jump it (which was one of my planned solutions).  He rolled badly though, and Deforch got battered again and flung back to the entrance once more.  He used his Second Wind ability to get back some much needed hit points and tried once more.  This time, he rolled a 19, which when added to his high Athletics skill, easily allowed him to jump the stone cylinder.  

At the far end of the room, he found a lever that allowed him to disable the trap.  He then took the chest of gold and the hide armor.  I told him that there was clearly another door out of the room, but that it was locked and that he couldn't figure out how to open it (because there pretty much had to be, on the one hand, but I wanted the adventure to be decidedly over, on the other--this will provide a starting place for a future session).  Deforch returned to the castle, had Freezie's little brother breath on the chest three times to open it (my son clearly had invented some sort of magical locking mechanism, although I was vague on the details), and told his parents about the adventure.  Deforch's daddy cast a spell and informed him that the hide armor he had found was magical.  Freezie said that it was getting late, and he had to go back to his home cave (again, an improvisation of my son's).  And with that, we ended the session.  As the session ended, I told my son about experience points, and that Deforch had gotten enough to go up to level 2--we'll handle the process of leveling up before the next game.  (I originally hadn't planned on leveling him up yet, but either his next game or the game after that will be with a friend of his whose character has reached second level and gotten some magic items.  I figure that while it can be perfectly fun to play a first level character with a second level character, Deforch has gotten enough experience to level by the book, and it will be more fun for them to be balanced.)

All told, it was another successful game, although perhaps somewhat less so than the previous games.  My son clearly had a lot of fun, but we also had an increased amount of friction about the issue of authorial control.  I'm trying to strike a good balance--being flexible, but still maintaining some structure and not letting it just become a pure free-form make-believe, but it's difficult, and I'm not sure that I'm getting it right.  I also think that I need to stat up a friendly dragon as a companion shortly, which isn't a bad thing anyway in a game with a single PC.  (I'll probably find reasons for the dragon to not be along on the adventure when my son plays together with his friend).

We also had some new milestones:  the first real trap that he's encountered, the first permanent magic item he's found, and of course the first time he's leveled up.  We also added in some additional rules in my effort to gradually ramp up the complexity and get him to the full ruleset without ever overwhelming him, although there are still some rules that I'm just ignoring (opportunity attacks stand out, for people who care).  And when I asked him to describe the game for Orichalcum at dinner, his first response was "It was great!" so I must still be doing something right.


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## Cerebral Paladin (Dec 30, 2010)

*Deforch's fourth adventure--now with another player!*

My son and I played another game of D&D last Wednesday--his first game with another player.

We briefly tried to play on Sunday, but my son was too hyped up for it to really be feasible.  We talked a little about what powers he wanted to get as he leveled up--my son chose to have Deforch's mommy teach him to be extra skilled with his sword, so I gave him the Heavy Blade Expertise feat, and then he chose the Hunter's Privilege utility powers.  My son also said that Deforch wanted to learn his mommy's sword power, "Overstrike Sword Pinwheel," but I said that he needed to be higher level to learn that.  "Yes," he sagely agreed, "you need to be 15th level to learn Overstrike Sword Pinwheel."  So I guess Deforch's mommy is Paragon Tier.  I also thought that "Overstrike Sword Pinwheel" sounded like a completely plausible 4E power.  But at that point, things got too chaotic, so we decided that my son would just make up a Deforch story instead of playing D&D.

A few days later, we got together with my son's friend to play a game of D&D together.  His friend is about the same age as my son--a couple of months older--and he's played a few sessions with his dad, but this was both of their first experience playing together.  His friend's character is an eponymous human fighter, which led to a little confusion, because my son had trouble understanding that his friend's name was both the player's name and the character's name.

We began the adventure basically where Deforch's last adventure left off.  First, we introduced his friend's character, saying that he was old friends with Deforch and had come by to visit Deforch's family's castle and to go on an adventure with him.  (I personally assume that Deforch and the other PC fostered together somewhere, since the implied setting details make them similarly aged nobles who are friends, but I didn't really want to explain the idea of fostering to two four-year-olds, so I kept this assumption to myself.)  The friend's PC knew Deforch's family, but Deforch introduced him to Freezie.  Then, Deforch's father, a wise and learned wizard, explained that he had translated the runes on the door in the dwarven hall that Deforch discovered.  The runes said that two dwarven warriors should pass through together, and I drew two special stones for standing on in front of the door.  He also explained that teamwork would be really important for this adventure, and that nobody had seen any dwarves in many years.  With that, the adventure began.

The two boys quickly figured out that they should stand on the stones, and the door rolled open.  They then went through into the next room.  Two zombies and two skeletons attacked them.  My son correctly inferred that the undead were undead dwarves, which is what I had planned but not wanted to make explicit, for fear that it would upset the boys.  They dispatched the enemies without much difficulty, but we discovered an interesting problem along the way:  combats with multiple players take much longer than a combat with only one player, leading to some frustration and attention wandering on the part of the two players.  My son got pretty upset about waiting for his friend's character, both skeletons, and both zombies to go before he got his first turn, and he also kept wanting Freezie to fly by and blast the zombies with its breath weapon.  But with a little gentle effort, my son calmed down and got into the game.  Still, it was a good thing that both the friend's dad and I were working to keep things focused, because otherwise the fun of spending time with a friend might have overwhelmed the ability to play the game.

With the undead dealt with, they saw that there were two doors out of the room.  Initially, the boys decided to have their characters split up, so each could go through one of the doors, but with a little nudging from their dads, they decided that splitting the party was maybe not such a good idea, and went through only one of the doors.  Behind that door, they found an ancient dwarven statue that spoke to them.  The statue explained that no dwarves had been in these halls for many years, and that they should explore and find out what happened to the dwarves.  Perhaps, if they found the dwarves, they could reunite them with the good humans and make everyone happy.  The statue also told them that they might find some useful treasure in these halls, but to be careful, as there were some traps that would not recognize them as allies.

They went into the next room, where they found another round door with stepping stones in front of it, but this one had three stones.  There was also another statue in this room, but this statue didn't talk.  There was also another door out of the room that was covered with rubble--I made it clear that they would not be able to move the rubble in the scope of this game session.  They immediately identified the puzzle of how to open the door; with a little nudging, they started trying things.  First the other PC and Deforch each stood on one stone--the stones sank into the ground, each with a different sound effect, but the door remained closed.  Then my son's friend's PC tried moving from one stone to another really quickly, but the stone he stepped off came up before the other one went down, and the door remained closed.  Next Deforch tried standing on one stone and pressing down on the other with his swords.  I thought that was a really good idea, and I considered letting it work, but I ruled that the swords couldn't exert enough pressure to cause the other stone to go down.  At that point, I prompted them to look around the room to see if there was anything else they could use.  My son said that they would try to move the statue.  Deforch got a truly woeful Athletics skill check, but his friend did better, and I said that they slowly dragged the statue across the room.  This was all done with moving around minis--I had a mini for a living statue that I used to represent the perfectly normal stone statue.  Throughout, my son definitely, and I think his friend as well, found it much easier to interact with symbolic representations on the battlemap then with purely imaginary concepts.  (This had also showed up with the insistence that we needed minis to represent Deforch's family, even when they had never been in combat in the game.)  With the statue on one of the stones and the two PCs on the other two stones, the door finally rolled open.

In the next room, they found a magically enchanted crossbow that could fire on its own (an arbalester from MMII), and a bloodthorn vine.  The friend's dad improvised minis for both from his collection of random gaming supplies, which was great because I had nothing to represent either in my minis collection.  Deforch won initiative, and I explained that the crossbow looked really dangerous, but not very tough, while the vine looked really tough, but not very dangerous.  Deforch immediately decided to attack the vine.  Oh well.  The friend's character initially wanted to stay back and use his bow; since he's a melee-oriented fighter, and substantially tougher than Deforch, that could have been disastrous, but his dad persuaded him against it.  The fight was satisfyingly challenging--Deforch was bloodied and the other PC took some damage before they destroyed the vine.  But with the vine destroyed, Deforch was able to run up to the enchanted crossbow and start attacking that as well.  The crossbow fired even when Deforch was right next to it, allowing Deforch an extra opportunity attack (which is a concept that we've now introduced, but without really explaining the rules--we just say things like "if you walk there, then the monster will get to attack you, but you can walk to here without the monster getting an attack.")  Finally, they finished off the crossbow, and found the treasure.  There was a treasure chest with 200 gp and a potion of healing, as well as a magic sword that could split into two magic swords (a Paired Sword +1, basically intended for Deforch).  They also found a book that explained that when earthquakes began to shake the dwarven halls, the dwarves moved deeper into the earth (since they think of deeper as safer).  So my son and his friend realized that the blocked passageway must have been from a collapse during an earthquake, and that if they wanted to find the dwarves, they would have to go deeper.  With that, we ended the session.

Overall, it was a success and both boys had a lot of fun.  That said, wow, the chaos level involved in GMing for two four-year-olds is vastly higher than for one.  Also, combat is much slower.  My guess is that each fight balanced for two takes between one and a half and twice as long as a fight would if balanced for a single character.  And that in turn makes the attention side of things much harder.  The game probably ran 45 minutes or an hour, and that really pushed the limits of both of their attention spans.  At the same time, they really enjoyed playing together.

I'm also amused that the little adventures that I'm throwing together for them are starting to develop more of a story and an ongoing campaign feel.  I don't really know what the story of the missing dwarves is, but this is clearly going to be an ongoing storyline over the course of the next several adventures.

As an addendum:  On Chrismas, my son gave me the D&D Monster Vault, a collection of monster descriptions and counters for each monster.  He was clearly as excited to be giving it to me as I was to be getting it.  I think this marks the first present he's given to either of his parents where he actually understood why they would want to get the present.  I look forward to using it in a game with him soon.


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## Cerebral Paladin (Jan 8, 2011)

*Deforch's Fifth Adventure*

Last Sunday, I ran another D&D adventure for my son.  There were some worrying signs beforehand, but I basically had to run the game anyway.  My son basically refused to take a nap that day, which meant that he was overtired--never a good situation when starting something complicated.  At the same time, we had promised him that we would play D&D with him on Sunday while trying to assuage him on Saturday, when we refused to let him play in a D&D game with some of our (adult) friends.  Suffice to say that as a 4-year-old, he is not ready to play with the adults yet, but he didn't really understand that.  So, faced with the choice between running a game for an overly tired child and triggering a (justified) tantrum about our breaking our promise, we went with running the game.

His mom joined us as a second player, playing Deforch's mommy (statted up as a warlord with lots of powers oriented towards giving other characters extra attacks, so that her actions would bolster his instead of overshadowing them).  She asked what Deforch's mommy's name was, and without hesitating my son said "Lovestar."  After a little speculation by his mom and me about whether this indicated some elven ancestry, she asked whether that was a first-name or a surname, and he said that it was a last name--her first name was "Alberta."  So we decided that "Alberta Lovestar" and her son, Deforch, would go on an adventure together.

The adventure began while Deforch was having a conversation with Camiflax the Dragon.  (We've more or less changed the name of the dragon to match my son's pronunciation.)  They heard a humming noise, and Camiflax asked if Deforch was carrying the Cup of al Falsal.  He said he was and took it out.  They could see that it was making the humming noise, and Camiflax explained that the Cup of al Faisal had magical powers of prophecy (and then explained what that means).  Deforch filled the cup with water, following Camiflax's instructions, and an image appeared in the water of a group of zombies and skeletons walking across a bridge into the nearby village.  My son was gratifyingly impressed with the idea of an image appearing in the cup.  He said "oooooooo..."  It's kinda awesome how easy it is to produce a sense of wonder.

They immediately headed off to defend the village against the undead.  I described how Camiflax dropped them off and then flew to defend the other bridge into the town.  Deforch and his mommy then fought a group of two zombies and three skeletons.  The fight basically went fine, but my son got really upset when Deforch's mommy got bloodied by a critical hit.  He was like, "That means she's almost destroyed!  And I'm not very effective right now!  Waaaah."  I'm not really sure what he meant about not being very effective--he was actually perfectly effective.  <shrug>  It was also a little surprising because Deforch had been bloodied in previous games (and actually had gotten a lot closer to being defeated).  I think that the idea of Deforch's mommy being destroyed was actually a lot more frightening than the idea of Deforch being defeated, perhaps especially because Deforch's mommy was being played by his mommy.  This was also clearly a function of my son being too tired.  We spent a while comforting my son, and after he calmed down, they finished defeating the undead.

At that point, the Cup began humming again.  Deforch quickly filled it with water from the river and a new image appeared--it showed Deforch going off into the woods and finding a clearing with a checker-board pattern.  Deforch quickly headed off and found the checker-board pattern--some squares had green grass, while others had blackened and dead grass on them, in a 5 by 5 grid with black squares in the corners.  He also found a pile of 13 shiny stones (represented by a pile of beads I put on the map, next to the map of the checker-board.)  At this point, the Cup spoke and said "3-2-3-2-3."  My son figured out that he should put the stones on the black squares of the checker-board, although he followed the diagonals instead of the horizontal patterns as I had intended.  When he had placed the last stone, all of the stones sank into the checker-board squares and the whole field became green and healthy looking.

Deforch returned to the castle, and Camiflax told him that he had destroyed that source of undead by curing that field.  He also asked if the Cup had begun speaking to him.  Deforch said that it had, and Camiflax told him that that was a very good sign--it meant that the Cup was awakening and beginning to attune to Deforch as a force for good.

At that point, we wrapped the game and had dinner.  All in all, it was not the most successful of games--probably our worst session so far, in fact.  In addition to the issues with Deforch's mommy getting bloodied, there were some pretty big issues with my son having wandering attention and wanting to tell his own story.  Starting when my son is tired is never a good idea, although I didn't feel like I had much choice.  Still, he mostly had fun and everything turned out okay.


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## The_Black_Cat (Jan 14, 2011)

I'm really enjoying this story hour! I can't wait to find out the truth behind the missing dwarves. DMing for youngsters is never an easy thing and I find you're handling it quite well.


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## Cerebral Paladin (Jan 17, 2011)

*Deforch and the Crystal Sword (Adventure 6)*

Thanks, Black Cat!  It's been an enormously fun, sometimes baffling experience. 

Now, on with the story...
-------
Early last week, my son mentioned that he wanted to play a Dungeons and Dragons game.  He said that the adventure would be about Deforch finding a crystal sword.  There wasn't any time that day for us to play, but I thought that it was a perfectly good concept for a game.  So yesterday, we sat down to play Deforch and the Crystal Sword.  The other relevant design consideration was that my son really likes my displacer beast mini.  He calls it "Slingie," and he said that he wanted Slingie to be in an adventure.  He said that many people are scared of Slingie, because they think that displacer beasts are mean, but that Slingie is actually really nice.  (Incidentally, hearing a four-year-old stumbling through the phrase "displacer beast" is amazingly cute.)  I wanted to put that in the game as well.

I started off by saying that people were getting very nervous at Deforch's family's castle and that he could hear guards running to the gates, saying that a monster was coming.  Deforch went to see what the matter was, and he saw that his friend Slingie was walking towards the castle's gate.  Deforch reassured the guards and went out to meet his friend.

Slingie greeted Deforch and said that he needed help.  At this point, my son cut in and began speaking as Slingie.  "Deforch, all of the people in the castle think that I'm mean and nasty because I'm a displacer beast.  It makes me sad that they won't be my friends even though I'm nice."  My son then switched over to speaking as Deforch and said, "Don't worry, Slingie.  I'll come with you to talk to them and to tell them that you're actually really nice."  So Deforch spoke to the guards and introduced them to Slingie, and they became friends.

I then went back to trying to advance my idea of the plot.  Slingie thanked Deforch for helping him become friends with other people, and then said that many of his friends had gotten very sick and could only be cured by going back to their homeland.  Going back to their homeland would require a magical journey that was only possible with the Crystal Sword--but only a human can recover the Crystal Sword, so Slingie needed Deforch's help.

Deforch was happy to set off on the adventure with Slingie and Freezie (Deforch's silver dragon friend).  They traveled to the location of the gold-roofed cave (my son's description) that contained the Crystal Sword.  My son said that there was a heavy stone blocking the entrance, but that Slingie could roll it aside with his tentacles because displacer beasts are really good at rolling stones.  So that got them into the cave.

As they entered the cave, a group of skeletons emerged from the walls of the cave and began attacking them.  Beyond the skeletons, they could see the Crystal Sword.  (Incidentally, I used the Excalibur mini from Shadows over Camelot to represent the sword.  My son was very excited by this.  "I didn't know that we could use things from other games to play Dungeons and Dragons!  Oooooo.")

Deforch won initiative and rushed forward.  He destroyed three of the skeletons with his Dire Wolverine Strike, and then Slingie destroyed another.  Freezie rushed forward and breathed on the two remaining skeletons, but he only destroyed one of them.  At that point, the remaining skeleton struck Freezie... and another five skeletons formed at the wall.  Deforch finished off the last of the original skeletons, and the second wave began to engage.  As they destroyed a few more of the skeletons, yet more skeletons came out of the wall.  Deforch and his friends had light wounds, but they still weren't making headway, as the skeletons kept coming.  Freezie said that he thought that the skeletons would keep attacking until Deforch reached the Crystal Sword.  So Deforch ran over to the sword and grabbed it.

When Deforch touched the sword, there was a brilliant, almost blinding flash of light.  As his vision cleared, Deforch realized that he was in a totally new space.  As I drew the map, my son looked at it and said, "this is shaped like a sword!"  Which was completely correct:  Deforch was inside the Crystal Sword.  He then read a message on the floor:

To escape the sword,
You must prepare it for battle.
Ruby to the pommel,
Steel to the tip.
Seek in the quillions
and ye shall find.

We spent a little while going over the vocabulary, to make sure that my son understood "ruby," "pommel," "steel," "tip," and "quillions."  With the help of a picture of a sword in the Players Handbook, he mostly understood what was going on.  I then asked him where he would go, and he said the quillions and pointed at the map.  Deforch moved into the first quillion, where he met a creature of living fire--a fire elemental.  The fire elemental won initiative and attacked, lighting Deforch's clothes on fire.  Deforch responded with his Twin Strike, and got a critical hit and a normal hit--almost destroying the elemental in a single round.  He then failed his saving throw, so he remained on fire--but that wasn't the worst thing in the world, since it meant that the elemental couldn't make thinks any worse.  On the next round, he finished off the flaming sentinel and then made his saving throw and succeeded in stopping the fire on his clothes.  Where the elemental had been, he found a red gemstone--the ruby!  So he brought the ruby back to the pommel, rested to regain his hit points, and went into the other quillion.  He saw a steel bar on the ground, which he immediately recognized as the last thing he needed, but he also saw the air swirling into a coherent form--an air elemental.  The air itself began to move to attack him, but Deforch won initiative and in a single massive attack destroyed the air elemental before it even got to act.  That was a little anticlimactic, but oh well.  My son seemed happy, so that's good enough for me.

Deforch carried the steel bar forward to the tip of the sword, and with another flash he disappeared and reappeared in the cave.  The skeletons crumbled to the ground, and he rejoined Slingie and Freezie.  They then went back to the town where Slingie's friends lived (which my son declared was "Displacer Beast Town") and used the Crystal Sword to cut a hole in reality, opening a portal to the displacer beast's home realm.  The sick displacer beasts went through to their home, where they would be able to recover from the sickness.  Slingie thanked Deforch for helping him and for being his friend when so many people would have thought of him as a monster.  With that, we wrapped up the game.

It was a pretty successful game.  My son seemed a little less engaged than in some of the other games, but that was in some ways a good thing--he never got upset during the game, which was very nice.  During some of the puzzle solving (such as it was), he did a bit of "Clever Hans"--pointing at random points and waiting for me to confirm one of the points as correct.  But he also seemed to have some understanding of the puzzle, so with a little bit of coaching he figured it out on his own.  And the effort to make friends for Slingie and to explain that he was a nice displacer beast was almost saccharine in its sweetness, but in a good way.


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## Cerebral Paladin (Jan 24, 2011)

*The Adventure of the Dragon's Eye Temple:  Deforch's 7th Adventure*

Yesterday, my son played Dungeons & Dragons with a friend (the same friend as last time).  This time, the friend's dad ran the game instead of me.  This was my son's first game with a GM other than me.  I thought people might still be interested in hearing about my son's experience, so I'm including a write-up just like the games that I run.

The game picked up where the friend's last adventure had ended--he was mounted on a friendly dragon, very tired from having fought a battle against the chocolate golem machine in the tiefling House of Valrhona.  (The games that the friend's dad runs for him have a Candy Land theme; I think I tend to run more serious games for my son.)  Looking for a place to rest, the other PC and the dragon flew to Deforch's family's castle, where they met up again with Deforch.

After they had rested, the other PC's dragon asked them if they would be willing to help him by going on an adventure.  The Dragon's Eye Temple was nearby, and it held a legendary glowing crystal (the Dragon's Eye).  Dragons couldn't go into the temple, but the dragon needed the crystal to heal his sick mommy.  He asked if Deforch and Deforch's friend would help him by getting it.  They of course agreed enthusiastically and flew to the temple, the other PC on his dragon and Deforch on Freezie.

The DM and I had built the Dragon's Eye Temple out of Duplo Lego bricks on a battle map, so there were physical walls that the minis were moving around within but still a battle map grid for combat.  (He omitted the roof, of course, so the kids could move their figures around inside.)  I think this worked really well for helping the kids visualize the situation.  They also had fun decorating it by putting shiny stones on the walls.  The only complexity was an issue of scale--the battlemap was ruled in a 1" square grid, but the standard four stud (2x2) Duplo brick is about 1.25" square, so it was hard to build a set of walls with the Duplo bricks that lined up with the battlemap grid.  Searching on the web suggests that a Duplo brick is in fact 16 mm wide per stud, less a little at the end of each brick to reduce friction between bricks, so a 2x2 Duplo brick is 31.8 mm on a side, with works out to 1.252", for people who care about precision.  For people who care, Lego bricks are based on 8 mm scaling, again with a slight reduction at the edges of pieces to reduce friction.  (I suppose that you could make every wall, excluding corners, multiples of 16 (Duplo) studs long, so a short wall is 16 studs=5 battlemap squares long, a medium wall is 32 studs=10 battlemap squares long, and so forth, but we didn't think about that before we built the temple.  Because the bricks end up forming structures that are 16 mm X the number of studs, really big structures will end up a little larger than the number of squares this suggests, but for reasonable numbers of studs, the error should be manageable.  Anyway, something to try for next time.)

Getting back to the game, the dragons had to stay outside (although I'm not sure whether this was because they couldn't fit through the doors or because of some magical effect).  In any event, this time my son accepted that more readily--I think he's starting to get used to the idea that there are places where Freezie can go with him, and places where Freezie has to wait outside.  This makes life easier for the DMs.

Within the main chamber of the temple, there was a large door underneath the Dragon's Eye, with three-horizontal bands:  red on bottom, white in the middle, and green at the top.  To either side of the door, there was a torch with a giant flame on it (represented by a black Duplo block that projected out from the wall and then a fire elemental miniature on the top of the Duplo block.  There were two statues flanking those (using the Living Statue minis).  There were also three pairs of colored Duplo blocks projecting out into the main temple room.  Each pair consisted of blocks on opposite walls of the temple, on the side walls.  The first pair was green, the second pair was white, and the third pair was red.

The other PC and Deforch ignored the pairs of colored blocks and went straight up to the door.  When they pushed at it and tried to open it, a ghostly dragon appeared and said that they could never have the Dragon's Eye.  At that point, both the ghostly dragon and the torch flames, which came to life as fire elementals, attacked.

The boys did a good job of focusing their attacks--by the end of the second round, they had killed the ghostly dragon.  (For people who care, the dragon was mechanically the wyrmling blizzard dragon from Monster Manual III.)  I don't think the dragon ever hit either of them.  The fire elementals burned the other PC several times, and Deforch once, but neither of them was even bloodied, and they quickly finished off the monsters.  My son was very keen on using his magic swords to cool off Deforch's friend and put out the fire--I'm not sure quite what he was thinking there, but it was him trying to help out his friend and it was nice.

They then turned to exploring the room some more, trying to figure out how to open the door.  Eventually, one of them tried touching one of the colored squares.  It glowed briefly, as did its twin on the other side of the room, and then they both stopped glowing.  They then spent a while trying to figure out how to make progress on that, but they clearly found the next step hard.  They also distracted themselves by trying to interact with some of the shiny stones they had placed on the top of the walls--it was kinda interesting that it pretty clearly didn't occur to them that an element that they added probably wouldn't be the key to the puzzle.  They also started thinking that maybe they needed to press all six stones at once, so the other PC tried to move around the statues (they wouldn't budge), and both the other PC and Deforch suggested recruiting their (in-character) parents to help--an idea that we rejected, because this was an adventure for just the two of them.  Finally, with a little nudging from their (out-of-character) parents, they touched both green stones at the same time.  At that point, two green bricks appeared on the black bricks where the torch flames had been.

They quickly moved on to press the white stones (causing two white bricks to appear on top of the green bricks on the black  bricks) and the red stones (with the predictable result).  At that point, the stack of bricks moved to in front of the door--but it didn't match, because the door was red-white-green, whereas the stacks of bricks were green-white-red.  At that point, the statues animated and attacked our heroes.

The animated statues were quickly dispatched, although perhaps not quite as quickly as they could have been.  By this point, both of the players were pretty distracted and had wandering attention.  They were still having fun, but they were less focused on the game.  After they defeated the statues, they pressed the pairs of stones, this time in the right order, and the DM popped the Dragon's Eye out of the wall (a crystal looking Duplo block).  They clearly knew that they had succeeded, and brought it out to the dragon.  They then switched over into full scale disassemble the temple mode, so the DM declared that the temple collapsed behind them, and we called the game there.

All in all, it was another fun game.  The boys really enjoyed playing D&D together.  The DM's use of Duplo bricks to create actual solid terrain and a physical puzzle was, I think, really successful at immersing the boys in the game.  Props to him for using props.   I also think that the presence of another player makes my son, at least, more willing to play along with the constraints of the game and the setting the DM is describing, instead of trying to just interject his own elements.  I think in that way he actually benefits from the structure of being one of two players instead of having the whole thing focus on him.  

There continues to be the complication that it's much harder to maintain the kids' focus in a two-player (plus DM, and helping parent) game then in a one-player game.  Partly that's because they distract each other, but it's also a function of it taking longer to accomplish things.  Combat, in particular, is much slower--doubling the size of a fight from 1 PC and 1 monster to 2 PCs and 2 monsters probably increases the length of the combat to 1.5 or 1.75 times as long.  (It's not quite double, because the PCs can focus their fire and gain some benefits from actions that affect multiple opponents, but it's still nearly twice as long.)  That meant that this session ran about 70 minutes--a comparable session for one player would probably have finished in 45 or 50 minutes.  And that's a big difference for four-year-old attention spans.  Still, I think it's good for the kids to practice focusing on things for a longer period of time, and they had a ton of fun.


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## Cerebral Paladin (Feb 11, 2011)

*Deforch's 8th Adventure*

Last Sunday, I ran a short and straightforward D&D adventure for my son.  I'm currently working in Texas on a Monday through Thursday schedule, then flying back home for each weekend.  Because of Dallas's inability to deal with snow, I was only back home for less than 36 hours, so I wanted to do something fun with my son on the Sunday morning before I had to fly back to Texas.  So even though I didn't really have much of anything prepared or even well thought through, I ran a D&D game for him.  One of the nice things about running games for a four year old is that an adventure that would be painfully lame for adults can still be fun and exciting.

Deforch was in his family's castle when one of the peasants who lived near the castle approached him for help.  I had fun role-playing the peasant as extremely nervous to be talking to someone as important as Deforch, who after all is the eldest son of the local nobility.  I'm not at all sure that my son understood why the peasant was nervous, but he still seemed to be having fun.  He did resolutely inform the peasant not to address him as "m'lord Deforch," that just "Deforch" was fine.  I couldn't really tell if my son understood why the peasant was calling him "m'lord."  Anyway, the peasant told him that one of their cows had been killed--ripped apart--and that they wanted Deforch to investigate, find out what had happened, and prevent it from happening again.  Deforch of course agreed.

He then went to the scene of the attack and looked at the cow's body.  I described the large puncture marks on the cow, and how it had been basically ripped apart, and started a skill challenge (although I didn't use that term for my son).  His initial thoughts were to wonder if it might have been a displacer beast--not Slingie, of course, but some other bad displacer beast.  He also looked at the mini of a white dragon and speculated about whether Freezie might rip up a cow like that.  I had him roll a skill check to examine the wounds on the cow, and he succeeded easily, concluding that they weren't the sorts of wounds that a displacer beast or dragon would make, but that they included very large punctures, about an inch or two across.  My son got excited at this point and wondered aloud whether the wounds were from the monsters Deforch fought before, in the "me-me" adventure as he called it.  I was very pleased with this, because I had already decided that the attackers had been kruthiks, which is the actual name for the me-mes.  I reminded him of the name, and this time he used the word "kruthiks" instead of using his term for them.  He looked around for footprints (another skill check), and after a moment found them--they had five claws all set close together, just like kruthiks!

My son then announced that he was going to look underground for a tunnel.  At first, this confused me, but then I realized that he had previously encountered the kruthiks tunneling through the ground, so he figured that there must be a tunnel nearby if there had been a kruthik attack.  I thought that was pretty clever actually, and Deforch quickly found the tunnel with a Perception check.  Another check or two to wriggle, jump, and climb his way through the tunnel brought him to the kruthik lair.

As he entered, he was attacked by a group of kruthik hatchlings.  He used his Dire Wolverine Strike to attack all four at once, killing three of them.  The last one clawed and bit him, but he finished it off the next round.  He then fought the adult kruthik that was leading this group.  It was a pretty tough monster for a 2nd level character to face alone, but I was pretty sure that it would be okay as long as I didn't use its powers in an obnoxious way.  I need not have worried.  Deforch got a critical hit in one of his first attacks, eliminating almost half its hit points in the first round.  Another two rounds of attacks easily dropped the kruthik, and while Deforch took some light wounds, they were nothing to worry about, even for a four year old.  Once Deforch defeated the kruthiks, he returned and told the peasant that the other cow and the sheep should be safe now, and the game ended.

It was a fun and entertaining time playing together.  As I said, for an adult (or even teen) player, that adventure would have been terrible--completely linear, and with the classic bad skill challenge design of "if you pass the skill challenge, you find the adventure--otherwise, the adventure is over."  But I knew that he would pass the skill challenge, because the difficulty was low relative to his skills, and because even if he had gotten three failures, I would have let him keep trying.  I might have improved some negative consequence, but even so.  But for a child, just getting to play and imagine the scene and roll the dice and then win was enough to make it fun.

There was also an amusing bit of "my son tries to determine the whole game" early on, where he was telling me about an evil villain named Flame Bowl (I think that was the name), who was really dangerous because he could turn into a fire elemental or an air elemental and was immune to water.  I explained that that wasn't the villain for today's game but that Deforch could fight him in the future.  My son was enthusiastic about that idea--"that's who Deforch will have to fight next time, but he's really tough!"  So I think my next game already has the climactic battle pre-planned.


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## Cerebral Paladin (Feb 28, 2011)

*The Ninth Adventure of Deforch:  Introducing Fire Boss Villain*

I ran a quick Dungeons and Dragons game for my son and his friend yesterday.  My son was still excited about fighting "Fire Boss Villain," so I wanted to include that in the adventure.  Also, Deforch and his friend's character had reached third level, so they had some additional powers.  I gave my son a choice from among four 3rd level encounter powers, although that was really too many.  He more or less wanted to have access to all of them, and then he picked the worst one out of the group (a power that is essentially Twin Strike with a push--in a game like the one he plays in, which is not particularly tactically complicated, powers that allow pushes aren't very good).  Amusingly, his first comment was "I can't push opponents--I don't use a shield," because he knew that his friend's character has a shield push sort of power.  After some back and forth, I persuaded him to take Leonine Surge instead, which is also a Twin Strike-plus power--in this case, it allows two attacks, and if they both land, it does extra damage and knocks the opponent prone, which can be pretty useful.

Anyway, we started out by reminding the boys of the dwarven halls beneath Deforch's family's castle that they were exploring.  I explained that the rubble from the cave in had been cleared away, revealing a heavy stone door with a strange key hole in it.  They spent a while trying to break down the door, hitting it with their magic swords, ramming their shoulders into it, and so forth, but they couldn't get it to open.  My son's friend immediately picked up on the fact that they were going to have to go on an adventure to get the key, but of course they didn't know where the key was.  With a little prompting, they then went to ask Deforch's dad if he knew where the key was.  He suggested that they ask Freezie the Dragon, who knew where lots of things were.  Freezie, in turn, actually had the magical key in his treasure hoard.  He said that he would fly back to get it for them.  They asked if they could come with Freezie, but he explained that while he was their friend, dragons are touchy about their treasure hoards, and he didn't really feel comfortable with having anyone visit his lair.  So Freezie flew off to get the key.  He told them that he would be back in about 2 hours.  Two hours later, he hadn't returned.  Four hours later, he still hadn't returned.  The next morning, he still hadn't returned.

I had planned on having the Cup of al-Faisal activate and show them a vision of Freezie, who was now trapped in a cage of fire, but without waiting for that, the heroes immediately decided that he might be in trouble and that they should go to his lair to see if he needed help.  My son suggested that some villain, maybe even Fire Boss Villain, might have taken Freezie prisoner.  His friend went even further, saying that maybe the villain had cut Freezie's head off and killed him.  I was a little worried that that would upset my son, but he seemed relatively unperturbed--perhaps he was distinguishing between what his friend was saying and what was actually going on in the game, or maybe he was just taking it reasonably well.  I'm not sure.  In any event, I made it clear that they would have to go and investigate to find out, so off they went.

I then ran a quick skill challenge of them climbing up the icy mountain trail to the mountaintop where Freezie's lair was.  There were a bunch of Athletics checks to climb rough sections of the trail, and what was more or less an Acrobatics check to cross a slippery ice patch.  They then came upon a rough cliff.  I expected them to just climb it with more Athletics checks, but they decided that they needed some way up it.  They talked about the possibility of using their magic swords to change it into a smooth walkway, but I explained that their swords weren't powerful enough.  They also discussed using a parachute, but I pointed out that while that would work for going down a cliff, it wouldn't really help them go up a cliff.  Then they decided to make a ladder, so I had them make Nature checks to find wood to make a ladder from, and then they reached the top of the mountain.

At the top of the mountain, a group of skeletons (4 decrepit skeletons (minions) and a blazing skeleton that could throw fire at them) attacked them.  I used a map from a D&D game day so that they had an image of a snowy mountaintop with a tower on it to help them visualize, but I'm not sure it worked as well as I had hoped--it's hard to say how much it helped their visualization.  This turned out to be a pretty dangerous fight--my son's friend, in particular, rolled very badly on some of his saving throws, after an orb of fire from the blazing skeleton lit him on fire.  They quickly cleared out the decrepit skeletons, but even with pretty lousy tactics and my ignoring the blazing skeleton's fire aura, the other PC got down to single digit hit points.  Still, he got to use his new power effectively, and then Deforch rolled a critical hit on his new Leonine Surge that destroyed the blazing skeleton.  With some prompting, Deforch used some snow to help put out the fire on the other PC's clothes, while the other PC rolled to put it out, and they had won the battle with no permanent harm done.

At that point, they made their way into the tower, where they saw Freezie trapped inside a cage of fire.  A powerful efreeti met them there, but he declared that he did not want to fight them right then, since he was still weakened from the effort of capturing Freezie, so he would seek his revenge later.  He disappeared in a blast of fire, smoke, and scorching hot air.  The heroes released Freezie by throwing snow on the cage of fire until it went out.  Freezie thanked them, and told them that that was his old enemy, Ignemesis (which I explained was the ancient language for "Fire Villain").  The dragon warned them that Ignemesis would be very angry at them for thwarting the plan to capture him.  The players seemed suitably impressed and excited about the idea of facing Ignemesis later.  With that, Freezie gave them the magic key, and we called the session after saying that in the next game they would be able to open the door in the dwarven halls.

From a behind the curtain perspective, my plan had been for them to fight Ignemesis this session as well, but the game had run long and the kids seemed a little over excitable.  As always, a 2-child game takes much longer to do anything than a 1-child game--a game with two fights and a little other material would be well within my son's attention span on his own (and I suspect his friend's just as easily, although I haven't seen it directly).  But with the longer fights with two characters, in particular, the game was running too long.  Also, their attention was much harder to keep focused--whenever one of them started to have wandering attention, he would distract the other one.  I still wanted to introduce Ignemesis, partly because I knew my son was excited by that idea, so I had him make a short appearance but left the actual fight for some future game.

All told, it was another fun game.  There is the difficulty that 4e fights are really long for small children.  And it is a constant effort to keep both of them focused on the game.  But it ended up being another fun game, both for them and for me.


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## Siuis (Mar 17, 2011)

Needs more Deforch.

Seriously though, I am enjoying this line of stories and learning a lot. Have you played in the last two weeks, or have you been  swayed by the tides of reality?


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## Cerebral Paladin (Mar 28, 2011)

*Deforch's Tenth and Eleventh Adventures*

Sorry about the delay in posting--I've had a busy couple of weeks, and I haven't had time to write up any games until now.  But I have had time to play some D&D with my son, so...

I've played several D&D games with my son since I last had a chance to write one of these posts.  Most of these were very short games, so I figure that I'll cover them at a faster clip than one per post.  They were also interesting in that I experimented with a more free-form approach to running games--unlike most of my previous games with my son, I ran these with absolutely zero preparation and without even using monster stats. 

Deforch's tenth adventure presented a bit of a problem.  I had told my son that I would run a game for him after his nap, and I had been looking forward to that.  But then his nap ran long--to about 5 PM--and I had guests coming over at 6.  More to the point, the guests were coming to play D&D, so it would have been even more upsetting to him than otherwise to delay his game to the next day.  But it meant that we really didn't have a lot of time in which to play.  So, I decided that I would run basically a single encounter.  I asked him what he wanted Deforch to do in this game.  He said he wanted Deforch to practice fighting with his swords, so that he would get better at it.  So I ran a little encounter where first Deforch sparred with two of the guards at his family's castle in a two-on-one sparring match.  After they had both yielded, I brought out a figure of a warforged (a type of combat golem, for people who aren't up on recent D&D character types).  My son really likes this figure, so I thought it would be fun to use it.  I explained that the warforged was a practice golem, clarifying that a golem is a type of robot that works by magic instead of technology.  Deforch asked his parents if they had made the golem; they replied that while Deforch's daddy is a wizard and can make some magic things, he doesn't know how to make a golem like that, but that they had actually discovered it on an adventure years ago when they found it in an old dwarven ruins.  I pointed out that dwarves are master crafters, and could make things that were better made than just about anyone else.  I figured that since Deforch still has a long-term story arc about exploring the dwarven halls beneath the castle, this set up reusing the warforged mini in a later game.  Deforch and the two guards then fought together against the golem.  After a little while of fighting, I declared that they had won.  As a friend commented on a previous game, my son's still at an age when he's happy to accept the joy of winning without really needing the feel of overcoming a difficult obstacle.  So we wrapped up the game with everyone happy.

A few days later, we sat down to play another game.  Between the previous game and this one, my son had told me that he wanted Deforch to fight a vampire.  His interest in vampires came from a book that he has.  Some friends of ours gave us a book they made, "My First Monster Manual," which has pictures of one monster for each letter of the alphabet, along with humorous little rhymes.  It's a wonderful little book, and he loves it.  In any event, he has begun flipping through it to find things he wants Deforch to meet, and this time he wanted to face a vampire.  He also talked a little bit about the vampire and its powers--he clearly conceived of vampires as having wizard powers and using a magic wand.  It took me a little bit of thought to figure out how to handle this, partly because I want to preserve some sense of different power levels for different types of monsters.  Still, I wasn't going to say no, so…

The game began with Deforch's dad telling him that some of the villagers in the local village were sick, and that Deforch's dad was suspicious that the sickness might be magical in nature.  My son immediately cut to the chase:  "Maybe they've actually been attacked by a vampire!"  Deforch's dad agreed that that was part of what he was worried about, but that he didn't know for sure.  So off Deforch went to investigate.

He quickly found a group of villagers, some of whom were "sick" and some of whom weren't.  The people who were sick were very pale, with basically no color in their cheeks at all, as well as feeling lethargic and tired.  A skill check confirmed that that matched the symptoms of someone who had been attacked by a vampire and also provided the basics of how vampire attacks work:  that vampires attack by sucking blood, with their two large fangs, typically biting the victim's neck or wrist.  So Deforch checked the sick people, and sure enough, they had bite marks at their necks.  At that point, Deforch knew that the "sickness" was actually the result of a vampire attack, but not who the vampire was.  So he made another skill check to get more information about vampires, and it turned up two more facts:  vampires can't go out in daylight, and they can't enter a home without an invitation.

Deforch quickly asked around about whether anyone had asked to come into the homes of the people who were sick.  They mentioned that there was a merchant who had been asking for a place to stay and offering gold in payment…

So now Deforch knew who the vampire was, but not where to find him.  I expected him to do some more legwork to get a report on where the vampire's lair was, but instead he focused on nightfall:  protecting the people who had been attacked, and defending the rest.  He started by telling everyone not to invite the merchant into their homes.  I pointed out that that wouldn't keep the people who had already invited the vampire in safe.  Deforch immediately said that they should go to the castle, and that he would tell the guards to not admit any strangers after nightfall.  Not quite the response I expected (I thought he would just have them stay in their neighbors' houses), but entirely reasonable.  And really, having the villagers flee to the castle for protection when faced with a threat is just so right.

Deforch then spent the evening patrolling the village.  The "merchant" tried to persuade one of the remaining villagers to let him in, and then raged at Deforch's interference when the villager refused.  Deforch rushed over as the vampire turned to face him, with the vampire vowing revenge, and the battle was joined.  The battle was short and straightforward.  I didn't have actual stats for the vampire, but I made him tougher than a normal foe--Deforch missed on okay but not great rolls, and the vampire hit on okay rolls, doing a bunch of damage.  My son asked me to tone down some of the descriptions.  When I described the vampire draining Deforch's energy, with a cold touch, trying to describe necrotic damage without using an unnecessarily opaque adjective, he asked that I stop my description.  But he was okay with the damage, and after a little while longer, the vampire retreated, disappearing in a cloud of black smoke and a swirl of bats.  Deforch would need to hunt the vampire down to its lair to finish the task, but that's an adventure for another day (and for a day when his other parent could join us, since he recognized that it would be a hard task and wanted to bring Deforch's mommy along to fight the vampire).


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## Cerebral Paladin (Apr 15, 2011)

*The Twelfth and Thirteenth Adventures of Deforch*

The two most recent games of D&D with my son have been unusual in several ways.  To begin with, the two games were really part of a single continuous story, and for that matter a story that hasn't yet finished.  But much more significantly, it's only vaguely accurate to say that I ran the game while my son played.  As I'll explain, my son basically ran the game for himself, with me providing a little bit of input and some rules advice.  I'm not sure that the first session even really qualifies as being a game, as opposed to just being a story he constructed about his D&D character (although I suppose it had a little bit of game-like aspects, so calling it a game makes some sense).

We sat down to play a game of D&D, and my son immediately took charge of the storytelling aspects.  He grabbed a miniature of a wraith I had (although he often referred to it as a "wreath") and announced that today's game would be about a good wraith who had asked Deforch for help.  I decided that turning this into a test of wills wouldn't make it more fun for anyone, so I just followed along.  

"What does the wraith need Deforch's help with?" I asked.

"Some bad guy has stolen all of the wraith's pogo sticks and baby bottles.  And his babies are really upset about not having their pogo sticks and baby bottles.  He wants Deforch to get them back."

Okay, then.  Apparently, this is all about pogo sticks and baby bottles?  I have to admit that I found parts of my son's creative storytelling to be hard to follow, but I tried to keep up as best as I could.  As I remember it, Deforch began looking for clues to try to figure out who the "bad guy" was and where he had taken the stolen goods.  The baby bottles and pogo sticks (two of each, apparently) were supposed to be kept in a secret cave, with heavy sealed doors.  My son explained that the outside walls were undamaged, but there were claw marks on the inside walls--claw marks like the wraith could make with its long claws.  (I figured that explaining that most wraiths are insubstantial would not really help.)  Maybe the things had been stolen by a bad wraith that didn't like the good wraith?  My son softened this to a good wraith and a sorta bad wraith.

At this point, my son explained that Deforch encountered a floating magic sword that could attack on its own.  I think the sword may have had a skull on it, but I'm not sure--his description was a little unclear.  At this point, I stepped in to DM the combat.  I just improvised the sword's stats--Deforch would attack, and if my son rolled well, I would declare that it was a hit.  I did the same thing in reverse when the sword attacked.  Once I felt like the fight had lasted long enough, I declared that Deforch had prevailed.

With that, we were out of time, so we wrapped up.

About a week later, we got a chance to play again.  This time, the plan was for my son's mom to join us (playing Deforch's mommy, Alberta Lovestar).  I had planned on following up on the vampire adventure, but my son said that the vampire was too scary, even with Deforch's mommy along.  I wasn't going to force him to play an adventure that he found too scary, and he was very definite about this.  Also, as we started to play, Robbie became progressively more upset, so their mom went to take care of Robbie, rather than actually playing with us.  This functionally meant that Deforch's mommy was on the adventure, but my son's mom wasn't, which made it a particularly bad time to try something a little frightening.

So instead of finishing up the vampire adventure, my son launched into continuing the effort to recover the missing baby bottles and pogo sticks.  He declared that Deforch and his mommy were in a cave tunnel in front of a stone door.  In front of the door were two white squares (my son put down small white cardboard squares (the backsides of my "Bloodied" tokens) for this) and two red gems (tokens in my mini bag).  He quickly solved the puzzle that he had created for himself, putting the two gems on the white squares and unlocking the door.  My son declared that there was a group of five skeletons on the other side of the door.  The skeletons attacked!

Like in the previous game, when combat began, I basically took over the GMing role.  Interestingly, my son was at first hesitant to use his "Dire Wolverine Strike," which attacks all adjacent enemies, because he was worried that it would hit his mommy.  I was surprised that he came up with the concept of friendly fire on his own, but I reassured him that that power (unlike some others) only affects enemies.  After a little while, all five skeletons were destroyed, and they spent a little time healing up.

He then began describing a second skeleton attack.  I suggested that while that might be okay, it might be more fun to have a little variety--to follow a fight with skeletons with some other, different sort of encounter.  He readily agreed, and said that instead they would encounter two bad guys and engage in a "match the things that are the same" competition.  So I laid out eight miniatures--3 pairs and 2 minis that were similar but not quite the same--as well as two figures to represent the bad guys.  Deforch went first, picking out two of the minis that were the same.  Then the bad guys picked out another pair.  Then Deforch grabbed the third pair.  The bad guys tried to match the last two minis together, but my son pointed out that those miniatures didn't match.  After he pointed out several details that were different, the bad guys conceded, agreeing that Deforch had beaten them.  They proceeded to leave.

Deforch and his mommy continued down the passageway and encountered two kruthiks.  The kruthiks initially planned on attacking, but my son announced that he would use the "tile flingers" (he had apparently decided that the cardboard tokens with the gems on them were now miniature catapults of a sort) to fling tiles at the kruthiks.  After that the tile flingers hit the kruthiks, they began to run away, but not before saying that someone had stolen the spikes for the backs of the baby kruthiks.  Apparently, the bad guys weren't just robbing good wraiths…

With that, we wrapped up the game.   These games were interesting experiments.  My son clearly had a lot of fun making up the stories, which is of course the key part.  At the same time, his stories continue to have the disjointed surrealist aspects that you would expect from a young child, which makes it both harder to understand for me and a little frustrating.  And sometimes I have ideas for games that I want to share with him.  Still, I think these games were both successes; I'll probably continue to play it by ear, running a game in a more traditional way when he seems interested in that, but not trying to prevent him from making his own stories in games where I'm really mostly his fight coordinator and rules consultant when that's what he feels like.


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## ellinor (Apr 15, 2011)

Obviously, your son is a budding GM.  I am shocked.  _Shocked._


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## Cerebral Paladin (Jul 18, 2011)

*Deforch's 14th and 15th Adventures*

My son and I have played D&D several times since my last post, but I haven't had time to write up descriptions until now.  This post will cover two short adventures in one write-up.  There's not a lot to tell, and I don't actually remember them in much detail.  My write-ups will be as accurate as I can make them, but I may have some errors in my recollection.  The next couple of entries will cover more substantial, and more recent, games.

Deforch's fourteenth adventure was a short game at home.  As with the previous game, I had planned on an adventure to fight the vampire, but my son quickly nixed that.  He said that he didn't want to fight the vampire until he got another attack card, meaning until he leveled up.  He was very clear about the fact that vampires are tough, and that he needed to be higher level to be ready to take on a vampire.  I found this very interesting--it's the first clear evidence of strategic thinking on his part, and it's also of course the first example of my son deciding to "grind" up to a higher level before taking on a challenge.  But that meant that my initial plan of an adventure in the vampire's castle had to be shelved for the time being.  I didn't want to upset him by trying to railroad him into an adventure that he doesn't want to do, and I also wanted to respect his strategic planning--especially because a vampire is a dangerous foe for a 3rd level character to take on.  So that left me needing to quickly improvise an adventure without a direct confrontation with the vampire.

I started things off by having Deforch's dragon friend, Freezie, report hearing some strange noises in the local village butcher's shop--some sort of repetitive scraping stomping noise that seemed to be coming from the basement.  Freezie couldn't fit down the stairs into the basement, so he told his friend Deforch about the noises.  Deforch talked to the butcher and quickly headed into the basement to investigate for himself.  He also heard the noises that Freezie had told him about, although he couldn't hear them until he was in the basement--good thing dragons have keen hearing!  Deforch could hear that the noises, which also included some moaning, were from the other side of the wall.  So he drew his swords, and pried at the stones in the wall until he opened a hole into a roughly dug passageway that led underneath the village… and a group of zombies shuffling along the passageway.

Deforch immediately attacked, and quickly dispatched the zombies.  On one of them, he found a letter from Ignemesis (also known as Fire Boss Villain) to the vampire!  The letter said that Fire Boss Villain was sending these zombies, as the vampire had requested, to help defend the vampire's spooky castle from the possibility of Deforch attacking him.  Deforch was excited to find confirmation that the vampire was based in a haunted castle--he had previously known that the vampire was probably in a castle or in a dark cave, but now he knew it was a castle, and in fact could be pretty sure which castle because of the direction that the zombies were going.

Deforch also took this opportunity to taunt his enemies, sending a letter down the passageway to the vampire (how wasn't entirely clear) telling the vampire that the zombies would not be showing up because Deforch had destroyed them, and that soon Deforch would be coming for him.  With that, we had run out of time and stopped the session.

A week or two later, my son spent the afternoon at his friend "Alan"'s house.  (Alan is a pseudonym to protect the privacy of a 5 year old.)  I began running an adventure for the two of them.  The idea was that it would continue the storyline with the dwarven halls underneath Deforch's familial castle, with a combat, a puzzle, and then maybe a second combat with Ignemesis.  Unfortunately, it was not a day of intense concentration for the kids.  The first combat went okay, although Alan wanted to do other things by the middle of it.  It took a fair amount of work to finish the fight.  Once it was finished, we asked Alan if he wanted to continue, and he said no, so we wrapped up there.  My son was a little disappointed by that but quickly focused on other things.  And it was hardly just Alan's distraction--a little later, Alan suggested playing a game of Pokemon (the collectible card game).  About halfway through that game (even playing a half length variant), my son lost interest and the game petered out, to Alan's disappointment.  Attention spans are not great at right around age 5, and some days are like that.  Oh well.


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## Cerebral Paladin (Aug 1, 2011)

Deforch's sixteenth adventure was one of the best games we've had in a while.  It was fun and exciting, and my son stayed focused and into the game for the whole session.

Before we started, my son said that he wanted to become friends with some more monsters, in addition to Freezie the Silver Dragon and Slingie the Displacer Beast.  I could work with that, so I quickly came up with an idea for the adventure.  Freezie approached Deforch and said that he wanted to visit one of his friends who lives at the top of a mountain.  He immediately got the obvious conclusion… "But it's a dangerous mountain, with lots of monsters on it, so Deforch should go with Freezie in case something attacks Freezie!"  Exactly, I thought.  So Deforch, Freezie, and Slingie all set out on an adventure together traveling up a trail leading up a very dangerous mountain.

They proceeded up a trail that switched back and forth as it climbed up the mountain slope.  After a short hike, they reached a point where a raging river cut across the trail.  There was no ford available, and indeed, the river across the trail did not look either natural or like it had been there for long--if nothing else, the river had turned and begun flowing uphill across the trail.

Deforch immediately began gathering up wood to make a bridge.  I was pleased that my son came up with a quick, reasonable plan to handle the problem.  A quick skill check sufficed to build the bridge, and he began heading across the bridge.

As he reached the middle of the bridge, a strange watery figure rose out of the river.  "Who are you that would intrude on this mountain?"

My son smiled excitedly.  "This sounds like a fight!"  I agreed that it could be a fight, but I cautioned him that Deforch might not have to fight the water spirit--perhaps they could talk.  If he had insisted on turning this into a battle, I would have been happy to follow his lead.

My son decided that if the spirit was willing to talk, Deforch would switch from outright violence to not-very-subtly-veiled threats of violence.  "You should let me pass, because I have lots of power cards for my attacks!"  I may have had him roll an Intimidate check--I'm not sure if I did or if I just relied on pure role-playing for this.

The spirit blinked at him, the rocky chips in her eyes shining like the light on the quartz on the mountain slope.  "I can tell you are very powerful and dangerous… but I have powers of my own."  The spirit holds up her hands, and with a woosh an arc of water courses between her hands.  My son was clearly a little frightened by this.  "Why are you here, and armed so heavily?  Do you mean harm for this mountain?"

"Freezie, my dragon friend, wanted to visit his friend at the top of the mountain.  But the mountain is dangerous, so we came with him."

"The mountain can be dangerous, and more of late.  And I know well the one who dwells at the mountain's summit.  If you are people of good will, I have a request of you.  There is a cave farther up the mountainside.  Animals that have entered that cave do not return.  I would appreciate it if you would explore the cave and find out what is threatening the good creatures of the mountain."

Deforch quickly agreed and set out across the river.  After a short hike farther up the  mountain, he saw a cave mouth leading into the mountainside.  He traveled into the mountain and found several animal skeletons lying in the cave, near a fire that continued to burn in a fire pit without consuming the wood in the pit.  As he looked at the fire, he noticed some motion by the ceiling.  He ducked out of the way as a large shapeless black mass dropped from the ceiling.  The strange ooze lashed out at him with a black pseudopod, but Deforch dodged aside.  He slashed back with his sword.  The attack seemed to hurt the creature, but it also cut off another chunk of the ooze, which continued to fight.

Freezie spoke up.  "Deforch!  Your sword blows seem to be cutting off parts of the ooze.  Maybe there is some way that we can destroy parts of the ooze with something other than your sword?"

"Try your frost breath, Freezie!"

Freezie's frost breath washed over both the original black pudding (to use the actual name) and the new black pudding.  The breath did harm the black pudding, but it did not destroy either the original black pudding or its spawn.  Slingie also attacked, and his claws ripped off another chunk of pudding that kept fighting.

The black pudding's pseudopods smacked Deforch, burning him with their acid touch.  Freezie said, "I don't think my frost breath will work.  Maybe there's something else we could use?"

Deforch decided that maybe he could burn the pudding, so he ran over to the fire, pushed his swords into it, and used his swords to shovel burning wood onto the black pudding.  This had a dramatic effect, burning and damaging the pudding and without creating more of the spawn.  While Freezie and Slingie finished off the black pudding spawn, Deforch continued throwing fire onto the black pudding.  Finally, the pudding collapsed and burned up.  They had dealt with the threat in the caves that had been killing all of the animals that came inside.

With that, they continued through the cave and emerged out just below the summit of the mountain.  Deforch, Freezie, and Slingie walked up and met a great feathered serpent, Axatl the Couatl.  Axatl the Couatl greeted his friend Freezie, who introduced him to Deforch.  Axatl congratulated Deforch on having dealt with the black pudding, a dangerous threat on the mountain, and said that he was happy to have met Deforch.  I showed my son a picture of a cobalt from the Monster Manual, although he didn't seem terribly interested in the picture.  He did have some fun talking to Axatl.

With that, we were out of time, and my son had to go off to gymnastics camp.

Overall, this session was great.  We both had a lot of fun, my son stayed focused, and we were able to do some interesting new things.  He had fun and effectively dealt with both of the problem solving bits--crossing the river and figuring out the trick to fighting the black pudding effectively--as well as having some okay, albeit a little primitive, role-playing.  Interestingly, my son, who was very interested in Deforch becoming friends with another monster, was not terribly engaged by the picture.  I suspect that he would have reacted a lot better to another miniature to represent his new friend--the picture was a little abstract for his play, I think.  But it was a great session for both of us.  At the end, he said, "this was the best game ever!"


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## Cerebral Paladin (Jul 2, 2012)

[A placeholder for me to fill in with the first adventures of Sir Warchop, Baron Chesterfield, a new character that my son has been playing recently.]


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## Cerebral Paladin (Jul 2, 2012)

*Sir Warchop versus Tailigon*

Yesterday, my elder son (just under 6 years old) announced that he wanted to play a D&D game.  I’m always game for that, so we headed down to the basement to play.  But this game was a little different from our previous games—as we headed downstairs, my son informed me that this time, he wanted to play the bad guys, in particular Tailigon, a dragon with a stretchy tail and a dangerous set of tail attacks.  We got to the table downstairs, and he handed me the figure that we’ve been using recently for Sir Warchop, Baron Chesterfield (one of his PCs) and he said that I would play the hero character.  As he set up a group of skeleton warriors around Tailigon, it became clear that he wasn’t planning on playing an adventure with me DMing for his bad-guy dragon.  Instead, my son had decided that he was going to run a game for me.

He began by narrating the problem that forced me to go on an adventure:  a group of new dragons, led by Tailigon, had moved into the land, and when they snored in their sleep it produced a lot of smoke that was covering the land and making it not nice for anyone else.  So Sir Warchop needed to head out to stop the dragon threat.  He began by asking if I wanted to spy on the dragon first.  That seemed like a good idea, so I said sure.  He had me roll a d20 to see whether the “skulls” (his word for the undead) would spot Sir Warchop.  I rolled an 8, so he said that one of the skulls looked over at Sir Warchop, but didn’t immediately raise the alarm.  Sir Warchop froze, and my son decided the skull thought he was a statue and ignored him.  Sir Warchop did see the group of four skulls guarding the dragon.  More importantly, he saw a river of lava with a larger group of skulls swimming in it.  (Apparently, their weapons burned up, but they could make new weapons from other skeletons.)

My son also asked if my scouting platform had a catapult on it.  That seemed like another obvious “yes” to me.  So then, with some prompting from the DM, Sir Warchop dipped the catapult ammunition into the lava, so now it would be flaming ammunition.  I was finally ready to attack.  He asked me who I wanted to target, and I said the skeletons around the dragon.  But he warned me that attacking near there would surely be spotted by the dragon, so I decided to attack the skulls in the river of lava first.  A decent roll later, and all that remained were the skulls around the dragon and Tailigon itself.

I then attacked with the big catapult rock, which my son told me was big enough to attack five targets—perfect!  One of the skulls was crushed outright, the rest were battered but not defeated, and the dragon took a lot of damage but was so tough that it only bruised its claws.  As Sir Warchop rushed forward, Tailigon declared that before anyone could challenge it, he would have to go through skull training.  So Sir Warchop had to jump over a pit of lava, swim through a lake filled with piranhas without getting eaten, sneak through a room filled with sleeping dragons, and then defeat a skull in single combat.  Sir Warchop rolled well and made it through the first three challenges without incident, although some of the dragons stirred restlessly before settling back to sleep.  The duel went very well for Sir Warchop—a natural 20 defeated the skull and brought him before Tailigon itself.

Sir Warchop told Tailigon that he did not want to fight if he had to, but would if that was necessary to make the land safe.  Tailigon replied that he would not leave without a fight, and if he won, he would use his breath to ignite the smoke in the air on fire, making the smoke from the snoring dragons even worse.

The battle with Tailigon was protracted.  Tailigon used a series of clever powers, such as flying around in a circle with its tail on the ground to generate a tornado.  With each subsequent power, Sir Warchop would try to do something to counter it, and then Tailigon would move on to his next power.  But finally when Tailigon slammed down onto Sir Warchop from high in the air, Sir Warchop positioned his lance so that Tailigon drove the lance into its own belly.  Tailigon was wounded—not beaten, but hurt badly enough to want to talk.  Sir Warchop had said from the beginning that they could have peace if Tailigon left these lands.  Now, Tailigon offered to surrender.  Sir Warchop agreed to the offer, only to be betrayed by the treacherous dragon!  Tailigon resumed its attack, but Sir Warchop continued to gain the upper hand.  Finally, Tailigon surrendered again, this time meaning it.  Tailigon agreed to stop all of the dragons from spreading smoke, and promised to not harm any of the people or animals in the lands around Sir Warchop’s lands, although there was some mention of the possibility of Tailigon hurting the lands of neighboring evil rulers.  With that, they agreed to be friends in the future.

Overall, it was a fantastic experience.  I’m sure this is the first of many instances of my son DMing.


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