Cogwheel Gaming

When a fire breathing dragon asks you if you’re a cleric, you say “yes.”

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MP3 Download: Pack Tactics S4 Ep 20: Seeing Red

Music Used: “In heaven everything is fine” by JAM is licensed as Public Domain and can be downloaded from http://modarchive.org

Hello and welcome to Crash’s Course, a short form podcast where I share my thoughts and advice on playing and running tabletop role playing games in roughly about 5 minutes.

A friend of a friend recently asked for advice on taking up the DM mantle for a bunch of elementary students. I gave my answer in a more direct fashion, but thought it would be worth sharing here as well.

To start, I do not suggest spending any money up front. (OK, maybe on dice, but who can resist shiny math rocks?) Instead, remember that the Basic Rules are free and now under a Creative Commons license. You can download the whole thing directly from the WotC website to save or print out, or, if you’re playing somewhere with an internet connection, 5esrd.com has done a decent job organizing the free rules and adding in a significant amount of open content, including tons of stuff from Kobold Press.

You still might end up buying books afterwards (that’s what WotC hopes you’ll do) but even then there’s plenty of companies releasing 5e content so you might decide to go with one of those, or maybe just build on the free stuff like they did.

The person in question had played in college but apparently not recently. In a case like this, I’d recommend a starter adventure. Not only are they written for new players, they’re frequently written for new (or newly returned) DMs as well. Most pre-printed adventures will include all the stat blocks and additional information not found in the basic rules, and if they’re designed for new players they tend to gradually build up the difficulty with simple skill checks and moments for role playing before getting too crunchy with the numbers and abilities.

I still haven’t played it myself, but Lost Mine of Phandelver continues to be recommended by others as a great starting point. I think it’s out of print but I’ve found a few copies at thrift stores ( shopgoodwill.com for the win…) and it looks like you can still claim a copy for free on DnD Beyond’s website if you make an account there.

(Yes, I know, DnD Beyond … but free is free.)

OK, so you’ve got the rules, you’ve got an adventure. Now what? Now you’re ready for baby steps. By that I mean, don’t have everyone create complete characters right away. If you have pre-made sheets, that’s nice, but I’ve found kids (and adults) get more immersed when they make their own from scratch.

To that end, start your first session with the players picking their races and rolling their stats. (I’m personally a fan of the standard array, but let my players decide between those two things.) Explaining races and stats to new players is a job in and of itself, but when that’s done you have a starting point. You can have the characters meet up somewhere and begin to interact. I suggest mandating that they all have something in common as a hook to get things started. When DMing for kids, telling them their characters all go to the same school works particularly well.

The next session, have them pick their classes and backgrounds. Even this might need to be split into two parts, but combined you still might have time in the session to continue the role-playing and continue or start the adventure.

By the third session, you can have them picking their equipment and, if applicable, their spells.

Finally, I would strongly suggest that the players make backstories for their characters. Not all of the kids in my after school club have wanted to do this, but the ones who did really got into it. Any chance you get, tie the plot in with one or more backstories. There is nothing like seeing a kid’s face light up because they RECOGNIZE the name of the big, bad, evil guy while everyone else is clueless.

That’s all for this episode, subscribe to just this podcast on Mastodon at is.aaronbsmith.com/@crashscourse or subscribe to all my TTRPG podcasts at is.aaronbsmith.com/@cogwheel.

Music is Deadly Windmills by JAM from modarchive.org, used with permission, as it’s public domain.

This podcast is distributed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

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MP3 Download: Crash’s Course Ep 13: Youth Group

Monty arrives to act in his capacity as KOSHA (Kobold OSHA) Probationary Inspector 3rd Class and get to the bottom of the sabotaging.

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MP3 Download: Cause & Effect Ep 26: KOSHA Compliant

Music Used: “Pandora’s Box (FB Mix)” by christofori is licensed as Public Domain and can be downloaded from http://modarchive.org

The party finds survivors … for a certain value of the word “survive.”

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MP3 Download: Pack Tactics S4 Ep 18: Full of Dragons

Music Used: “In heaven everything is fine” by JAM is licensed as Public Domain and can be downloaded from http://modarchive.org

The following morning, the pieces have been picked up and the party begins investigating why a T-Rex sized sheep went on a rampage.

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MP3 Download: Cause & Effect Ep 24: Mutton Mystery

Music Used: “Pandora’s Box (FB Mix)” by christofori is licensed as Public Domain and can be downloaded from http://modarchive.org

Crash, Beth, Ellie, Io, and Jen dive into Cypher System with a 1-shot where everyone plays a grandparent on their way to a lunch buffet.

Download this published one-shot here: https://crashthedm.itch.io/the-grand-adventure

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MP3 Download: One-Shot: The Grand Adventure (Cypher System)

Music Used: Bubble Machine by Drozerix

Getting to the hollow center of this world is easy. It’s what’s waiting for the kobolds on the other side that’s difficult.

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MP3 Download: Pack Tactics S4 Ep 17: Land of the Lost

Music Used: “In heaven everything is fine” by JAM is licensed as Public Domain and can be downloaded from http://modarchive.org

Hello and welcome to Crash’s Course, a short form podcast where I share my thoughts and advice on playing and running tabletop role playing games in roughly about 5 minutes.

Today I want to talk a little about rerolling. OK, not every TTRPG requires players to roll anything when creating a character, but whatever. I’m talking about those moments in a longer campaign when one of your players decides they want to try a different character.

There can be a lot of reasons for this.

Perhaps the player decided that after a certain plot development, it didn’t make sense for their character to decide to stick around. This could be because they felt betrayed, because they’d finally found a place that felt like home, or something else entirely.

Perhaps the player felt inspired to create a new character, and didn’t want to have to wait for the next campaign to try it out.

Perhaps they’ve decided that character they made looked neat on paper but they’re just not getting the emotional attachment they wanted or expected.

Perhaps they’re just bored.

And … perhaps the character died in a spectacular fashion.

I’ve had players come to me with all of these reasons and more, and they’re all valid.

Look, TTRPGs are supposed to be fun. If something gets in the way of that fun, that’s a bad implementation, and you should change things. I won’t say I’m the perfect GM, but at this point when designing a campaign I try to also think about how new characters can be added without breaking the established plot.

Yes, even in the all-kobold game where they crash landed on a planet without kobolds. The ship was full of more than just the party, and the escape pods worked for everyone but the NPC captain (R.I.P. Sniv Stonetail). Any new character could just be assumed to be a survivor whose pod landed somewhere else.

There’s mixed schools of thought on what the power level of the new character should be. I’m of the opinion that it should be comparable to the rest of the party (yes, even if the new character didn’t “earn” those levels – the player earned them on another character), so if the rest of the party’s level 3, Joe McNewcharacter should also be level 3. If they’ve acquired a few magic items along the way, I’m likely to allow McNewcharacter to pick something off a list.

In Cypher System it can be a bit trickier, because even if you award XP evenly throughout, players can spend it on long or short term benefits. I have a situation like this that I’ll be resolving on Monday, and in this case some of the players have spent enough XP to get halfway to Tier 2 so I’ll be letting the player of the new character check off two boxes on their character sheet (their choice which) but have them otherwise start with no XP.

In my games, that’s a state that won’t last long.

One last thing: Just because a character’s leaving the active party does not mean they’ve left the campaign setting. One of my favorite things is when the plot provides a reason for that character to make a return, either as an NPC or, better yet, with the original player reprising the role with an appropriately leveled older and wiser PC.

Bonus points if they end up playing the old and new characters at the same time, but try to not force them into a situation where they have to have a too long conversation with themself.

That’s all for this episode, subscribe to just this podcast on Mastodon at is.aaronbsmith.com/@crashscourse or subscribe to all my TTRPG podcasts at is.aaronbsmith.com/@cogwheel.

Music is Deadly Windmills by JAM from modarchive.org, used with permission, as it’s public domain.

This podcast is distributed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

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MP3 Download: Crash’s Course Ep 12: Rerolling