There was a new wrinkle in my D&D experience this week, and it was a lot of fun.
I've played with variations of the same group for about twenty years. We've all had our own, seperate gaming experiences, but the three of us have been a gaming team forever. We were all in each other's weddings, have started families, and basically been brothers to each other. One of the three of us, let's call him Dave, gave his oldest daughter a copy of the players handbook for her most recent birthday, fueled by her love of harry potter, lord of the rings, and her absolutely amazing creative streak... I guarantee you, someday we'll be watching movies based on her books. She was super excited to play, and her father decided to make it happen. He invited her to invite her friends to their own game, and we worked together to give them something tailored for them.
Now, I've run the game a few times, but I'm nowhere near as good as our third friend and normal Dungeon Master, lets call him John. The dude actually gets paid to run a game online in addition to the one I play in. He didn't have time to put together another campaign, so we decided we'd work together. I would DM, I'd build the story, and John would play in the campaign as a sort of DM-Player Character, keeping all the rules above board.
So there we were, three guys putting together a very first ever D&D experience for a group of 12-year-old girls. It was actually a lot of fun, they took to it pretty quickly. John, always the DM, was pretty adamant that we keep the game's narrative moving, while I, usually a player, was more focused on just keeping it fun moment-to-moment, but I think we worked together to find a good middle ground.
Why am I writing about this? there was a moment in our gameplay that actually make me question a few things. The girls had all chosen to play spellcasters of one sort or another... they were a Wizard, a Druid, a Bard, and a Ranger (Dave's daughter picked the Ranger... she had a much clearer vision of what she wanted to be). Meanwhile, Dave was a fighter and John, our DM-PC, was a cleric. Essentially, you had the men playing armored warriors, and the girls playing characters that really didn't engage in physical violence.
Now, the game featured a moment when the characters were seperated from the bad guy's base by a wide open field of tall grass. It was pretty clear that the thing to do was to sneak through the grass, and the girls were all certain they wanted to leave the guys with their big noisey armor behind. (I imagine the fact that they were essentially the authority figures in their badass girl-band was a factor in it too). I found myself pointing out... hey, if there are badguys in the grass, how are you gals going to protect yourselves? None of you are built to fight up close...
Even as I was saying it, I could feel myself unpacking all sorts of stuff in that moment. How awesome was it that all four girls had picked characters that eshewed the whole idea of up close physical violence? Moments like that are often central to the game, but why is that? Is it a gendered idea, to place violence so central to the narrative? Had *I* done that? What exactly does it say if I tell these awesome young ladies that they HAVE to conform to this male-dominant perspective to problem solving?Obviously, a lot of that is nonsense and I was just overthinking it, but it occured to me that this was such a great moment for me to listen and maybe be taught something by these girls. Maybe I'd see a broader perspective on conflict resolution? Well, they decided to sneak themselves, and watch the two armored teammates walk through the grass noisily... and when they were jumped by the hidden badguys, the girls were free to counter-jump THEM.
I have no idea what the lesson was there, but I can already tell this is going to be a great time.
