D&D Kids: Girls at the Table
Teaching Young Gamers
By Uri Kurlianchik
To start again with the briefest of introductions. My name is Uri, and I go from school to school, and from community center to community center, to play Dungeons & Dragons with kids. On top of the usual challenges that arise from working with kids—one also constantly gets burned by bumping into rules and concepts that can be too complex or boring for young children. And oh boy, did I get burned in my first year! I’ve learned from my mistakes and developed techniques to make the transition from playing with bearded dudes to mischievous students as smooth as possible.
And I’m here to share these techniques with you—along with actual anecdotes and drawings from some of the kids I’ve taught.
Note: As a framework for this article, consider that my kids fall into two age groups: 8-9 (beginners) and 10-11 (advanced). Occasionally, there will be younger or older children. The youngest player I have is 7 and is doing surprisingly well.
Quote:
I would like to say a few words in my defense even before I might give cause for offence. I believe this is called a disclaimer, though I’m loath to use this term since I don’t plan to dis any of my claims.
(un)Disclaimer
I am a man.
Despite living a rich and fulfilling life, one thing I never got to be is a woman. Therefore, some readers are likely to ask, “What gives you the right, as a man, to talk about women?”
First of all, this article is not about women, but about children of the female persuasion. Children rarely write pedagogic articles (and thank goodness for that!) and so this ungrateful task falls upon my hairy adult shoulders. So while I may not be female, you, my hypothetical accuser, are not a child, hence we’re both in equal violation of authenticity.
Secondly, an observer from the outside may notice some truths that a member from within won’t. This is why people, at least smart ones, listen to other people. This is why we have psychologists, rabbis, priests, strangers on a train, and Uris: to get a different angle on our lives.
Thirdly, while I’m neither a girl nor often DM for young girls (they make hardly 10% of the demographic in my gaming groups), while writing this article I have consulted with female DMs, female players, and a guy who had the rare experience of running an all-girl group for a year. Much of the article is a summary of their experiences.
Lastly, and this is my main point, it’s all about fun and games. So please, for the aforementioned goodness’ sake, don’t take anything I write too seriously. My aim as I embarked on this monumental project was to help DMs avoid some of the pitfalls into which I had stumbled in the beginning of my career and to tell some amusing anecdotes while at it, not to expose all the intricacies of the human spirit.
Now, let’s get to business, shall we?
(un)Disclaimer
I am a man.
Despite living a rich and fulfilling life, one thing I never got to be is a woman. Therefore, some readers are likely to ask, “What gives you the right, as a man, to talk about women?”
First of all, this article is not about women, but about children of the female persuasion. Children rarely write pedagogic articles (and thank goodness for that!) and so this ungrateful task falls upon my hairy adult shoulders. So while I may not be female, you, my hypothetical accuser, are not a child, hence we’re both in equal violation of authenticity.
Secondly, an observer from the outside may notice some truths that a member from within won’t. This is why people, at least smart ones, listen to other people. This is why we have psychologists, rabbis, priests, strangers on a train, and Uris: to get a different angle on our lives.
Thirdly, while I’m neither a girl nor often DM for young girls (they make hardly 10% of the demographic in my gaming groups), while writing this article I have consulted with female DMs, female players, and a guy who had the rare experience of running an all-girl group for a year. Much of the article is a summary of their experiences.
Lastly, and this is my main point, it’s all about fun and games. So please, for the aforementioned goodness’ sake, don’t take anything I write too seriously. My aim as I embarked on this monumental project was to help DMs avoid some of the pitfalls into which I had stumbled in the beginning of my career and to tell some amusing anecdotes while at it, not to expose all the intricacies of the human spirit.
Now, let’s get to business, shall we?
What Are We Rolling For?
The first and most apparent difference between male and female players is what they enjoy in the game. From what I observed, boys or girls enjoy more or less the same things in D&D, but for different reasons; boys usually prefer “crunch” (often literally) while girls usually prefer “fluff” (almost always literally.)
Boys
Male players seem to have two main motivations: winning and goofing around. These two are practically contradictory and often lead to friction and conflict.
D&D is Sport
Best Example: Oi! Stop talking about football, we have a dragon to kill! Buy provisions and let’s do it!
Worst Example: Our mission is to kill the dragon? Okay, I kill the dragon. What do I get?
Those who live by this code feel that D&D—unlike what the rules say—has winners and losers: The one with the most XP is a winner. The one who successfully completed the most quests is a winner. The one who has the most money and the best items is a winner. The one who wastes times doing things that don’t grant XP or treasure is a loser.
An interesting side effect of viewing D&D as sport is how alignments are perceived; most players upon meeting a new NPC ask whether he’s good or evil. The more competitive players, on the other hand, ask whether the NPC is with them or against them—abstract concepts of good and evil are of little interest to a soldier on a mission. Who’s a foe and who’s an ally, however, are matters of top importance.
Turning D&D into a contest may make DMing easier and the general atmosphere at the table more serious and businesslike, but instead of telling an interactive story with your group, you're now taking on the role of a military commander who sends the heroes on missions which they either accomplish or die trying. In these game, the players' odds of surprising you can be much smaller... unless you actively put them in situations in which they have to make decisions based on morality and not gain. Even then, however, they are likely to simply ask you what would you prefer they did (sporty players are nothing if not helpful).
D&D is Playground
Best Example: I wonder who lives inside this city with walls of night and towers of unfulfilled dreams... let’s go there and find out!
Worst Example: Wow! A new sword? Awesome! I stab Ron in the head to see what it does.
Should you ever spot me fervently banging my head against the whiteboard, you’ll know someone just kicked the anthill that is my adventure. This sort of player views D&D as a playground where they are the heroes and everyone else is like ants or toys, to be played with or destroyed, according to the player’s disposition.
DM: Six people dead. Thousands of gold pieces worth of damage. Riots all over the state... how do you plan to finish your mission now?
Kid: We have a mission?!
In the best case, such players use the game as a journey into their own subconscious, a therapy of sorts. This is fascinating to observe and makes for excellent sandbox games. Some of their actions might be irresponsible and throw the campaign into disarray, forcing you to improvise and make adjustments to your plans—but at least you know you’re building a good thing there.
At worst, such players use it to break stuff (and your spirit) to either compensate for powerlessness in real life or for sheer sadistic glee. Even thought the latter is just screaming for PC-killing, with young children this may not end well. Instead, see some of the suggestions in the text box below.
Repercussions of Violence
What happens when you shoot everything that moves in real life or a CRPG? You die. No matter how tough you are, the cops, the National Guard, the USAF, The Justice League of America... someone will eventually stop your rampage. The problem with young players is that killing their characters can be traumatic and cause them to leave gaming for good. Nevertheless, you don’t want to encourage this sort of gaming, so here are a few tricks that can be used to counter it without resorting to PC-killing.
Imprisonment: the players attacked a night watch patrol and got TPK’ed? No problem. They wake up bound and disarmed (erase all equipment from their character sheets). The enormity of their actions is made clear to them by an authoritative and stern judge.
Although he could easily have them executed, the judge says he nevertheless believes there is goodness in the heroes and sentences them to a long prison term instead. Some XP is lost because the heroes don’t get to practice in prison, their contacts and patrons disavow them, and the players walk away with a valuable lesson: you’re part of the world, not its center. Conversely, you can give them a chance to breakout and learn what it feels like to live on the lam; no more shopping in the market and no more quests from the king—you’re outlaws now and every visit to a town or a castle can be your last.
If the players messed with criminal elements instead of the authorities, you can have them shipped to a faraway slave camp from which they have to escape or die of overwork or starvation—which is more exciting for the players if more torturous for their characters.
Atonement: If you feel that prison is a little too harsh for your sensitive group, you can replace it with a fun adventure they have to complete to make up for their crimes. Feel free to use magic to compel the heroes to complete this quest... and then donate all recovered treasure to charity.
Manhunt: Having a powerful enemy is less fun than it sounds. A short while after the heroes kill an NPC for no good reason, they discover that he or she had some absurdly powerful friends… friends that the heroes have no chance of defeating. Soon they encounter those people and barely escape with their lives. Now the campaign has a new focus: somehow calling off the hit, possibly by making amends and changing their evil ways.
Common Sense: Ask the attacking player why he does what he does. If he says “because,” or “I feel like it,” tell him there is no such thing as “because” in your group. You don’t allow players to play evil characters and so every act of violence must be explained in-play. If they fail to provide an adequate explanation, don’t allow the action. After all, you don’t stab the teachers in the hallway for fun, why would your lawful good paladin do it? Feel free to confront them with the harsh realities of violence. Yes, you will be seen as patronizing, preachy, and a killjoy—but maybe, if you roll your Diplomacy high enough, you’ll get your message across.
Of course, I don’t have to do any of these with my groups. I take the time to instruct players about what roleplaying is and how it’s different from a FPS in advance; we’re telling a story, not pointlessly rolling dice.
Girls
Kid 1: I don't want to storm this castle. I don't want to die again.
Kid 2: Death shouldn't concern you.
Kid 1: You mean this is safe?
Kid 2: No. I mean death shouldn't concern you.
Girls mostly play to express themselves in artistic ways and to see others doing it. They are not nearly as confrontational as boys and give their positions much more easily. Those who are confrontational tend to be extreme individualists who frequently provide a dissenting opinion. More often than not, they are a voice of reason in a cacophony of silliness.
D&D is Drama
Best Example: I’m so sorry we weren’t here to protect your home, little bird, join us and we’ll be your new family.
Worst Example: Wait! You didn’t let me finish describing how my character is dressed this morning.
A 9-year old girl who came to see what D&D is all about once asked me if her character can be a vegetarian, to which I replied “of course” and rewarded her 200 XP because she was the only one who bothered with non-combat aspects of her character. As I reviewed the character sheets that evening I noticed that she wrote in her character class as “vegetarian ranger.” Practically every decision she made during this campaign was affected by her character’s vegetarianism and love for nature. This included not only her selection of friends and enemies, but also character appearance, choice of items, and making a point of petting an animal or planting a tree at least once per session.
Dramatic players care about how their characters look like and how they are perceived by seemingly inconsequential NPCs more than about “winning the game” or destroying stuff. In a way, they are much more immersed in the game than the sportsmen, who view it as, well... a game; or the hooligans, who view it as GTA: Nentir Vale. Crunch is of secondary importance to them; if you want to capture a dramatic player’s heart, it’s much more important to portray the witch as stooped and cackling, to describe the dragon’s magnificence with epic prose and grandiose tones, and to generally pay attention to body language and aesthetics. A dramatic player cares less about the powers and bonuses granted by the treasure and more about its luster and beauty.
The negative aspect of the dramatic player is an exaggerated attention to detail which sometimes borders on narcissism and is likely to bore other players, who view a five-minute long description of how the group’s wizard is dressed or an equally long chat with a random eladrin traveler as a waste of time. Worse, if you go along with it, some players will feel the dramatic player is enjoying special treatment as he or she’s getting much more air time than anyone else. This sort of narcissism is more often seen in male players than female players, which is not surprising, given that the original Narcissus was a guy....
Kid 1 (to Galeb Duhr): Join our grand adventure!
Galeb Duhr: No way I'm going anywhere with you!
Kid 2: You've just been rejected by a stone... it doesn't get any more humiliating than this, does it?
D&D is Spectacle
Best Example: Could you please describe how the eladrin priestess looks again? I want my drawing to be accurate.
Worst Example: ...
Another example of something girl players will occasionally do and which some boys find annoying is taking the role of the observer. Boys also sometimes behave like this, but from my experience it’s mostly because they are busy making detailed travel journals or comics of the game, not because they don’t feel like acting. A girl, on the other hand, may often sit back during the game and just observe the occurrences without taking any actions except during combat or when directly addressed by an NPC. She’s not being distracted like the astronaut; she’s perfectly focused on the game, probably more than her very active fellow who just cast flames of phlegethos on the troll who was killed five rounds ago because he didn’t hear you saying the troll is toast. She doesn’t feel the need to intervene in the story just yet.
My advice is this: Don’t force observers to act. There’s nothing wrong with observing, and being quiet is certainly better than constantly talking over everyone else. Trust me—when the time comes, she will act, sometimes surprising everyone with the decisiveness and cleverness of that one action. A girl whose actions could be summed as “I follow the group” for half a session just happened to be the one to discover that the gigantic garbage pile the group was climbing could be used to empower the robotic heroes, a discovery that saved the day. She also drew a nice picture of her character.
Bows and Fairies
We talked about why boys and girls play; now let’s talk a little about what they play. My personal experience shows that girls are not less violent than boys, they are less wantonly violent. They don’t mind using force to achieve their goals or defend their honor, but they don’t relish in slaughter and destruction, and they certainly don’t like taking reckless risks solely for the sake of awesome.
I recollect a session in which a group came upon an infernal anaconda. A minotaur hero threw down his great axe, stripped to his breeches, and declared that he was going to wrestle the anaconda one-on-one and to strangle it to death with his bare hands. Why? Because that’s totally badass!
This is not something I imagine a female player doing. In fact, nearly all females playing for the first time, both young and old, created characters that specialized in ranged attacks, most often rangers and druids. Those who didn’t start the game as ranged strikers did so because of peer pressure from boys who really needed a leader in the group. Now, have you noticed how leaders in D&D never really lead, but only serve the group? A girl forced to play a so-called “leader” is much less likely to stay in the game than a girl given a character with which she can express herself and act as an individual, and not part of a well-oiled monster-killing, XP-making war-machine.
Therefore, if you’re running an introductory game and want to appeal to girls, make sure to have a suitable character handy. An esteemed colleague of mine, a man with much more experience with girl players, says that the girls he DMs prefer fey and sylvan races and their characters to be tall and slander. They like nature-based, ranged and quick classes, and value Dexterity more than any other ability. Although less popular than rangers and rogues, wizards are also fairly common.
My personal (though much more limited experience) is different. Girls I played with preferred short and stocky characters to lithe and elegant ones. Given free reign, most started the game as dwarves, mulls, halflings or simply short humans. Class-wise, my experience corresponded with my colleague’s.
Taking all this into account, I think the character statistically most likely to be attractive to girls is a female eladrin ranger. Describe her as a friend of nature and a protector of the forest, not as a hunter or avenger. The character least likely to appeal to girls would be a four-hundred-pound mentally-deficient half-orc warlord armed with a dinosaur femur and no backstory whatsoever.
If you have a group with one girl and half a dozen boys, as if often the case, expect a fair (or not very fair...) amount of badgering and attempts to coerce the young lady into playing male style—either a team player who never asks questions or a jolly psychopath who goes around wrecking the campaign world. Some intervention is advised, at least at first. While I usually support absolute impartiality in DMs and consider railroading a crime worse than murder (or misspelling the word rogue), in this case if you don’t intervene you’ll lose an almost certainly good player. I say “almost certainly good,” because girls who bother coming to introductory sessions are usually independent thinkers and keen enthusiasts of the genre, and often grow into very imaginative and dedicated players. Besides, we have a stereotype to kill, right?
Last but not least is a minor difference that should nevertheless be taken into account; contrary to the prevalent stereotype, girls are much less concerned with shopping for shopping’s sake than boys. An all-male group will never leave the marketplace of their own accord. They will spend the whole session buying trash they don’t need, animals that won’t help, and stealing shiny nonsense that could easily get them hanged. Girls, in my experience, don’t do that. They only buy items that they actually need or that are necessary to advance their quest. For example, a girl with a masterwork sword will upgrade to an enchanted sword; she won’t buy seven other mundane melee weapons, a trained but sarcastic parrot, and a souvenir glass bubble with a miniature Waterdeep inside.
