RPG a Day #25 Welcome

 

I’m going to try and take part in the #RPGaDay writing prompts for 2021. The idea is there’s a prompt every day that asks you to write about something in RPG’s you really like. There are a couple of alternate prompts offered but I’m going to try and do the main one every day. If you want to try it yourself, you can head here for the calendar for this year.

When I think of welcoming people to the hobby the event that always comes to mind for me is Free RPG Day. I’ve volunteered at my local game store every Free RPG Day. Part of why I do it is that it involves new players. I love introducing new people to the hobby and showing them the games.

Two years ago, when we still had in person gatherings I was lucky enough to get to introduce a family to Dungeon Crawl Classics. My local game store also functions as a comic book store. During that year, a father and his two kids had come into the store. They saw the event and asked what was going on. I got to explain DCC to them and they decided to play.

I’ll be honest I was a little worried because the kids were both under six years of age and the module was a character sieve. What that means is that the adventure was designed to be particularly vicious. Everyone creates a couple of characters and plays all of them simultaneously. This is because the adventure is particularly lethal. I was worried how the kids was handle their characters being killed. I explained this to make sure that their father knew and could help if one of them had a bad reaction.

The game began. Everyone rolled up characters; we all had tons of fun with the random charts. DCC has lots of randomness and character creation is pretty quick because of it. It also means that in addition to everything else we got to name a chicken and a cow as these were random pieces of equipment that the kids rolled.

Once characters were finished we headed into the dungeon. Everything went pretty well for the first fifteen or so feet and then dad lost a character. Everybody laughed and dad pointed out that he had another character so he was fine. Having found the first trap the kids very carefully navigated around it; into the second trap.

They did okay for a round or so and then one of the kids lost a character. I remember waiting to see what would happen. I was worried about this exact moment. However, it was fine. They laughed. After that the evening moved on and we finished the adventure. Of the six characters that went in one survived by running across the heads of a terracotta army to cheers from everyone else.

Did I take it easy on them? Yes. Did I let them win, maybe at the very end I might have fudged a dice roll. But to me, in this instance, it was okay. They were young kids and I wanted them to experience the victory. Plus, in the end they got a copy of the module, one of them won a dice tower from the store, and their dad bought the rulebook on their way out.

I like Free RPG Day for that reason. That moment is when I think our hobby is at its best. Two kids got a fun afternoon with their dad, they laughed, they thought out how to solve puzzles, and they won.

For me, that’s as welcoming as it gets.

I’ll be back tomorrow to talk about theory.

Until then, stay safe and be well.