It was tough picking just 5 things we were grateful for - the experience of Dungeons & Dragons is a pretty amazing one!
In this season of thanksgiving, we’ve been reflecting on all the things we’re grateful for at Young Dragonslayers. We’ve been running online tween and teen games of Dungeons & Dragons for over half a decade now, and we’ve grown from a tiny-but-powerful group of three into a robust team of eighteen therapists, performers, nurses, teachers, writers, educators, parents and nerds who get to connect with some truly incredible kids week after week, year after year. It’s hard to take for granted, and it’s even harder to narrow down all the things we’re grateful for in this work! But we did our best, and we hope these reflections give you a window into the incredible power of collaborative gaming experiences (and what it’s like to facilitate them)!
Amazing People Who Share Our Passions
There’s nothing like finding other people to geek out with you.
Living life with a geek-minded persuasion can make it difficult to find your people. Your average neighbor doesn’t usually want to talk about the latest episode of the One-Piece anime, the progress you’ve made in Legend of Zelda, or the best magic spells in Dungeons & Dragons! But it makes it all the more fulfilling when you’re able to connect with the people who share your passions. At Young Dragonslayers, we’ve benefitted hugely from the nerdy community we’ve built. We’ve got a former Magic: The Gathering state champion, Disney World performer, engineering professor, and zookeeper. We’re history nerds, theater nerds, cosplayers, gamers, game designers and writers of everything from pop culture blogs to middle-grade fiction. We love fantasy, sci-fi, science fantasy, board games, video games, comics, anime, western animation, theater, and tabletop roleplaying games, and we get to share this love with one another.
We also get to bring some of our nerdiest ideas to our Young Dragonslayers games, like Zach mashing up Curse of Strahd and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Jaclyn expanding on the lore of The Muppets, Steph putting Minecraft in D&D, Jesse pulling from old-school 1980s XCrawl and Dungeon Magazine materials, Chris weaving in myths from his medieval studies courses, Savanna letting her players be circus performers in a sci-fi future, Maddy using costumes and creativity to host our summer camps adventuring through the Feywild, Gerritt mashing up Blade Runner and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Bobby making dramatic villains and giving them all ridiculous voices. Both in our sessions with tweens and teens and connecting with one another as Game Masters, Young Dragonslayers has been an awesome place for us to share the things we get geeked about!
Unforgettable Memories We Get to Create In Sessions
We will always treasure our favorite stories from sessions
Running D&D games with tweens and teens week after week means we get to tell stories with some of the most creative, thoughtful, and hilarious people on the planet. We get to create complex mysteries, dramatic character arcs, and stunning plot twists. We get to watch our players build interesting characters and develop their stories and relationships in a fictional world. And we get to see the wild ideas of players, the random roll of the dice, and the potent combination of D&D rules and imaginations turn into the kind of chaos, mayhem, and hilarity that we could never come up with on our own.
We have more stories than we could possibly put in a single blog post,* but here are some favorites:
When Zach’s players summoned a magical beaver named Poopa Stinka who gave its life to save the town from a flaming windmill
When Jaclyn’s players took down a vampire by combining the power to create water jets with the power to transform regular water into Holy Water
When Jesse’s players succeeded in befriending Hornet Dragon and take down the leaders of the Xtreme Dungeon Crawl
When Liv’s players summoned real-life pet Bubby the Lizard as a familiar and insisted on giving him all their in-game perks
*You can read more in our blog posts on animal-themed session stories and session stories about bad guys!
The Incredible, Creative, Brilliant Kids in Our Groups
Tweens and teens are some of the coolest people on the planet.
As you can tell from our Dungeons & Dragons session stories, we have some pretty amazing players. Our tweens and teens come from all over (and sometimes beyond) the country, and each one brings their own unique ideas, interests, and personality to our groups. They work with one another to come up with the most wacky and out-of-the-box (but sometimes totally brilliant) solutions to in-game problems. They make art, memes, and songs based on the characters and stories in our games. They create original characters with backstory, motivations, personality, powers, and relationships and add in new ideas as they play. And they share their passions: showing off their cosplays. giving impromptu concerts, sharing fanart, comparing chess strategies, and geeking out about their favorite movies, TV shows, and games. We are so lucky that it’s our job to spend time with these kids!
Building Shared Community
Seeing our players grow into community is amazing.
Sharing these kinds of experiences together in the same group of people meeting week after week turns each of our groups into its own little community. We agree as a group on what we do and don’t want to see in our games, we work through conflict together, and we care about each other. As time passes, players who used to be strangers become friends outside of Young Dragonslayers, texting each other about their favorite anime, swapping chess strategies and video-game stories, and celebrating each other’s wins as a group, whether it’s creating an awesome piece of Sonic the Hedgehog fanart, making it to the soccer semifinals, or finally passing Calculus. And we as Game Masters get to help make that happen: setting the guidelines for the group, adapting to fit player needs, helping them work through conflict, and facilitating the wild D&D experience that brings everyone together.
Getting To See Our Kids Grow
Young people change so much over the course of our groups!
Watching these tweens and teens develop and mature is an incredible experience. As they get older and get more time in our groups, we see their interests, social skills, personalities and confidence grow. Self-conscious teens come out of their shell and start to share their ideas in a group they’ve come to trust. Kids go from not being sure how exactly this “roleplaying thing” works to performing dramatic monologues in character. Young artists build up the confidence to share their work, and their skills only get better with time. High-energy interruption-prone “chaos gremlins” build up the impulse-control skills to make sure everybody gets a turn (but still want to cast Fireball no matter what’s getting lit on fire). Players who were nervous they wouldn’t be able to understand the rules end up recommending their favorite character builds to new players months later. And if players stay with us long enough (which they often do), we literally get to see them grow up, seeing them develop over the years before we bid them farewell at eighteen.* That’s the greatest gift of all, for us and for anyone else who works with kids.
*After he graduated, one of Jesse’s longtime players actually had his dad drive him to the Origins Game Fair so he could meet Jesse in person and play games together!
Join the Young Dragonslayers Crew!
If you or your child haven’t had a chance to join in on the awesome experience of Young Dragonslayers, now is a great time; pre-registration is currently open for our winter games. You can tell us about your kid, and we’ll reach out when enrollment opens, scheduling a quick 15-minute Zoom call so we can get to know them. Then they can try an optional beginner-friendly game before you commit. If we’re a good fit, we’ll build their group of fellow players based on age, schedule, experience level, play style, and personality, and get them all set to join in their own Dungeons & Dragons game! Learn more via the button below.
