Anyone want to help make a D&D style game for 6th graders?

[IvyClimber]

I'm a teacher, and I'm trying to put together a D&D style game for 6th graders. The trouble is that I only played D&D with my dad and brother when I was a lot younger, and never DMd, so I am not exactly sure how to put it all together.  

 

Here's what I've got so far: 

 

grid-style game boards with some squares painted blue for water areas - places their animals can't walk

Tons of 6 sided dice and one 20 sided die for me

Pennies & glass beads for energy tokens

 

Before student turns begin, I'd roll a 20-sided die to determine whether there are any special circumstances as follows:

1 - freak tornado - all roll to see who survives (1, 2, 3 are swept away)

2 - snow - takes double energy to move each square / roll to see who survives (1 succumb to exposure)

3 - sunshine & fair skies - takes 1/2 energy to move each square (so 1 energy - 2 squares if they wish)

4 - virus affects producers (food), so food availability cut in half, rounding down (need a 4 or 5 just to get 1 food)

5 - virus affects students' animals, roll to see affects (1 - death, 2 - no food this turn, 3 - double energy to move, 4 - 6 no problems)

6 - virus affects predators - no predator attacks this turn

7 - warm weather & abundance of food (Food roll +1)

8 - 20 normal circumstances

 

Animals can move as many blocks as the amount of energy they have.  They start with an energy level of 10.  They have to roll wherever they stop to see if they found food there (1 - no food, 2 - no food, 3 - 1 food, 4 - 2 food, 5 - 3 food, 6 - 4 food).  Food, of course, changes to energy. If they run out of energy and don't find food, they starve. 

 

Every turn, students will roll to see if they encounter a predator (me).  If they roll a 1, a predator has found them and they have to roll to defend themselves.  Whichever of us gets a higher roll on a six sided die wins.  If I win, they've been eaten.  If they win, they elude me and live another day. If we tie, we roll again.

 

Okay, for those of you who care enough to have made it through all that and knowledgeable enough about games like this:  I feel like I need to give them an overarching goal to be working toward.  Any ideas?  Also, I'd like to tie in procreation in a dice-roll, in some school appropriate way.  Maybe animals that have over 20 energy can roll to see if they successfully procreate? Then students can control 2 animals, which is fine.  It would also be nice to have a predator population count with a probability of encounter, so that if there are a small number of them, a number of the predators would die, leaving less of a chance of encountering them next turn, but I'm not sure how to implement that. 

 

I'll be playing what I've got with my husband all weekend to see how things go with the chances of survival.  No sense in making them all die early on.  And I guess I'll need to work on something so that students' animals who die respawn or something so that they're not bored for the rest of the class period.

 

Any thoughts on anything I've put up here is welcomed!

 

Bringing nerdiness to the masses!

 

 

[Rostov]

Well.... I think my advice (for what little it's worth) would be to try and see if there's anything age-appropriate already out there to save you reinventing the wheel.  All that looks like a lot of hard work to me.  Homebrew games are a lot of fun, but I think they need a lot of patience on behalf of the developer and the play-testers.... and I'm not sure how patient children would be.  In terms of board games, I think 'Ticket to Ride' and 'Settlers of Catan' are both fairly straightforward to learn, but I wouldn't fancy buying enough copies of the game for the whole class.

 

What are your aims and objectives for the game, and how many people will be playing?  And how old is a sixth-grader?  (*Goes to check google*  oh... about 11-12ish?)  Would a computer game be an option?

 

One D&D style game that I've run at summer camp was a lot simpler, and involved a lot more running around.  It may well be that it's a summer camp game, not a school game, because of the numbers of staff and amount of space that it required.  Roughly, the first stage involves groups of kids running between the gold-giver and the wizard getting ticks on a card, while avoiding "capture" by the goblins.  In the second half, they can spend their gold and magic on buying weapons to take on monsters.  For example, the Stink Monster can only be slain by the Air Freshener, the Fire Monster by the bucket of water, and so on.  Sometimes we had some red herring items in there to cause confusion.  The way we used to play it was mainly an excuse for the staff to get covered in green face paint and run shrieking around the centre, and to tire out the kids before bedtime.... but I guess it could easiy be developed into something more cerebral.  Sometimes we replaced the first stage with a straightforward treasure hunt that was rewarded with currency...

[Raincloak]

Why do you want an adventure game for 6th graders?  If you're trying to make it educational, you could probably customize an existing game to your needs.

 

If you're just amusing them, why not pull out a basic old-school dungeon crawler (eg, 2nd edition D&D), flip through the book to make sure there's no half-naked succubi, and let them go at it?  Or you could find a "retro-clone," there are plenty of systems that might be suitable. 

 

Either way, I'm thinking it'd be less work to adapt an existing system.  Making a new RPG from scratch is an ENORMOUS project -- much bigger than DMing, which is itself fairly time consuming.  You'd rather spend time playing with the kids than mucking around with game mechanics, right?

 

If you want a board game, I'll second "Settlers of Catan" -- it's well within the grasp of a 6th grader, one play session takes about an hour, and there are a lot of customizations available when you get bored with the basic game.  I've heard great things about "Ticket to Ride" but haven't actually played it.

 

If you want to teach them a card game, "Munchkin" is also good nerdy dungeon-crawlin' entertainment, though you might need to check the cards for age-inappropriate ones (as I recall it's not terribly obscene, just occasional references to pants and beer).  Or you could teach them to play Magic: the Gathering; back when I was in 6th grade it was the hottest thing on the playground.

 

Or ... you could go REALLY retro, and teach them to play chess...

 

p.s.  Are you seeking to engage the entire class en masse in one game?  Because if so, a standard dungeon crawl is going to require some tweaking.  Most adventure games are designed for 3 to 8 players.

[Space_Elf]

From what i remember of sixth grade, your biggest chalelnge will be getting the whole class invested in playing.

 

the really smart kids (if sufficiently enlightened) may recognise this as a chance to get to know oyu better and will participate, but some will be disinterested if they feel it's taking away from valuble class time.

 

A certain number will out of hand dismiss it as geeky and boring and refuse to participate.

 

The ones who are really into it may try to break the game just to test limits and see how you adapt to unexpected reactions.

 

the rest will probably be varying shades of interested or bored.

 

 

I reccomend if you want the whoel class to participate in the game you need to offer some incentives... like reduced homework or something. for the kids struggeling in your class, enough extra credit to boost their grade wuld be very inspiring. I'll also say that the others are right you'd be best served by modifying an existsting system then creating your own, much simpler.

[IvyClimber]

Thanks for your thoughts, guys.  I kept it homebrew because it's more fun to make it ourselves, and more educational for them to think through game creation & improvement.  They made some really interesting game boards that we taped together for one big board, and played it in groups of 6 - 8.  We played it Friday and it was a blast! The kids loved it!  We played another game on the topic of predators and prey that involved running around and hiding/finding things that they enjoyed as well, but 117 out of 120 preferred the "tabletop" game we played. They also offered some really thoughtful advice on how to improve it.  I even had one girl go home and make a version for herself at home.  I feel awesome that I've brought new kids into D&D style gaming! YAY!