Did ya miss the part about “when other options aren’t convenient”?
Actually, yes. :smack:
So you failed a perception roll, then? 
Smart not Wise?
We’ve been playing with a combination of Roll20, DnDBeyond, and Discord, which is working out pretty well. You can get all the books online, and DnDBeyond keeps track of character sheets, saving throws, etc. Not as convenient as playing in person, and apparently Roll20 has a bit of a learning curve, but it definitely makes it possible.
If you get her a starter set, make sure that you know whether she’s playing D&D or AD&D. AD&D is “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons,” has different rules, and is what 98% of gamers play.
Probably she will want a players handbook, and some polyhedral dice of her own. Also, some graph paper, and mechanical pencils, to map out the places she’s visiting.
I started playing when I was 11, and I couldn’t have done it without the graph paper.
Also, nothing inherently wrong about an adult DMing for some kids, particularly if it’s one of the kid’s parents, or someone who is a teacher when not furloughed, and just misses doing something with kids, or even just someone who DMs for a adult group, and maybe has made a kid-friendly version of an old module, and wants to welcome kids who may be serious players in 10 more years. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a right to ask as many questions as you want. Someone with nothing to hide will understand why you are asking.
A red flag might be an adult who wants to play with 10-yr-olds, as a player, not a DM. Particularly if there is just one such person playing a game clearly designed for 10-yr-olds.
As great as this advice all was in 1985, it’s a teeny bit out of date :). AD&D hasn’t been around since 2000, when Third Edition was released. These days, the overwhelming majority of play happens with fifth edition, and without graph paper.
Yeah, I was gonna offer advice on vetting adults who would GM, but I figure that the general parenting approach to sussing out adults in your kids’ lives applies here just as well.
From the opposite end, in fact, as an adult who DMs for kids, I put safety measure in place. I never use my teacher account for anything, although it’d make things logistically easier (I could get everyone into a Google Meet via their school accounts). I run all scheduling directly through parents. We use roll20, and I got the parents to set up the roll20 accounts with parental email addresses.
My goal is to make everything as transparent to the other parents as I can, so that if they ever feel the need, they can log on and see what’s going on. If a parent of one of my kids’ friends set up a game and asked them to play, I’d want that DM to have similar transparency protocols.
To add to what Left Hand of Dorkness stated:
D&D has been around in one form or another since 1973, and there have been a lot of different iterations and versions over that time.
The current iteration is “Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition”*, often referred to simply as “D&D”, or “5th Edition” or “5E” to distinguish it from previous versions. This is the version the vast majority of gamers currently play, and is the version pretty much all of the podcasters and streamers are nominally playing.**
The current “Basic D&D” is a free, cut-down version of 5th Edition. If you get the Basic D&D PDF or the Essentials Kit from Wizards of the Coast, you’re playing the current 5th Edition of D&D. Confusingly, there are other, much older, versions of the game also called “Basic D&D”, but if you download the free PDF from the WotC website, that’s the current version.
*“5th Edition” is actually at least 7th Edition, and maybe 10th Edition, depending on how you count, but that’s a whole can of worms irrelevant to this discussion.
**This is actually worth noting, since your daughter’s exposure to the game is from YouTube videos. There are a lot of podcasts and streaming video series of people playing D&D. Many of these are “actual play” streams, which are lightly edited sessions of people actually playing the game. But the most popular are highly produced shows, with players and DMs who are often professional voice actors and writers in their day jobs, “playing” “D&D”. They’re not scripted shows, exactly, but they’re often more like improv theater than an actual RPG session. They’re intentionally produced to be entertaining for the audience at least as much as the players - the players themselves know they’re not just playing to the other people around the table, but to a broader viewing audience. They can set up unrealistic expectations for new players. I’ve personally experienced this myself. New players are sometimes disappointed when a DM doesn’t have a variety of distinctive, entertaining NPC personas and voices at their command, and when the DM doesn’t craft intricate, individualized plots and storylines around their character’s backstory.
Actually, though all of the players universally call the current version of the game “5th edition”, so far as I can tell, the official name of the current version of the game is just “Dungeons and Dragons”. Nowhere on the cover or frontis pages of any of the books is any edition number listed.
And I like it when DMs bring in bits of backstory from characters, so when I started DMing this spring, I wanted to be sure to do some of that… except that none of my players gave me enough to do much with.
I never even noticed that, I just checked on Amazon, not even the Modules have 5th Edition on the covers.
Spam reported (post #32).
There are some board games that are modeled on D&D. I played one a few years ago (Forget the name) and it was a co-op game where the game itself was the DM. You can play with two people. It’s simpler than actual D&D, and might provide a good intro.
There are a lot of board games in this genre.
Wizards of the Coast released a series of “Adventure System” board games, based on D&D 4th Edition.
There are also a number of 3rd party “dungeon crawler” board games that share thematic elements with D&D. The most prominent are probably Descent and Frosthaven, but there are quite a few more.
There are also a lot of “dungeon crawler” games with other thematic elements - “Hellboy” (neo-pulp gonzo occult investigation), “Mansions of Madness” (Lovecraftian horror investigation), “Shadows of Brimstone” (Weird West horror adventure), and just so, so many more.
They are expensive hobby games - most of them cost $50 at the low end to $100+ at the high end, just for the base game. I own far more of them than is financially healthy. I love playing them. But, they aren’t D&D. They have role-playing elements, but at the end of the day, they are board games, not role-playing games.
NAF1138, if you are interested in trying a board game with RPG elements instead of a full-on RPG and you think your daughter might be interested, my personal recommendation would probably be Descent 2E from Fantasy Flight Games. It’s got a lot of D&D style elements, and it doesn’t really have any elements that would be inappropriate for a 10-year old. Out of the box, it was designed for one player to be the Overlord (Dungeon Master, sort of) and 2-4 players playing heroes. However, FFG has also released a free app (iOS, Android, Steam) that takes on the role of the Overlord and turns the game into a fully co-op 2-4 player game of heroes against the AI Overlord. It is really well-done, with entire campaigns of linked quests.
What’s the relative popularity of 5e vs. Pathfinder these days? I only ask because I fairly recently started playing the cRPG Kingmaker and was surprised to find it was D&D ;). I bought it more or less sight unseen off Steam while searching for decently reviewed long-form rpgs and had no idea exactly what it was until I started playing it. This then got me curious about this split in the gaming community, which happened well after I stopped being involved in PnP gaming( I was mostly a 2e-generation player for context ).
Hard figures are hard to come by in the table-top RPG market. However, by most estimates, D&D 5E has eclipsed Pathfinder. Partially that’s just due to the fact, as I indicated above, recent years have seen a huge influx of new players, who were specifically drawn in by 5E. But a lot of Pathfinder players migrated over to 5E as well. Paizo responded by publishing a new edition of Pathfinder, Pathfinder Second Edition. I’m honestly not sure what the market impact has been.
Anecdotally, I know some people who are playing Pathfinder 2E (I’m in a campaign myself), but literally everyone I know who is playing Pathfinder 2E is also playing 5E, but I know at least as many people who are playing 5E but not Pathfinder 2E.
I knew a lot of people who played Pathfinder but had no interest in D&D 4E. Probably half of the gamers in my extended gaming circle have no particular interest in Pathfinder, 1E or 2E, and several have never played either. I have literally never met a gamer who wasn’t interested in 5E. It’s far from everyone’s favorite system, but I’ve never met anyone who didn’t enjoy it, while I know a few that actively dislike Pathfinder.
A bit more broadly, my Friendly Local Game Store, before the Corona shut downs, had two nights a week devoted specifically to 5E organized play, Adventurer’s League, and the store is typically packed on those nights. I frequently see groups playing 5E at the store on other nights.
There have been a few attempts to organize a local Pathfinder Society chapter at the store for Pathfinder organized play, but they’ve never gotten much interest or turn-out. I have seen groups playing Pathfinder at the store, but not as many as playing 5E.
For a little more context on the inter-relation between D&D and Pathfinder:
The third edition of D&D, particularly the 3.5 revision, was tremendously popular (3E was released in 2000, 3.5 in 2003); D&D had become less popular over the course of the 2E era (not helped by TSR’s bankruptcy, and the transition to WotC), but 3E/3.5 really did a lot to revive the D&D brand, and the game.
Part of that popularity was driven by the fact that WotC released the core of the rules system under the “Open Game License,” which allowed other publishers to use the game system mechanics to publish their own content that was compatible with D&D, as well as creating their own games that used the “D20 System,” which lowered the barrier to entry for getting new players to try their games.
After Hasbro had bought Wizards of the Coast, they spun off the magazine-publishing arm of WotC (which was publishing Dragon and Dungeon magazines), creating a new company called Paizo. Paizo continued publishing Dragon and Dungeon, and had a licensing agreement with WotC which allowed them to publish official D&D content.
Despite the success of 3.5 D&D, WotC was convinced that they were missing out on attracting younger players, who were instead playing MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. So, in 2007, they announced that they would be introducing a fourth edition of D&D, which would feature aspects that would be familiar-feeling to MMO players. At that same time, WotC terminated their relationship with Paizo, and pulled back the licenses to the Dragon and Dungeon magazines (intending to make them into webzines).
Paizo, realizing that their business model just got killed, also realized that there were a lot of players who loved 3.5, and were not enthused about what they were hearing about 4E D&D. As the core of the 3.5 rules was under the Open Game License, Paizo began developing their own game, which was, effectively, a revision of 3.5 D&D, which they called Pathfinder.
In the summer of 2008, WotC launched 4E D&D, and Paizo launched Pathfinder. Pathfinder, of course, felt an awful lot like 3.5 D&D, while 4E was radically different from 3.5 – and, in fact, it played a lot like an MMO, including having “roles” for classes that were borrowed directly from the traditional roles in MMOs (healer, tank, DPS).
The D&D player base largely fractured at that point – while a lot of players played both, many of the ones who had loved 3.5 left D&D for Pathfinder. 4E sold well at first, but within a couple of years of the launches of the two games, it became clear that Pathfinder was proving to be substantially more successful, and it also became clear that WotC had a losing proposition on their hands with 4E. By 2011, WotC pulled back on their publication of new 4E books.
WotC started releasing previews of “D&D Next” (5E) in 2013, and they made it clear that they were returning to the game’s roots in its design. It was released in 2014, and pretty quickly took off; I believe that, within a couple of years of its release, it’d retaken the #1 RPG slot back from Pathfinder.
It’s an interesting history, but I’m not sure how much it’s gonna help NAF with his daughter’s D&D needs :). Short answer: Anything labeled “D&D” that’s published now, or that’s on D&D Beyond (an amazing online resource), is gonna be the game she wants to play. Unless she’s buying used books, the edition won’t matter.
You’re right; I was responding to Tamerlane – which, I admit, created a sidetrack to the thread. My apologies.
And, yes, pretty much anything that NAF1138 finds that’s been published by WotC from 2014 on will be 5E.
If you are playing on-line, no need to limit it to local friends. Have a nephew across the country that your daughter is friendly with? An old camp friend who moved away? Invite them to play!