I DM for a 13-16 year old kids club with twelve members divided between two DMs and that's tough enough. When the other DM calls in sick and I have all twelve it's verging on the impossible. Trying to DM a full classroom sounds like a nightmare!
On a more positive note if you're in the US you can apply for various school club and classroom resources that might help https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/educators and includes things like play kits, free DDB copies of books and videos and webinars on how to go about setting up after school clubs and class room groups. Might be something on there you find helpful
By far the best way to DM for a classroom is to have the mega dungeon they are running up on the projector so that they can all get a good look at it from their desks, and from there you maneuvering their tokens around and revealing fog of war as they go. Describe the scenes and scenarios as they go and let them decide how they want to approach the dungeon’s challenges.
Thanks for the link! I'm not in the US but managed to get a D&D Beyond Educator License which has been helpful for me to start planning to implement this, but I haven't had the opportunity to go beyond the planning stage yet.
I've got the opportunity in a couple of months to run an engagement/enrichment program that I am planning to use D&D for, so I have a little while to figure out what it's actually going to look like.
I run a DnD after school club, got the educator kit, and live outside of North America.
There are two problems you have to overcome to run a classroom-sized DnD campaign. First, how does it fit into the curriculum? What curricular goals are you hitting? How are you going to structure it so that you've got evidence of learning for every student? That's probably the biggest issue you've got. You've got to justify it pedagogically to use a substantial amount of classroom time for it. It can be done, but it is difficult.
And, the second problem is how do you play with 15 - 25 players? The answer is you don't. You have five or six characters that the students run as groups. It makes it more manageable. I would take it a step further and assign roles to each person in the character group: the narrator, who describes the actions that the character is taking, the speaker, who roleplays the character, what does the character say and do, the negotiator that meets with the negotiator of all the other groups to coordinate, the combatant that runs the characters combat, the scribe that takes notes on what is happening in the campaign. And whatever else you can think of or makes sense. Use a timer to keep decision making crisp and the game moving. Rotate roles often to keep everyone on their toes.
Hey Jack, some great insight there. Hadn't considered the one character as a group angle.
As for curricular goals and requirements, this is for an extra-curricular engagement class, 96 minutes a week that doesn't sit in any faculty or anything. Some students play sports in this time, some do crafts; I'm trying to implement D&D for social and literacy development.
We never had a class on RPG but we did have a several hour "after school" class room to play games in. Back in the 1e days. The school and teachers stayed out of it because of the hype about it at the time.
It was a great way to learn teamwork and team dynamics for those who didn't play sports much. It also somewhat worked into our Greek/Roman mythology class along with making a few of us look more into European history.
That really makes it much easier. You may or may not get a ton of kids in it. I've done the character by committee before. It works pretty well. Once you get a game or two under their belts, you can start some of them off as DMs and get the groups smaller.
Seriously. Let us know how it goes. I'd love to know.
Game on Sibling! Jack.
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Trying to engage some kids by integrating D&D into the curriculum, not sure how exactly to do it.
None have experience to DM a small group by themselves so I wonder if there's any way to DM a whole class at once?
I DM for a 13-16 year old kids club with twelve members divided between two DMs and that's tough enough. When the other DM calls in sick and I have all twelve it's verging on the impossible. Trying to DM a full classroom sounds like a nightmare!
On a more positive note if you're in the US you can apply for various school club and classroom resources that might help https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/educators and includes things like play kits, free DDB copies of books and videos and webinars on how to go about setting up after school clubs and class room groups. Might be something on there you find helpful
By far the best way to DM for a classroom is to have the mega dungeon they are running up on the projector so that they can all get a good look at it from their desks, and from there you maneuvering their tokens around and revealing fog of war as they go. Describe the scenes and scenarios as they go and let them decide how they want to approach the dungeon’s challenges.
Thanks for the link! I'm not in the US but managed to get a D&D Beyond Educator License which has been helpful for me to start planning to implement this, but I haven't had the opportunity to go beyond the planning stage yet.
I've got the opportunity in a couple of months to run an engagement/enrichment program that I am planning to use D&D for, so I have a little while to figure out what it's actually going to look like.
Howdy y'all!
I run a DnD after school club, got the educator kit, and live outside of North America.
There are two problems you have to overcome to run a classroom-sized DnD campaign. First, how does it fit into the curriculum? What curricular goals are you hitting? How are you going to structure it so that you've got evidence of learning for every student? That's probably the biggest issue you've got. You've got to justify it pedagogically to use a substantial amount of classroom time for it. It can be done, but it is difficult.
And, the second problem is how do you play with 15 - 25 players? The answer is you don't. You have five or six characters that the students run as groups. It makes it more manageable. I would take it a step further and assign roles to each person in the character group: the narrator, who describes the actions that the character is taking, the speaker, who roleplays the character, what does the character say and do, the negotiator that meets with the negotiator of all the other groups to coordinate, the combatant that runs the characters combat, the scribe that takes notes on what is happening in the campaign. And whatever else you can think of or makes sense. Use a timer to keep decision making crisp and the game moving. Rotate roles often to keep everyone on their toes.
Let us know how it turns out.
Huzzah!
Jack
Hey Jack, some great insight there. Hadn't considered the one character as a group angle.
As for curricular goals and requirements, this is for an extra-curricular engagement class, 96 minutes a week that doesn't sit in any faculty or anything. Some students play sports in this time, some do crafts; I'm trying to implement D&D for social and literacy development.
We never had a class on RPG but we did have a several hour "after school" class room to play games in. Back in the 1e days. The school and teachers stayed out of it because of the hype about it at the time.
It was a great way to learn teamwork and team dynamics for those who didn't play sports much. It also somewhat worked into our Greek/Roman mythology class along with making a few of us look more into European history.
That really makes it much easier. You may or may not get a ton of kids in it. I've done the character by committee before. It works pretty well. Once you get a game or two under their belts, you can start some of them off as DMs and get the groups smaller.
Seriously. Let us know how it goes. I'd love to know.
Game on Sibling!
Jack.