Gelatinous cubes can engulf adventurers. Mimics can make one think twice about reaching for a nearby treasure chest. A Deck of Many Things can throw a curveball in your campaigns. Yet when you’re talking about the power to disrupt a D&D session with sheer undefeatable chaos, nothing compares to a table full of kids in the player seats.

I’ve spent quite a lot of hours over the course of my life sitting in the DM’s seat. I’ve run games for friends, on livestreams, and as a professional DM. In the last year, though, I’ve spent a significant amount of my DMing time running games for groups of kids, either in D&D camp settings, in private gigs, or things like special game night events at schools. If you’ve never run D&D for kids, or you’re looking to do it more, here are some things to keep in mind.

• Kids Are the Most Unpredictable Players
• Kids Want to Decide Everything
• Kids Don't Want to Decide Anything
• Kids Love “Cheating”
• Kids Will Sometimes Know More About D&D Than You Do
• Kids Can Be So Brutal
• Kids Can Easily Get Their Feelings Hurt
• Kids Can Sometimes Surprise You in the Most Amazing Ways

Kids Are the Most Unpredictable Players

Artist: Scott Murphy

When DMing for kids, take the phrase “be prepared for anything” and kindly chuck it out the window, because you simply cannot. What you can do is be prepared to react to anything. Shelly Mazzanoble, Wizards of the Coast’s Sr. Manager of Global Philanthropy & Social Impact, who also quite literally wrote the book on D&D and raising kids, summed it up by saying, “D&D with kids is about as close to real-world magic there is. Their creativity knows no bounds. They come up with the most out-of-the-box ideas and solutions. They are fearless and unpredictable and also surprisingly ruthless.”

My own experiences definitely agree with Mazzanoble. My kids have defeated bosses by locking them in rooms and setting the room on fire. They’ve fed potential allies to monsters to aid in their own escape. They convinced the spectator in Wave Echo Cave to turn the Forge of Spells into a brewery for Rainbow Cat, a special “magical drink” they can sell to taverns. There’s now a whole distribution system for Rainbow Cat, including a gang of bugbears the kids convinced to work for them instead of fighting.

Leaning into this chaos is usually the best choice. Oliver Grigsby, TV writer and owner of Game Masters for Hire, agreed. “Kids typically won't make ‘optimal’ choices,” Grigsby said, “they'd rather try to do a backflip off the wall and kick the pot of hot porridge at the bugbear than light it up with 4d6 Radiant damage. Let them! The biggest advantage Dungeons & Dragons has over video games is that anything is possible. And kids will light up at that feeling.”

Kids Want to Decide Everything

“Some considerations I bring to the table when playing with kids vs. adults,” Mazzanoble said, “is that adults new to the game often welcome pre-generated characters and anything else that gets them playing quickly without being overwhelmed. Kids want to make every decision possible. They are very invested in their characters and want every detail to be unique, which, as you can imagine, can take quite a while.”

I’ve also found this to be true, and many of these same kids have little to no interest in actually building their character sheets or learning how they work. As a result, a lot of my session zeroes with kid groups tend to be me filling out the paperwork based on the information they tell me as they conceptualize.

Kids Don’t Want to Decide Anything

Artist: Kent Davis

You’re probably thinking, “Riley, that’s a complete contradiction to the last thing you said.” And I want you to picture me dead-eyed, staring at you as I say, I know. But it’s true. Some days, the easiest way to burn through a shocking amount of game time is to give the kids a choice in what they do next because they’ll either spend the time arguing with each other about it or asking you questions nonstop.

The thing is, if you let the kids’ indecision delay the game too much, you run the risk of the entire game collapsing. Kids are not exactly known for their attention spans, and if you let a table of five or more drift into their own little orbits, you’ll never get them back. “The biggest mistake I see DMs make running games for kids is losing momentum,” Grigsby adds. “The best thing you can do is just keep the game flowing.”

As a DM for kids, you often have to be a little more railroady than you might for adults, directing them towards the story. Alternatively, you may need to just chuck out the entire story you had planned for a session and follow the first fun thing the kids latch onto. Grigsby shared an anecdote of a time his group “spent over an hour shopping in Neverwinter, buying magic items, convincing the town guard to sell them a ballista, and finding an elephant to pull it. Are there elephants in Neverwinter? There are now! The kids had a blast.”

Character Names

Something else that has come up quite a few times, too, is that sometimes kids just will not think of a name for their characters. I had a player join my table last September for his first-ever D&D game. He’s playing a Wizard. His character’s name? The Wizard.

Mazzanoble echoes this with her games. “They spend so much time trying to come up with the perfect name, workshop it a bit, change it, use a ‘placeholder’ name, and then come up with something like Bob in the end.” In fact, in one of the games I ran, we also had a kid who named his character Bob. Another kid at the table couldn’t think of a name himself, so he ended up just going with Bob the Second.

Kids Love “Cheating”

There are ways that people can cheat at D&D that transcend age, such as lying about rolls or somehow magically rolling for perfect stats in ways that purely max without a trace of min. Kids are no exception to these, and you may have to make an effort to keep a closer eye on their rolls as a result. Personally, I tend not to dwell on this kind of thing too much unless it’s actively impacting the fun of other kids at the table. Instead, I just gently focus on storytelling that might balance out some of these falsely inflated numbers. I do the same thing in games with adults, truth be told.

But when I say kids love cheating, I actually mean it in a much more conceptual sense. Kids love feeling like they broke the system somehow. I’m not a child psychologist or an expert on child behavior in any way, but from my own experience working with kids in D&D and education, I see that kids frequently like to push boundaries to see what they can get away with. D&D can offer a way to let them explore that without consequences that extend beyond the table.

This can provide a good opportunity for DMs to embrace creativity. “If a spontaneous splashing hot porridge on an enemy blinds them, the next thing you know, the characters are buying gallons of porridge at the next tavern and carrying it into every battle,” Grigsby said. “Introduce the ‘porridge monster’ who has been angered by all this wanton spilled porridge. Keep them on their toes, and they’ll love every second.”

Kids Will Sometimes Know More About D&D Than You Do

Artist: Wade Acuff

One thing I’ve noticed with a lot of the kids that get the D&D bug is that their desire to know more only increases. I went through a similar period of my life when I was a kid when I needed to get my hands on every book I could and read it cover to cover. These same kids also tend to memorize very important stats about common monsters and will regurgitate them in the middle of combat despite that being something their character wouldn’t know.

This creates a tightrope to walk as a DM. The absolute last thing you want to do is curb a kid’s enthusiasm for this amazing hobby. But you also don’t want to strip the challenge of each future combat because the kids know all your monsters’ weaknesses. My favorite solution to this is to just use less common monsters or even just slightly tweak or modify any monsters that you use. Add in unexpected abilities, or use variant versions of them found in setting books or partnered resources like Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts 1.

Having these budding rules lawyer kids at your table can be useful, however. They’re usually very excited to help other players with their character sheets, which can be good for getting the other kids invested in their stats without them feeling like they’re doing math homework a grownup gave them.

Kids Can Be So Brutal

One of the things I was the most unprepared for when I first started running games for kids is just how playfully malevolent even some of the quietest, nicest kids can be when they dip into the fantasy world. Last summer, I had a kid describe his character’s toy, “teddypede,” which was a cross between a teddy bear and a centipede that climbs into the chest of his enemies and eats their heart from the inside. Of course, I found a way to make sure that happened in the game.

But this brutality can also extend to downright bullying of enemies and NPCs. I had a group of kids whose solution to rescuing captives on an ice giant ship was to verbally abuse and mock every ice giant they encountered instead of fighting them. Another time, a kid playing an Aberrant Sorcery Sorcerer used telepathy to pretend to be a goblin’s conscience to tear away at his self-esteem and convince him none of the other goblins liked him or were his friends.

A lot of this is just going to happen because the kids love making each other laugh by teasing the NPCs, but it definitely requires a thick skin as a DM when your players start launching in with roast material for every NPC they encounter. Luckily for that goblin, one player at the table opted instead to suggest therapy for him.

Kids Can Easily Get Their Feelings Hurt

Artist: John Grello

As much as kids love to tease NPCs, if you’re DMing for kids, it’s good to be mindful that kids are often a lot more emotionally fragile than adults. If you’re running enemies that might like to taunt a group of heroes, it’s good to do it with a light touch with kids. You don’t want to run the risk of singling a kid out and making them feel like they’re being picked on by the villain–and by extension, you. You also run the risk of the other kids at the table joining in on what they think is a joke, which could only further isolate the kid.

Kids can get pretty upset, even from the nature of D&D as a game itself. I’ve previously written advice for DMs on how to lean into poor dice rolls for storytelling in order to mitigate a sense of failure. That goes tenfold for playing with kids. They’ll take it personally if they keep rolling low or if they think an enemy is targeting them more. “As a DM you have to keep half an eye on those things, even if it may not be optimal gameplay,” Grigsby advises. “If the player misses an attack, but the next player hits–use the miss as part of the overall success so the player feels involved. Maybe the missed attack causes the goblin to stumble backward, opening it up to the ally's attack that hits.”

Kids Can Sometimes Surprise You in the Most Amazing Ways

While I was in the midst of preparing this article, I had an experience with a group of kids at my D&D table that struck exactly that kind of real-life magic that Mazzanoble mentioned to me. As I said before, I mostly run games in Los Angeles. We had taken a week off from my camp gig because our gaming space was under evacuation orders during the recent wildfires. This also meant that most, if not all, of the kids at my table were kids who’d had to evacuate as the fires spread.

At our last game before the fires, they’d spent the session defending Phandalin from a goblin attack. So, for our first game back, the characters started the session the morning after. I planned on a kind of chill, laid-back game that day because I knew the kids had been through a lot. So, at the start of the session, I asked what the kids wanted to do. They could keep investigating the goblin attack, they could see what needed to be done in town, or if they just wanted to roll dice and fight, I’d drop them into an arena battle for the day.

What they chose to do was help out the town. With little to no prompting from me, the kids chose to go help rebuild the mining guild headquarters. Then they remembered the town well had been destroyed the night before, so they dug a new well and redirected the water supply. One of the kids realized the water would be contaminated by debris, so they worked out a way to filter and purify the water, including recruiting some Clerics.

The group decided the town sure does get attacked a lot, so they wanted to build a fence to protect it. The Druid used Plant Growth to help bolster the wood supply from the forest, and the other kids started trying to build. This was when their dice started feeling cursed, and all of their roles were abysmal. Because of the amazing roleplay they were doing, I ruled the poor roles as simply meaning it took them longer on each task, but when they started to show signs of frustration, I had townspeople step in to finish the job by saying it was more their skillset.

The kids’ response was to pivot to cooking meals for the working townspeople. They broke things up into appetizers, main courses, and desserts. Then, they threw a festival for the town and described games and entertainment the citizens of Phandalin could partake in. They even held in-universe skeeball and basketball tournaments and gave the winners 100 GP from their own characters’ pouches as a reward.

Running D&D for Kids is Infinitely Challenging But Just as Equally Rewarding

Artist: Domenico Cava

DMing for kids is not for the faint of heart. The constant chaos of my tables has sometimes been the most stressful and exhausting games I’ve ever had the immense pleasure of running. But that post-fires session was easily one of the most fulfilling and compelling D&D games I’ve ever participated in. And I barely had to do anything for it. I just got to sit back, hear the kids tell me what they wanted to do, and then tell them what to roll. They provided all the magic.

Shelly Mazzanoble’s book, How to Dungeon Master Parenting: A Guidebook for Gamifying the Child-Rearing Quest, Leveling Up Your Skills, and Raising Future Adventurers, is available from University of Iowa Press

Riley Silverman (rileysilverman.bsky.social) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, and has written for Nerdist, SYFY Wire, and Star Wars. She is a professional DM and currently plays as Chase Variant on the Good Chaotic TTRPG podcast.