How to Start a D&D Club at Your School
Ethan Scunover ( known to his students in Seattle as Mr. E. ) recently tweeted how he started the Dungeons and Dragons Club at his girls’ high school – and how you can do it too.
I must admit that before I watched his 47-minute explainer video, everything I knew about Dungeons and Dragons I learned from watching Stranger Things . But Schonover talks about D&D and the benefits for kids playing it with such knowledge and enthusiasm that he made me hope my son would figure it out in a few years – or that someone at his school would start a similar club.
If you’ve ever thought about starting a board RPG club, you don’t have to go for Dungeons and Dragons. There are many other RPGs with a variety of non-medieval fantasy themes. And if you’re working with younger children, you can try something like “ No thanks, evil,” which has a more youthful and cartoonish flavor.
Scunover says he chose D&D on purpose because it is the oldest and best-known RPG so heavily marketed to boys; he wanted his students to feel their own, too.
Step one: promoting the idea
There are certain games and clubs that people find socially acceptable in schools or youth centers: chess clubs, photography clubs, and any other sports to start with. But mention the RPG club and it might raise your eyebrows.
Schoonover suggests starting the conversation by discussing the benefits, both social and academic. Socially, role-playing children need to work together. From an academic point of view, they read, solve problems creatively, research, and even do a little math when they consider the probability of rolling the dice.
“There is one key phrase that I think you should use,” Schunover says in the video. “When I talked to my parents, I used this phrase, and it was almost all I had to say. And this phrase sounds like this: “No screen time.” You just say no screen time and your parents’ eyes light up. Schoonover goes a step further and introduces a ban on the use of mobile phones while playing.
(He also tried to give the club a catchy name – “Swords, Stories and Statistics” – but after a week the students still called it “The D&D Club,” so I wouldn’t bother with that).
Step two: getting started
Usually, during the so-called “zero session” or the first meeting of the group, a lot of bookkeeping and paperwork is required. But Scunover wanted to be careful not to tire the kids right out of the gate; he wanted them to tell all their friends how super fun it was and that they should play too.
Therefore, for the first meeting of the club, he suggests simply starting with the basic characteristics: race (type of mystical creature), name and background. (Having a list of suggested names is also key, because some students will be confused if they have to come up with their own.) It keeps the characters’ background rather simple and dark: pig breeders, glass blowers, stables, student hunters and how.
“I had one student who recently worked as an assistant librarian,” says Schunover. “And she chose the dragonborn as her race because it was so much fun for her to wander dragonborn around the librarian, breathe fire and not be able to do it among the stacks of books.”
He gives his students two rules:
1. No evil characters.
2. Everyone works together.
Then they immediately come into play, and “trouble” enters the city.
Step three: keep working
Try to choose a day and time when the children will feel fresh and rested enough. Skunover runs his club on Fridays after school, which he admits is far from ideal. His disciples had come to the end of a long week and everyone was rather tired. But this is the only time slot available to him, so he fights their moodiness with the help of snacks; one in the beginning and one in the middle, what his students call “lunchtime.”
It downloads and prints free PDFs of basic D&D rules for each student (they are simpler than the Player’s Guide and therefore easier for beginners); He also recommends reading two books:
- The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Michael E. Shea , which Scunover says offers “great sound advice on how to prepare, how not to overdo it, and how to get the right stuff ready for D&D or any other RPG.”
- “Hamlet’s hit points” by Robin D. Laws , which Scunover says changed the way he controlled the pace of the game.
It’s also good to have a couple of “secret rules” that you don’t tell the players about. For example, Schunover’s students sometimes ask him if he’s going to kill his characters. “And of course the correct answer to that question is to just raise an eyebrow and look mysterious,” he says in the video. “But of course I’m probably not going to kill their characters; in fact, my rule is not the death of the player character. ” Unless a student really wants to move on to a new character, he doesn’t think killing him adds much value, especially because his students are very emotionally invested in their characters.
He also tries not to put players in a situation where they end up becoming what he calls “killing”; that is, where they can jump to conclusions and start killing things for the sake of killing, especially when it comes to humanoids.
Schunover started out with six apprentices at the club, a number he admits would be too much for him, the Dungeon Master, to handle on his own. But now he has more than 20 students in the club, and he solved this problem by teaching several more experienced students to the Dungeon Masters themselves. Students can write their own adventures, or use pre-written adventures to relieve pressure and time a bit.
“You want to be the one providing these resources, not just shifting them onto your shoulders,” he says.