Thread by @brianAround

When my daughter was around eleven years old I ran a brief D&D campaign for her, and her only. It was a transformative experience for me.

I was partially trying to scratch the itch I'd had since I saw the D&D Basic book in elementary school, and partially trying to build enough experience with the mechanics that I could maybe write and publish something playable.

But as I started out with my daughter, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to play anything straight. I knew, canned module or not, I was really going to have to make the bears dance if I wanted to keep playing.

Her eyes lit up when I first did the voice of the Half-Orc Barbarian in a dark room, and I knew that the friendly, somewhat goofy Barbarian was going to be my ace in the hole. The Bears were dancing.

I had kind of used World of Warcraft as a gateway to the high-fantasy setting, so I had a story lexicon to work from.

More importantly, I had a sense of what she wanted. There were pretty dresses. There were adorable pets. Sarcastic halflings skewered each other in heated arguments over differences in religious convictions.

One game we cleared a mine (self-defensively cleared the mine) of the kobolds that lived there and stumbled across six helpless kobold pups that were clearly meant to spark moral debate. My daughter didn't hesitate:

"I'll take the baby kobolds home and raise them myself," she told me.

She had thrown me a few curve balls, but this one beaned me on the head.

"Are you sure? These are pretty nasty creatures."

"Then I'll train them. If they can be good or evil, I'll raise them to be good."

At that moment I realized that I really couldn't argue with this logic.

I refused to teach my daughter that anyone was "born evil."

Even a kobold.

What I started to notice was that this was not the game I had thought I was playing. I'd wanted to get the mechanics of the game down with a story to make it more fun, but in this game, the mechanics hardly mattered.

The ways her choices changed the game helped me understand a new kind of D&D game:

Everyone brings a little of their personality and builds a story worth remembering.

I still enjoy purely mechanical or strategic games, but if I'm DMing a game for you, that's not the game I'm angling for. I'm looking for a game with heart.

So when I see movements at roleplaying game companies for inclusivity and representation, I'm so excited by it. Because this game is exponentially better the more perspectives you add.

This is something I remember when I see a DM roll their eyes at a female player that wants to do a check to see what the raiding Orcs might want.

I remember my daughter when I hear a podcast that has spent ten minutes describing the way a character dresses and their precious mementos of the past. It's exciting because I know that this is set up for the good stuff.

I remember those games with my daughter every time I sit down to play because those games set a higher standard for what a roleplaying game can be.