A poll to the public

Today while I was working, I asked Ty, one of the library's regular teen visitors, if he would be interested in a Dungeons and Dragons program. His response?

"What, that old thing from the 1970s?"

4th Edition, it is, then.

EDIT: I want to make this introduction to RPGs as fun and inspiring as possible and encourage them to try and play them in their own free time outside of the library. This is going to be a first step, hopefully towards a wider appreciation of different games that may include retro-clone or original D&D games. But in all honesty, I don't think that a game like Labyrinth Lord or Swords and Wizardry is going to spark these kid's imaginations. As I mentioned in my first Elesyian Fable post, kids these days aren't really interested in the material that inspired earlier editions of D&D. They want to be heroic from the get-go, shutting down coup attempts, diving Indiana Jones-like into tombs of forgotten gods and generally having a badass cinematic time of it. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS.

I'm still probably going to continue work on the Elesyian Fable game, and who knows? Maybe I'll get the chance to play it with some teens or younger kids in the future. I really would like to create a B/X derivative game that's angled towards kids who've never gamed before, but are familiar with whimsical fantasy like the Legend of Zelda and One Piece. But for this particular instance, I think 4e Eberron is going to be for the best.

Elesyian Fable

I work as a page at an inner-city library in Pittsburgh, mostly shelving books, helping people with computer issues and supervising the weekly Lego club. In the past week or so, I've been talking with my supervisor about potentially running a Dungeons and Dragons club for Teens in the early Fall once the school year has started again and the library needs programming. Naturally my mind first turns to the early editions of D&D that I've been discovering, but the more and more that I think about it, the more difficult I feel that it would be for modern teenagers to go head first and enjoy an unmodified game of B/X or AD&D. Kids today aren't inspired by cheap paperbacks, Star Wars, comic books or the art from Magic: the Gathering cards like I was when I first started role playing. If I asked one of my Lego club members what the fantasy genre means to them, I'd get answers that spread from video games to young adult novels to anime and manga.

NONE OF THIS IS A BAD THING. It just requires a different approach, one that I think a Basic D&D-inspired game could accomplish very well. A simple rule set, modular enough to allow every character from fighters to magicians to have something special up their sleeves, combined with a 'rulings, not rules' aesthetic, but incorporating elements from sources that kids would recognize and understand.

It's gonna have airships, quests to save the world, ridiculously named swords, the summoning of magical beasts and godly avatars, and hopefully, it'll be a great introduction to roleplaying for a group of kids who would probably never have come to it on their own.

And if that doesn't work, I'll use 4e Essentials. :)

(Picture from a cutscene in Final Fantasy IX)