Hot Elf Summer: The Return of Family Dungeons & Dragons

My fourteen-year-old son just finished eighth grade, which means next year I’ll have a high schooler in the house. I’m finding the prospect hard to process. He’s no longer a kid, and he’s interesting, unique, and opinionated – rapidly becoming his own person, with his own ideas (and, in typical teenage fashion, rejecting a lot of his dad’s advice along the way).

If there’s one thing all three of us – myself, my wife, and my son – share, it’s that we’re gamers. Before our son was born, my wife got deeper into World of Warcraft than I ever did, with multiple max-level characters and a spot in nightly guild raids as a primary healer. My son’s Steam collection is rapidly swelling, and though he’s got some distance to go before it catches up with my library, he’s already developed a keen eye for when the best sales pop up.

As I’ve written about before, we play a fair few board games and role-playing games. A year and a half ago, we completed our long-running 5E Curse of Strahd campaign – with me in my usual role as the forever DM – and even continued the story of my wife and son’s characters for a few months after the wrap-up, until a new school year intruded on the fun parts of our lives.

After that fairly epic family adventure (memorialized in a scrapbook I put together of the various handouts and character sheets) we took a long break from Dungeons & Dragons. Yet one of the reasons I find it so hard to get rid of any games in my collection is that things have a way of coming around again.

It took several months of me singing its praises, but I finally got the whole family to try out Baldur’s Gate 3. As I expected, everyone was hooked pretty quickly. If you’re a gamer, it’s hard not to fall in love with the fantastic experience Larian crafted in the Forgotten Realms setting.

And if you’re a pen-and-paper veteran, it’s likely one of the things playing Baldur’s Gate 3 will do to you is give you the itch to play Dungeons and Dragons again. Sure enough, as summer approached, my wife and son started talking about a new campaign.

So I dusted off our collection of miniatures, bought a pack of fresh graph paper and mechanical pencils, and sat myself down in the DM’s chair once again. Our first session, with fresh characters, was this last weekend. 

Fantasy Flaws and Foibles

Dungeons & Dragons, even in its modern, highly successful 5E form, is a flawed system. Anyone with any game design sense definitely knows there are better choices out there.

If you’re looking for mechanical crunch, Pathfinder 2E is more interesting. If you’re after a more narrative-focused experiences, games using the Powered by the Apocalypse system or spin-offs like Ironsworn are better fits that remove a ton of bookkeeping tedium.

And the many criticisms of the default Forgotten Realms setting – the good ol’ Sword Coast made famous by Baldur’s Gate – are entirely valid. It’s warmed-over high fantasy Tolkien stuff, dragons and elves and dwarves, complete with all the problematic racial and political overtones of traditional fantasy tropes.

Beyond core problems with the system and intellectual property, the corporate handling of Dungeons and Dragons over the last few years has been subpar. Aggressive digital material money grabs; ill-advised open game license decisions that had to be rolled back; mass layoffs at Wizards of the Coast shortly after the huge success of Baldur’s Gate 3 – too often in the last few years, it’s been clear that Hasbro doesn’t understand how to manage the value of the property it bought.

Indeed, with fresh iterations of the rules forthcoming, Dungeons and Dragons is at a crisis point. Even Critical Role, which built its brand on Dungeons and Dragons foundations, has been slowly edging away and dabbling with side stories and other systems.

Yet for those of us of a certain age and disposition, there is comfort in the game – the familiar fantasy trope of a group of adventurers meeting up in a tavern for a perilous quest; prowling the back streets of the cities of Waterdeep and Neverwinter; the pleasant clunk of a D20 hitting the table for a key deception check.

And the premade materials – so many! As a dungeon master, there’s enough 5E content out there – both official and fan-authored – to keep a group busy for decades. Whether it’s chunky tactical encounters or clever narrative experiences with genuinely interesting hooks, Dungeons & Dragons has plentiful, diverse, and ever-expanding content.

Back at the Table

As summer of 2024 begins, my family is back at the table. I’m seeing a new maturity in the way my son plays. Two years ago, during the Curse of Strahd campaign, he was most interested in his rogue doing the maximum damage possible. Now he’s willing to let my wife’s character kill the monsters while he tries more creative solutions to problems and spends more time role-playing conversations.

He’s more willing to experiment, too. Instead of power-gaming the perfect character, he spun up a multiclass rogue/druid – far from mechanically optimal, but interesting from a role-playing perspective.

(I always start our campaigns at level 3, because low-level Dungeons and Dragons is absolutely miserable and I’m not a sadist.)

My son’s purple-haired tiefling is going to be trouble (the good kind of role-playing trouble). After a couple of sessions, I’ve had to spin up an improvised nighttime shop robbery; his character is looking for every opportunity to pocket shiny bits and bobs.

But my wife’s new character will help smooth things out for the party. She’s always played spellcasters in the past, but this time she rolled up a barbarian. Her character has a creative backstory. She played against the usual dumb axe-swinger type, envisioning a former noble and history buff who suffers from uncontrollable rages – and isn’t overly tolerant of thievery.

So as the increasing Texas summer heat sends all of us scrambling for air-conditioned inside entertainment, our family picks up the dice again and heads out on another adventure. 

I can’t wait to see where we all go.

New Scree Games blogs appear on Tuesdays.