Hello, Adventure-Raisers and welcome to Session 23: Interview with RedWyrm! I’m very excited to bring you this content today, RedWyrm was a delight to work with and don’t forget to check him out on X and Facebook!
Nat20Mom: Hello, making sure this works right. I’m seeing all the lights pop up. Hello.
RedWyrm: Hello, I’m glad to be here. Can you hear me okay? I am, yes. Yeah, I’m good.
Nat20Mom: Well, we can get things started that way. You’re free when they get up and everything. I figure, to be honest, I’m still pretty small fish, so anybody who comes and checks this out probably already knows who you are, but if you want to give like a little introduction and everything, so that way it’s in the transcription, that’s up to you.
RedWyrm: So, yeah, sure. Sure. My name is Daniel. I run the account, the Red Worm account. My son is the Wyrmling, the Red Wyrmling. He started out playing Dungeons and Dragons when he was about three and has been playing ever since and started giving out tips and advice when he was about four and a half, I guess, is when we really started that. And just this week, we actually crested 20,000 followers on Twitter, so we’re pretty excited about that. It’s fun. Yes.
Nat20Mom: Yeah, that’s awesome. Kind of a little bit of the same idea over here. I go by Nat20Mom, call my son little dragon or little green dragon because he has a bunch of stuffed dragons. They all happen to be green. He’s about 16 months old. My group, we meet whenever we can, and I started my blog just to kind of talk about the parents’ perspective, bringing a kid to the table, all the adventures you look forward to with raising them and then raising them with this kind of creativity.
RedWyrm: Definitely. Yeah. It’s exciting.
Nat20Mom: And then same kind of idea, tips and tricks, because we started bringing him to the table before he could even walk, but definitely a learning curve as he’s starting to do that. Okay, yeah, let’s jump right in. I guess, again, I’m sure a lot of other people already know this, but what’s your family’s favorite system? Definitely Dungeons and Dragons, or do you guys branch out at all? Yeah, I definitely agree with that.
RedWyrm: Sure. Well, we play 5e as the rule set, but when my son and I play our games, we normally don’t use any, well, we use rules, but we use 5e, but we also, at the same time, just kind of play from the hip a lot of times. And so, he makes up rules all the time. He loves 5e because 5e can really just boil down to a target and a roll to see if you hit the target. So that’s kind of, you know, you set a DC or there’s an armor class and you roll to hit. So, there’s not a whole lot of rule heavy aspects to it. Obviously, there’s rules to see if you have what modifiers you have and things of that sort, but you can kind of guess a lot of times and get close enough that it’s just a simple roll. And then if I roll well, I got it. If I failed and roll bad, I didn’t get it. So, he just kind of, he loves this simplicity. It gives him more opportunities as a dungeon master to do whatever he wants to do. Yes, and my wife and I play kind of a version of 3e, which is what she made her character in, but then I’ve included some of the 5e rules. And, you know, we just play a one-on-one campaign that we’ve played for, oh, 23, 24 years at this point. So, we actually started that campaign in second edition, and so it’s gone through the changes. We don’t do any video games, but we do play occasionally board games, Magic the Gathering, things of that sort as well.
Nat20Mom: I know even when I was adult and brand new to D&D, because I didn’t start until after college, I played a druid and I didn’t fully understand every spell. But my DM, same kind of thing, he let me bend the rules quite a bit and kind of make it my own. Oh, that’s sweet. Yeah. Yeah, awesome. So is it just tabletop RPGs? Do you guys do like board games, video games and stuff like that too?
RedWyrm: Most of the board games we bought for him a while back, he’s outgrown a lot of them. So, we need to get to more advanced versions, but we haven’t done that yet. But he’s really gotten into Lord of the Rings, Magic the Gathering lately, so we’ve been enjoying playing that. We have a lot of board games we got when he was little, and so he’s outgrown on most of those at this point. We do play Magic the Gathering. He’s gotten into Lord of the Rings, Magic the Gathering recently and really is excited about that as well.
Nat20Mom: That’s awesome. I know my husband’s more into magic than me and he’s definitely getting into that one as well. All right.
RedWyrm: Yeah, yeah, it’s a, I was never really into it, but some of my son’s friends, their parents play, and so he kind of got into it from that, so we got back into it. I used to play it back when I was in college in the 90s, but it’s been a long time. Great, no problem.
Nat20Mom: Okay, all right, cool. All right, next question. What do you hope that your kids get the most out of tabletop RPGs? I try to emphasize that I personally want him to get a lot of exposure to creativity and social skills and things like that. Just wondering kind of what you’re hoping he gets the most out of. Yeah, fully agreed. Yeah, I guess you actually already dovetailed into my next question.
RedWyrm: There’s so many things about tabletop RPGs that are great for kids, so I think the first one is, I just, I love to see my son be able to express his creativity and his imagination. So he’s got so many ideas and so much going on that it’s, it’s, there’s, there’s free play to express that, but this kind of gives it a structured free play where he can create monsters or create a dungeon or a scenario. I think that’s, that’s, that’s the, that’s the big thing I love to see, but I also really like to see him exploring various scenarios in life that he wouldn’t normally get to experience in a way that’s not really dangerous for him personally. And so in a safe place he can explore social interactions and someone who’s being mean or a bully or someone who’s being evil or, or what it means if, if there’s, you know, danger around and those type of things without actually experiencing it himself. And so I think that’s a, a second one. He has a D&D group.
Nat20Mom: It sounds like he is finding other kids to play with. How did you find other kids for him to connect with for this at this age, I guess? Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, it sounds like it was just like a perfect setup.
RedWyrm: My son’s an only son, only child, so it’s, it’s great for him to have that social interaction, the opportunity for him to work with his friends as a, as a team to solve problems where each person is bringing different skills to the table. I mean, that’s just, it’s just so many benefits to role-playing games, but I think those are the big three. Okay, so we’ve been playing for a while and he played with my friends who are obviously all adults in their 40s as opposed to kids, but he had a, he’s a homeschool child, and so we, we joined a homeschool group that was basically just playing games. It was called Table Toppers was the name of our group. And they played some board games and the kids just played, but they’d also started playing Dungeons and Dragons there. One of the other dads in the group was a Dungeon Master and he was having the kids play some D&D. And so we joined the group and they’re now all his best friends. I actually, all of, all of his friends’ dads are in one of my campaigns now as well, so we kind of have a whole group of Dungeons and Dragons players and we’ve really, we’ve really gotten into it. So we play every week, every Wednesday we go play as a group. The group’s gotten so big that me and one of the other, the other dad, both together Dungeon Master different campaigns, and so it’s a lot of fun as well. It really was, and I think there’s probably, both of our groups have nine players in them, so there’s a bunch of kids that are there that love the game. Yeah.
Nat20Mom: You mentioned your son is homeschooled. So one of the things that I’ve noticed just like poking around on the internet is Dungeons and Dragons is actually getting a lot more popular in like public school classrooms to emphasize different things. Just wondering have you seen that at all? Are you doing the same kind of thing? Yeah.
RedWyrm: Yeah, so, so what we do with our, with our group, our homeschool group, is that every Wednesday we, I teach a science and engineering class to all the kids, and then afterwards we play Dungeons and Dragons together. And so it’s kind of like, it’s a, it’s a fun science and engineering where we explore different subjects in science, and then after that we all just relax, we get some social interaction, we play D&D and have fun. There’s math skills involved in it. I mean, it’s definitely, you know, it combines almost every subject in school to, to a single fun game, and so to me it’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s a wonderful teaching opportunity. You know, when I was a kid, it was, it was definitely not in the public schools. It was right after the, the problems of the 80s, and they had a Dungeons and Dragons club before I got to school, but they canceled it because of parent complaints at that point, so it was kind of something you had to do in secret almost from other people, because it was, it was looked down upon, but these days I love that it’s, it’s so well accepted.
Nat20Mom: Yeah, absolutely agreed. I think we went to Gen Con with our little dragon last year and I think they said they’d hit 300,000 people foot traffic. Yeah, we’re mainstream. That’s great to see. There was actually, so that you know, the host that we go to down there is a friend’s father and I was going to do an interview with him to kind of compare raising kids in this space today versus back in the early 90s and 80s and stuff. So I thought that would be a really nice like bridge comparing where we were and where we are now.
RedWyrm: Wow, that’s amazing. Yeah, I know when I was, when I was growing up, the, you know, my parents, they didn’t mind D&D, but they weren’t, they didn’t know anything about it either. They just, they knew that if I was hanging out with my friends and playing D&D at our house, I wasn’t out, you know, getting into trouble somewhere else, so that’s kind of their, their whole belief of D&D at that time, and so, so they didn’t care about it being a social thing or, or any sort of learning abilities. I mean, I learned so much from my old D&D books when I was reading them as a kid, because they were, you know, there was just so much there, and I mean, so many words, and so many problem-solving skills, and different things that I learned as a kid that, you know, everyone should have had that opportunity to have, so. Great. Yeah.
Nat20Mom: How does watching your son play like make you feel in the moment? That’s something I haven’t gotten to yet is watching him actually play.
RedWyrm: Oh, wow. You know, sometimes it is just, you know, pure joy just sitting here watching him in his element where he’s coming up with, with great ideas, and he’s, he’s immersed in the creativity of the story. He’s, he’s creating plots for me, and I’m thinking these are better than plots I made when I was an adult, and then other times, of course, you know, he’s a kid, so sometimes the stuff he gets over a focus on the silliness aspect of things, and, and he, you know, he, he decides that he likes his character better than mine, and so he wants his character to be the coolest character, and so my character doesn’t get to do anything, and so it’s always learning experiences, and so he gets to understand that as we have these teaching moments, but there’s just sometimes, though, that it’s just perfect. You just get to see him really creating something that’s, that’s really, truly special, and so it’s a mix, as most parenting is. I know on, on my Twitter account, you know, I post the, the ideal things, or the funny things, and, and, you know, I’m not posting conversations that were boring, or weren’t interesting, or tedious, or anything of that sort, but as a parent, we all know that that happens as well, but, um, I really do just love watching him play the game. Are you still there? You’re right.
Nat20Mom: How does playing with a seven-year-old differ than playing with adults? I know there’s the obvious stuff, you probably got to keep the games a little easier to understand.
RedWyrm: So no doubt. Yeah. So, you know, kids are strange when you play with them that sometimes things that bother, that wouldn’t bother an adult at all bother a child.
My son right now really does not like to kill anybody in his games, which is great. You know, I don’t really want him to love that. So it’s the only monsters that we have that we can fight and destroy are normally like undead or constructs or things that aren’t like people of any kind. And so they have to be fairly obviously monsters and things that just need to be destroyed. Whereas, you know, my other games… So that basically means for me, if I’m going to create a human bad guy, like an evil king or something of the sort, I got to find a way that my son can talk to him and convince him what he’s doing is wrong more than fight him and try to defeat the person. And it’s great. I mean, it’s so wonderful to see him try to help people as opposed to just destroy something that he doesn’t like. The kids in my games, when I play with other kids, they range from ages, I think, five or six up to about 13 in my game, 12 or 13. And they all have different things that they don’t like. So some of them, for example, might not like undead. And then others might not like certain types of monsters that seem too scary or anything of the sort. And others don’t want to do any talking. They just want to fight things. And so it’s balancing that with your kids in mind and creating fun adventure for them still is so much more challenging than creating an adventure for an adult group, at least in my opinion. Yeah.
Nat20Mom: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, yeah, I get it. You got to set a little bit more limits for yourself and actively make something that’s a little bit more engaging and challenging.
RedWyrm: Well, then at the same time, though, I mean, you could have a three-session chili cook-off because the kids just get so into it. And then they hyper-focus and they’re like, we’re going to find some peppers. We’re going to go on a quest to find the right tomatoes for this chili cookout.
Nat20Mom: Right, yeah, that makes sense. I guess on that note, do you have any tips for keeping children more engaged and entertained? Not just in the games that they’re actively in now, but what I’m doing where we’re just bringing him along right now, and he’s kind of listening to us play. Okay.Yeah. Okay. That sounds like a great strategy to do it.
RedWyrm: And so sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it’s more of a challenge, depending. Yeah, so my biggest tips for someone starting a kid in the game and what we did with my son is we just started telling stories. So, we started with bedtime stories for our son. When he was two, he’d already heard my wife and I playing a lot of D&D, and he decided he wanted to make his own D&D character. And so, we made a character up for him. We rolled the dice and everything, but he didn’t really understand all the details of what we were doing. But I made one anyway, and then I started telling him stories about his character. And he got so into it, and he’d just listen to the stories. He’d be excited about it, and his character would go on all these adventures. And a lot of it is based off of books that we had or stories that I knew that his character could go on. As he did this, he eventually wanted to be kind of in control of what the character did, and so that’s where you move into role-playing. And we just started saying, I’d ask him, what do you think your character does? His name was Sir Tyson.
What do you think Sir Tyson does at this point? And he would tell me what he’d do, and then we’d change the story from that. And so that’s how I got him interested in the storytelling aspect of D&D, is just simply playing that. Eventually we added some dice, and I’d say, okay, well, if you think he’s going to make this jump, let’s roll to see if he does it. And if he succeeded, it was successful. So that was where that went. It was a lot of fun. And then for older kids, tips for older kids, you really have to see what the kids like. Because so many kids are different, and they have so many different interests and things that they enjoy. Just see what they have fun doing, and pay attention to that, and do more of that.
Nat20Mom: Yeah, no, that, that all sounds honestly it makes a lot of sense. Um, when your son is being the DM, how much oversight, do you allow yourself in like his DM and world building.
RedWyrm: So if they love quests to find stuff, lean into that. If they like battle, you can lean into that. If they like social interactions or being silly or carnivals or whatever it might be, just lean into the things they like, because they’ll have fun doing that, and you’ll really see them come out of their shell and have fun doing it. And a lot of times those aren’t the same things that adults like. Adults oftentimes have a desire to solve this quest or to do something very specific, where kids sometimes just want to have fun playing their characters in the world. So the way we play our game is the most fun this time is he’ll make a character for me. He’ll say, your new character is this guy, and then we run an adventure with that character. And so I let him pretty much run whatever he wants in the game. I give him complete control over the world that he creates. Sometimes that’s a Lord of the Rings world, sometimes we’re in Star Wars, sometimes we are in traditional D&D, fantasy world. Whatever he wants to play, I just let him run with his creativity. We play that character, we might play that character for a session or two sessions, and then he’s ready to move on to a new character.
And the next game he might be like, I’m going to play a character, and you DM, or then he might make another character. We recently watched Mission Impossible, so he’s been really into spy movies and spy genre. So my recent character is a spy in a modern world, so that’s been a lot of fun too.
Nat20Mom: Nice. Um, I think this would be our last question honestly we’ve kind of already covered the other ones that I had. What is your favorite anecdote of like kid logic in your games.
RedWyrm: Kid Logic, oh wow. So my son has created a monster that he loves, it’s called the Gargan. And these are dragons, it’s just a massive dragon. But Kid Logic, the bigger the better, right? And so this dragon is half the size of the planet. And they’re really, really big. And so when he first created the Gargan, they were just these monsters that I had to fight. And I’m like, how do I fight a monster that’s half the size of the planet? And so we were kind of talking about one state would be his footprint type thing. And so he kind of leaned into it, which was fun. As opposed to saying, no, he’s not really that big. He made them kind of these primordial beings that have always been around. And they fight these astral battles with the deities a lot of times. And so he really leaned into it. But first he really didn’t understand how big half the planet was. But it’s been fun to see where he went with this Gargan creature that he created. But it’s amusing to see how a child can just make something up that he thinks is really big to be scary. And then he ends up creating all sorts of fun D&D plot points and lore in his world about these creatures. No doubt, yeah. Completely.
Nat20Mom: Oh, nice. I absolutely love the whole concept that you just presented. That is awesome. I love how kids will double down on something, and it’ll be totally unexpected. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay, that was our last my last question for you.
RedWyrm: I don’t think he’s ever backed down from anything. He’s laid out in a D&D game, which is great. But at the same point, it’s fun to see where he goes with it.
That’s all we got to cover this time, but I want to give a special thanks to RedWyrm for agreeing to this interview and giving up part of his Saturday! It is always so heartwarming to talk to other parents raising wonderful little adventurers!
Drop a comment to let everyone know you’re here, too, and see you next time! Remember, you’re not on this journey alone!
