Sunday School DM

Back in June, I was contacted out of the blue by the education director at my synagogue, looking for an adult to lead their D&D club. They’d established it the prior school year as a post-Sunday-school activity for a handful of high-school kids who wanted the space to play.

They were looking for an adult to DM this year, as the kids found it too time consuming and difficult to manage (would it surprise you to know they were running 5e?); if there was some Jewish-leaning content in the mix, that would be a bonus. I jumped at the opportunity, partly because my in-person campaign had withered months ago, partly because it seemed like a huge challenge, but potentially an absolute blast. Within days, we had scheduled it out through the school year, with hefty breaks for the High Holidays, winter break, and spring break, and an expected census of 4-6 players. All of a sudden, I had a campaign to plan.

The Challenge

This was going to be a novel challenge for me. My self-doubt brain immediately ginned up a half dozen problems and then gestured at them broadly, saying “Well? Isn’t it obvious we need to just call this off?”¹ Ignoring the voice, for once, but not the problems, I got to work on breaking them down.

Problem 1: Much-Younger Players

I haven’t played an RPG with high schoolers since I was in high school, nigh on 30 years ago. Of all my worries, this was the most irrational and anxiety-fueled. What if these kids have concrete (and very modern) expectations of what we should play? What if they mock me mercilessly for my old-school sensibilities? What if they all soft-quit by the end of the second month?

I shooed away the absurdities (with encouragement from Patchwork Paladin) and told myself, “These are people, first and foremost, and you’ve had plenty of different people at your table before. Everyone’s managed to have a pretty great time, all in all. This is supposed to be fun.²” This last bit became my mantra.

So what I really needed to do was to determine what this group will find to be fun.

Problem 2: Time Restrictions

I negotiated 2.5hr of time for our sessions, of which there were going to be 11. All told, that makes less than 28 hours of time for the entire year. So there’s pressure to make the time count. The at-hand, most obvious way to deal with this is to way over prepare so all contingencies are accounted for. But, clutching my new mantra, I realized the optimization should be to make each moment, on average, as fun as it can be. World-building won’t save me; picking a good enough ruleset as a foundation and then engaging with the players to help shape the experience will.

Problem 3: A Formal Organizing Body

Because officially I’m volunteering for the religious school attached to a synagogue³, there’s a dynamic of Approval layered on top of what a normal campaign among unaffiliated adults might have. When discussing taking the gig, I made, without prompting, assurances of content limitation – basically, no sex, drugs, overt alcohol use – because I’m not interested in that kind of content generally anyway (other than playing a pack of drunk NPCs for flavor). We also talked about violence, and I was surprised to learn the group last year made some agreements about avoiding murderhoboism. But the director had no illusions about the general violence content of the game. Since I was planning to, from very early on, jettison the addiction to combat (as well as basically everything else) that modern D&D is beset with, I told her that we’d probably see less violence overall anyway. The director was into this idea, saying that the group last year had lamented the constant combat. So honestly, content doesn’t seem like it’s going to be an issue at the outset.

More than content, however, communications and logistics were going to be a lot more restricted. As a volunteer, I’m harboring no illusions about how dynamics between adult volunteers and their teenage charges can go very, very badly⁴. Therefore, I’m not going to be texting with these kids, so there’s going to be no off-table discussion of, say, downtime. And they’re mostly without their own transportation, so their parents are expecting to drop them off and pick them up at a particular time, so last minute cancellations or twenty minute run-overs aren’t going to go over too well. So my usual approach of checking in with the group a day or two before to see who’s in, and rescheduling on-the-fly if not enough people are in, is not going to work.

So we’re going to have to play when scheduled, rain or shine, and we’re probably going to have to take some time to do some upkeep at the table I might normally reserve for a Discord DM. So I’m really going to have to mind the clock to keep our fun quotient up.

Problem 4: Judaism-as-RPG

A couple of years back, a community member who was the sponsor of a Bar Mitzvah kid contacted me to discuss D&D, because the kid was interested in layering in D&D content into their speech. He told me that he could break down a Torah portion no problem, but D&D was beyond his ken. We didn’t really get anywhere with the Bar Mitzvah conversation, but we spent some time discussing the Euro-centrism⁵ of D&D and what a campaign might look like set in the medieval, or even ancient, Levant. The idea took root in my brain, all the same.

Having spent the intervening time falling even further into the OSR/NSR/*SR hole, I now know there are plenty of settings that are not the “vanilla D&D” pseudo-European western medieval fantasy world. But when confronted with the idea of “injecting some Jewish content” into the game, even though it was considered extra credit, I was too excited by the early ideas simmering in my head, so I wasn’t very motivated to go looking for pre-existing content (although I immediately bought a hard copy of Beyond The Pale⁶).

But I am a person long accustomed to having my enthusiasm met with blank stares, indifference, and occasionally scorn. So I know it would be easy for Sunday school kids to take one look at something marketed as “Jewish D&D!!! For teens!!!” and think “ahh, that sounds like shul” and bounce right off the thing. Moreover, it would be easy for this to feel like I was “hiding the vegetables” by just decomposing a worksheet on the events of Exodus into a 15-room puzzle dungeon. “And now, in the sixth room: you see giant Boils coming right for you. Roll initiative!” I wouldn’t want to play or run that game.

I was heartened, however, to hear that one of our prospective players has an abiding love of languages and history. I decided to just lean quite far in that direction, melding nicely with my conversation from years prior. Language, historicity (as in rhyming, not re-enacting), and intercultural juxtaposition would be my beat, with a firm “no thank you” to sweaty, forced allegory (ancient or modern). But none of this was going to exist as an impediment to the enjoyment of the group. As Liz from Magnolia Keep writes, “[T]he hobby as we know it now is dominated largely by what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, ‘Elfkissers.’” Anticipating this might be the case with my group, I planned on leaving open the possibility for demihuman PCs and making it a Session-0-time call. If someone wants to play bring an elf along on a Jewish-tinged adventure, I’m not going to stop them, although I might have to make some calls on vibe.

The Solutions Start Flowing

So now I had enough of a foundation of goals to start fleshing things out. I had nearly three months before our first session, which I spent down various rabbit holes, but I kept turning back to This Is Supposed To Be Fun, which helped me keep all my little darlings under the knife. Knowing I was going to be shaping this campaign to suit the crowd at the table, people who were strangers to me, actually let me spend time thinking about tools and structures that would help that process be easier.

I did build a dungeon though.

More on those tools and the world they produced next time.