Raising D&D

Recently I found a floorplan of the rented condo I lived in between 1989 and 1997, as shown.  I find it a little funny that, thinking of it, finding it took just a few moments.  I'm not living too far from the place now; if I were making a little more money, I could move back there.  That would be sort of funny.

This would be the first home my daughter knew, and as it happens she met one of the players in her present-day D&D campaign while living here (who grew up in the same collection of condos), so moving back in would be pretty weird.  But that's not what this post is about.

I'm sure I've mentioned before that I did not begin running my daughter in my D&D campaign until she was 14, because I'm a miserable, strange and complex person.  My personal feeling is that children shouldn't play the game until they are at least 11, at least not with adults.  This isn't because I feel the game is too violent or difficult; it is because I believe (and there's only three or four mountains of evidence in psychology to back me up on this) that young children build patterns of behaviour that hold with them all their lives, and that these patterns influence the way they see things.  If a child's first interpretation of the game is as a child, that will be a different interpretation from what we could expect from someone who first came to the game as a youth or an adult.  Children play D&D very differently from adults; I wanted my daughter to comprehend how adults play, not how children do.

That's not quite what happened.  She did begin playing with her friends when she was 8; but these were silly games (her description) and I don't think they had much influence over her thinking.  Her real experience came from another source ... which brings us to the floor plan presented.

The reader can see the location of my daughter's bedroom.  Beginning from about the age of 4 or 5 (her description), her mother, Michelle, who has long since passed away, would put her to bed between 7 and 8 p.m.  Then my daughter would wait for a bit, for the game to "get going."  Then she would sneak around the hallway, to the little cubbyhole where the washer and dryer was, where she would slip inside and close the thin sliding doors.  Then, she would lie on top of the dryer, just 7 ft. from where her mother, me and our friends were playing D&D, bringing a pillow with her and listening for hours.

We never caught her.  She did this for years, she told me around the time she was 17, but we never knew.  You can see plainly from the floor plan that we walked past her dozens of times on our way to the washroom; the lower, smaller bedroom was my study, where I kept back-up materials, so I would have gone there over and over.  She faked a lump in her bed so if we checked in on her, we wouldn't want to wake her up; and when she got tired, she put herself to bed without a word.

I can only assume that she really liked the game; and, for the sake of my ego, she really liked the way I played it.

I have other evidence for that.  Here is my daughter, showing me her D&D books, from about a year ago:



 At least I did one thing right as a parent.

[p.s.; I may have posted the video once before on this blog, but I couldn't find it; I might have told the story about her hiding in a closet, but I couldn't find it.  I'm old.  I forget things.  Like your grandfather who keeps telling you the same story, over and over.  Have I not mentioned lately that my daughter is pregnant?]