Advice for D&D at a Camp

[Garagun, Scion of Fire]

So hey everyone,

I'm a camp counselor at a day camp each summer and I'm in charge of the D&D program there.

Each week we get a group of kids (2nd grade to about 7th grade) coming in to our group and we teach them how to play D&D, LARP, roleplay and play a ton of board games. It's been a blast doing this for the past four years.

This summer however, the D&D group's been split into D&D Quest and D&D Adventure and I'm in charge of the former. Adventure is the LARP and sports side, while Quest is the tabletop aspect.

We've tried a lot of different variants in the past but little by little the LARP and swordfighting took more and more space at the camp. Now that I've finally got a dedicated Quest only group, I'm looking for some advice.

I'll be having anywhere between 15-25 campers I expect each week for 6 weeks and we throughout the week assume that we have about 8h of real, tabletop roleplaying time spread across 5 days. (No camp on the weekends)

We've realized that getting right into playing actual D&D is long and actually rather tedious since character creation, rule explanation and set up takes quite some time. Furthermore, when we have so many players we simply can't play typical D&D since the campers get bored quite quickly when they need to wait their turn as 19+ players wait their turn.

Now, I've thought that perhaps this summer we could try wargaming using the mass combat and kingdom building rules. Have them play together as a group, deciding where to send troops and what to defend. Give them a good classic story (Dragon invades their home and they need to defend their settlements from his attacks), dungeons to explore and a sense of challenge as they compete each week to beat the previous week's Victory Point totals. Something like that.

I'm looking for some feedback, or any ideas on D&D at camp!

Cheers!

[Marc Radle]

Wow! Does that ever bring back memories!!!

A Look at D&D Camp: Shippensburg University

[Garagun, Scion of Fire]

Hey wow, thanks for this. Great source for inspiration. It looks like the campers were quite a bit older but it's still a great resource! Thanks Marc!

[Bob Bob Bob]

The answer is We Be Goblins. The answer is always We Be Goblins. Followed by We Be Goblins Too and We Be Goblins Free.

More seriously, I swear there was a PFS event that was essentially a whole bunch of players (at different tables) fighting against a demon? invasion of a city. So each separate table was actually fighting their own little battle in defense of the city but would contribute to the overall goal. They kept track of progress on a big board for everyone to see (I think).

[Garagun, Scion of Fire]

Bob Bob Bob wrote:

The answer is We Be Goblins. The answer is always We Be Goblins. Followed by We Be Goblins Too and We Be Goblins Free.

Hey Bob, I have all of those but that hasn't worked out before. We're a group of 20 or so each week and I'm we're only 1 camp counselor (DM) per 10 kids. I don't see us running 10 goblins per adventure. But mini adventures could work in some way.

That multi group idea is great. I just need to find a way to do that without needing a DM at each table. The wargaming idea was a potential way to solve it.

[Bob Bob Bob]

Ah, there's your problem. "1 camp counselor (DM) per 10 kids." Think like PFS, "One camp counselor (VC) for two DMs (kids) for 4 players (kids) each". It won't work for all age ranges but for the ones it does you can basically run any simple module.

Other than that there's always original Tomb of Horrors style, a meatgrinder designed to kill everyone who goes into it. Extra numbers are fine because they die fast. Whoever lasts longest "wins". There's actually a modern version of this in The Cheese Grinder. Probably not too hard to adapt it to your purposes (only 6 characters in play at any given time, others are waiting their turn).

[Garagun, Scion of Fire]

Thanks for the tips! I'll check the cheese grinder out. And yeah, the older kids could become DMs. That's a good idea.