Sunday, October 25, 2009

Starting Labyrinth Lord

So, when my 9 year old, who I shall refer to as Aha, said he would like to play a game like the books he was reading I said, "Great!" I had recently printed Labyrinth Lord and read it. It is so simple. I did not play the Moldvay version of Basic D&D. I started with Holmes and plunged straight into AD&D shortly thereafter. I really like the simplicity of LL. My tired brain absorbed the rules easily. Something I don't know if it is capable of right now with more complex games. I read a lot of discussion/controversy about race as class. Even though they were separate throughout my playing time it doesn't bother me. I don't know why but have discovered I don't care I don't know why.

So, Aha wants to play a young wizard like one of the protagonists of The Knights of the Silver Dragon. So I explain attributes to him and how they effect the game. He decided to read about each of the attributes anyway. Then we set about rolling up a character. Since this is his first time and he wants to play a wizard I have him roll 4d6, discard the lowest and assign as he likes. He assigns his highest to intelligence and we are off. It actually took us two evenings to finish the character because Aha would deliberate and read some of the book before each decision. Between the two sessions he read the spell lists. Not just the 1st level spells but all of them and he still deliberated for awhile. He then poured over the equipment list and agonized over what to buy. I didn't worry about encumbrance. That can come later. So we finished it and had quite a bit of fun with the process. We planned to start the next time we had the opportunity.

Then my five year old decided he wanted to play.

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