D&D in the Classroom: Getting Started
Piper Fact: my first real musical was Fiddler on the Roof. I was in elementary school, and I played the head Russian, with a huge solo in “To Life.” It was awesome!
But what does that have to do with teaching? Everything. Well, kind of. You’ll see. After a really difficult year previous school year, I decided that we should do Fiddler on the Roof for our spring musical in the 2019-2020 school year. And yet again, it was awesome! The actors were prepared; the dances were choreographed; the sets were being built… Then Covid happened. And gone was the spring musical. Everyone lost their parts. Our seniors lost their final show. We were all devastated. As the year went on, it became clear that we couldn’t do a fall play during the next school year, or our student-written one act shows, or perhaps even the next spring musical. But I still wanted my kids to feel accomplished, to do something meaningful, and (most of all) to have fun memories from their theater class, even if those memories couldn’t be performances.
Soooooo I had a wild idea this summer: Dungeons and Dragons.
Crazy, right? RPG for theater class? A campaign as a final? But really, it wasn’t crazy at all. In fact, it would cover a lot of our normal activities and standards. Collaboration? Check. Costuming? Check. Character backgrounds and development? Check. Theatrical improvisation? Definite check.
Then I just had to tell my kids… I was a little worried. As far as I was aware, none of them had ever played before. And I had seniors! Would they be ok with this? Would they be upset that we weren’t following the norm? Nope! My kids were all stoked! One almost fell out of his chair when I told the class because he was just so excited!
That left me with only one thing to do: learn everything I could about DnD. And, um, that ain’t easy. Luckily, my husband is awesome and immediately bought me the 5e Player’s Handbook, Monsters Manual, and Dungeon Master’s Guide, along with dice. Even more luckily, my brother-in-law plays, so he taught me the basics and ran me through a mini practice campaign.
So now I can do the same for you! Well, I can get you ready and give you some guidance. I can’t buy you all the books -- living on a teacher’s salary, after all!
I’ve got a really wide range of grade, maturity, and skill levels in my class, and after creating my own character, I knew that simply giving them instructions and setting them loose would not be enough… That’s why I split up the process (by the way, all the documents I mention will be shared below).
I started off by creating documents listing the basic information for each basic 5e race, class, and background. I warned my students that they wouldn’t know what some of the stats were as they read through the documents, but that was completely ok, since we would get to them later. Instead, I told them to just read through and choose the race, class, and background that seemed the most interesting! And, well, that led to a lot of bards. What else did I expect in a class full of theater kids!? But it all worked out fine, and I had enough of a mix to put together some good campaign teams. I had all my students put their information in a group Google Doc, so I could keep track of everything, but I could just as easily have called out their names and collected the information myself if I didn’t trust them to not delete or mess with each other’s information. Luckily, my kids are pretty dang awesome!
Next, I had to walk everyone through the somewhat arduous task of gathering all their stats together onto a character sheet. Ummm… no. Wasn’t going to happen. At least not with a regular sheet and basic instructions, so I made my own sheet, with a corresponding Google Slides presentation! And I color-coded them both, because... rainbow! To be honest, this took a few days to go through with them, especially since, like I said, I’ve got a large range of students, some of whom really needed me to break down each step into parts and walk them through everything individually. Depending on your students, though, it could take much less time, or you could even assign it as independent work. However, even though it took some time, I was able to walk every single kid through it, all at once! And once it was done, I knew it was (relatively) smooth sailing from then on!
So if you’re at all interested in using D&D in the classroom, or even just interested in learning it for yourself or teaching your friends, I hope this helps! Check out all the documents below to get started! In future posts I’ll be sure to add in some of the other things we did in our D&D theater class!
Who’s Who Document for gathering your players’ Races, Classes, and Backgrounds
Character Creation Slides Presentation (which goes along with…)
Good luck!
