I love my 7-year old Dungeons & Dragons, World-of-Warcraft Geek boy!! Here are some of the reasons why role playing games (and [my son]) rock...
1. Vocabulary Aquisition, using words like adjacent and dexterity if everyday conversations.
2. Leadership and Groupwork Skills, choosing abilities that will help the entire group succeed and choosing actions based on what will benefit the team.
3. Bad Ass Math Practice, subtracting hit points, understanding probability, and quickly tallying the most damage you can do with any combination of dice.
4. History Linkages, knowing way more than necessary about medieval weaponry and armor.
5. Quality Family Time, playing with mom, dad, [aunts and uncles]
6. Computer and Techonology Skills, helping brothers and friends create characters on dad's laptop, surfing the web for information and interesting youtube clips
7. Research, always looking things up in monster manuals and dungeon master's guides
8. Appreciating Mythology and Folklore, look out Homer!
9. Decision-making and good sportsmanship, let the dice fall how they may.
10. Passion, that gets him up at 6:00am on a Saturday so he can tell his mom all about the quest that they will begin that evening. Gotta love when sitting down and talking with mom ranks higher than playing the Wii.
Well said, thanks for letting me share this on my blog.
Follow Your Bliss,
JJ
Some sound reasons there, may well borrow them in my pitch to get Junior Grognard's school to set up a D&D club.
ReplyDeleteI'm also going through the National Curriculum (google it and find out what UK teachers have to put up with) to see how many learning outcome boxes D&D can tick.
I'm serious about this - we need to get the next generation on board otherwise our great game dies with us
Borrow away; I'm sure my friend would be pleased to know she was helping the cause. I wish you luck in your endeavor and hope to hear about it in your blog. I'm hopping to do similarly with RPGs in the states.
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