 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Christa Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10am central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesday, that's fine. We do report the show as we are doing today. And it will be posted to our website for you to watch at your convenience. And I will show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our archive recordings. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open for anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think would be interested in any of the topics you have on Encompass Live. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for library that we similar to your state library. And so we provide services and programs and resources to all types of libraries in the state. So you will find shows on Encompass Live for all types of libraries. Public academic K-12 corrections, museums, archives are really our only top criteria is that something to do with libraries. We do book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes come on the show and talk about resources and programs and things we're doing here to the commission. And we also bring on guest speakers, which we have to attend today. I joined us this morning is Caitlin Lombardo. She is from our Lincoln City Libraries right here in Nebraska. And she's going to talk to us about table top role playing gaming and D&D, which is awesome. I'm wearing my D&D shirt. My husband, myself, my friend, he plays for years and years. But I will hand it over to you. Caitlin, tell us how you're doing at the library with your teams. Yeah. So I have been doing table top gaming in my library, which is the central branch here in Lincoln in terms of kind of helping you figure out scale. And I've been doing it consistently since March of 2022. Started as a spring break, what we're going to have teams do productively in the library and kind of became this lovely big monster. So my email is down there at the bottom and it's also on the last slide. So if anybody wants any extra handouts and stuff that I have. And they'll also go to Krista for posting with the slides. Yeah, I mentioned that we'll have the slides along with the recording when that's posted in our archives. Perfect. And then I'm also working on doing a Zoom zero session. That's kind of an example. So if you're interested in joining that as well, you can email me there. So what is D&D? It's Dungeons and Dragons is what it's short for. And it is one system for table top gaming. There are many systems. D&D is the one that I'm personally more familiar with, but I've listed a bunch of other systems here. The idea is that it's collaborative storytelling around a table, whether that's physical or virtual using the players imagination and creativity to create the story characters and world. And like I said, D&D is kind of the most popular one, but you know, there's a whole variety. The IRL lore is that it was created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 72. And it was inspired by Lord of the Rings. They set it in kind of a Lord of the Rings world. And the idea was that they would have a single player that they would follow through this storyline. The character skills would improve and they would have different puzzles to face and villains to battle, and that they would have that same character over a long series of time. They were originally published on their own, but it was purchased by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. If you're familiar with Hitchhiker's Guide, some would call that a bad move, but it is what it is. D&D and pop culture. A lot of you may be familiar with Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Community, Gravity Falls, She-Ra. They've all had like the D&D episode. There's also a lot of podcasts and real plays like Critical Role, which has turned into Vox Machina on Amazon Prime, I believe. Illustrated kind of show. Role in the family is a family-friendly real play. Kids and adults playing together. There's also friends at the table. Dimension 20 is part of the dropout family of programs. So if you're familiar with dropout, it's a little bit, you know, maybe more adult specific content and the adventure zone. And then of course Stranger Things, the entire show is kind of based on the D&D world. So some of the anatomy of the D&D game, some important terms to know. The DM, that's the Dungeon Master. They're kind of the admin. They're the one who is moderating, running encounters, you know, choosing villains. Depending on your group, they may be the ones keeping track of hit points and that sort of statistical data. But keep in mind that the DM also makes and breaks the rules. Breaks being the key there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The player is in control of one character making decisions for that character. The setting is the fictional world you've placed it in. The plot provides structure, sets some goals for the players. And then the IRL stuff would be like dice, maps, figurines, character sheets, the admin. And a lot of groups have what's called the snack tapped in the person who makes sure that there is snack and drink on the table. So how to play. This is a nice little video you're welcome to look at outside of this. This is just a photo for our purposes, but this bitly will lead you straight there. It is a Dungeons and Dragons produced video that kind of gives you the bare bones of how to get started in seven minutes. It's kind of a nice starter tutorial as well on that website. There's a number of other tutorials once you kind of get deeper into playing. I referenced session zero earlier. So when you start your group session zero is a chance for the Dungeon Master. Usually in my case, I'm the Dungeon Master for my teens. And I think that tends to be the way it works for most libraries. Session zero allows the DM to kind of share a little bit about the world that you'll be moving around in and maybe give clues as to what kind of skills might be useful or what kind of mechanics they might be looking at. If it's a new situation, you know, it's the first time you're holding this program. It might be a nice chance to also do some ice breakers and things like that. So the teens are comfortable with each other as well. But thinking about, you know, like everybody kind of hates ice breakers. Something that we found pretty useful for our group was ice breakers as your character. So the character that you want to create is are they shy or is the character you want to create really funny and have your ice breakers reflect that character. They also get to give the chance for the DM to kind of gauge some play styles interests so that I can shape the game in that direction. If I should choose. So now we get to the fun part. This is the character creation portion. So the stats that help you shape a character are strength, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, those two things are different. So strength is how hard you smash the tomato. Dexterity is how well you dodge a thrown tomato. Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad. Prisma is being able to convince someone to eat a tomato based fruit salad and Constitution is not getting sick after eating the tomato fruit salad. That kind of gives you a nice way to explain it and understand it yourself when you are making these characters. Some species that you might run into would be dwarf, elf, halfling, human, dragonborn, gnome, half elk, half orc and tiefling. You'll notice there are no wizards, warlocks or sorcerers on here because they are so hard to work with in beginner situations. I have intentionally kind of limited my beginner teens to this group of species because it's a lot for a beginning player to try to manage a sorcerer. And if I have 13 other teens, a sorcerer has a very specific set of skills that are very different from some of these others. This is also kind of a nice place to get into some of the previous problems, some of the things that were previously problematic about D&D. Species used to be called races and races used to have specific characteristics tied to them, skills and things like that. D&D is moving away from that because there's some obvious racism inherent in that system. So the species classifications are more about backstory and things like that that help bring the character to light. There are some skills that like elves and half elves have better vision, things like that that aren't so much tied to success of one species over another. And then class is your character's job essentially. So back to the tomato analogy. We have the barbarian. They're going to smash that tomato. Bard is going to sing about the tomato. The cleric might heal the tomato. The druid will grow the tomato. The fighter will stab the tomato. A monk will flip and kick the tomato. A paladin will smite them. The ranger will shoot the tomato. The rogue will steal the tomato. The sorcerer will zap it. Warlock will summon a tomato eating monster. And a wizard will study the tomato. Now up at the top here I have Dempsey and Davis. They are a TikTok medium duo that does a lot of Dungeons and Dragons content. And that bitly will lead you to the TikTok if you want to jot it down. But I did send a video to Krista to hopefully play it for you all. Hold on a sec. I'm going to switch right over to my screen quickly and then I'm going to switch back. If I punch hard enough, this goblin will die. If I pray hard enough, this goblin will die. If I sing loud enough, this goblin will die. If my backstory is tragic enough, this goblin will die. Fireball! I love the wizard, yeah. And that wizard is kind of the reason why wizards are not a starter sort of character. But yeah, they also have a lot of other content to help you understand game mechanics. Alright, I'm going to send back presenter control to you. Okay. Go ahead and share it again. Perfect. Yes. So the backstory is what those TikTok characters were based on. And that is thinking about where your character is from, what they're doing at the starting point of the game, why are they on the adventure, and then how does your character get along with others. This is important because a lot of characters or a lot of adventures rather will have end goals of treasure or have end goals with information. And if your character is on the search for information that will liberate their village or on the search for gold to help pay off somebody's debt, something like that, that helps them guide what kinds of decisions they will make throughout the game. And deciding how your character gets along with others, it's going to inform a lot of that repartee that happens when they're discussing what decisions to make. Or if they're somebody who doesn't get along with anybody, maybe they just make a choice and do what they want and everybody else kind of has to deal with the consequences. So there's some of that, the drama aspect there in the backstory. You're playing another character, so it's kind of like acting. If you're coming up with a character that's not like yourself, but some people I know they kind of say, well, I'm just going to be me and I'll do, you know, and see how I would react in all these situations in the new world. Yeah, for some people I know it like myself I have trouble coming up with a whole backstory and why am I doing it? I don't know. I just kind of have fun and play with some of these people and see what's going to happen. So I kind of go with it. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes it's there are certain backstories that will give you, you know, certain sets of tools and stuff like that that can be useful if you're a thief or rogue. But yeah, they're mostly inform your interactions. Another way to look at that is what's called an alignment chart, just a suggestion. And it's not, not by any means cement right like your character could start out as lawful good and realize over the course of the adventure, maybe they need to be true neutral or somebody could start out as lawful evil and progress to lawful good. That's totally acceptable. And it just kind of, again, guides decision making and that sort of thing thinking about who, who that character really is. I believe, yes. So this is my kind of handle here. But what I would say, as far as practicality and like, actually doing it. I have two meetings per month with my Dungeons and Dragons group the second and fourth Monday of each month. And we meet in the team room. So it's visible to any team walking in the library. And it's also if you've ever been to my library, it's on the main floor. So anybody who is coming in the library would see that there are, you know, teams doing stuff. It kind of makes it more visible that there are events happening. Beyond that we have the table setup and a map in the middle so everybody can see. I also bring extra dice, because invariably somebody will have forgotten their dice. You can buy little dice sets if you can see on the camera, but you can buy little dice sets on Amazon and we got like a multi pack of these dice sets and having a six sided dice, eight sided, 12 sided, 20 sided, four sided, and then a percentage dice are usually going to help you out in most cases. But again, this would be one of those things where a dungeon master can make and break the rules. So for my characters or for my teens, a lot of their characters are like kind of troublemakers and they're just going to try to do the most outrageous solution to any problem. So they may promote or try to persuade me. Ooh, could my character use my annual handling skill to persuade this ox to, you know, bash through the door or something like that. And there's not much precedent for that. But if you roll a nat 20 on your, which is, you get 20 out of 20 points on rolling a 20 sided die. If you get a nat 20, I might let the ox go through the door. But I kind of decided the DM, does it serve the story for the ox to go through the door. If they shouldn't be going through that door and it's locked and I'm trying to steer them to a different room. I could say, Nope, this ox is does not speak common this this ox or whatever language I can kind of shut it down and just say as the DM I'm guiding you in a different direction. And in the beginning, when I was kind of training teens, I did also say things like the invisible hand of the DM is saying maybe you shouldn't do that. And then once you kind of get a feel for the kids, then you maybe have a little bit better improv as to what what elements you can use to steer them back onto the path. And then I kind of learned to how what's the what is the acceptable or logical thing that might happen. I mean getting creative is great thinking of those things, which I think some of the ends are like, Oh, wow, you just threw a whole wrench into this but I like it. Let's see if it goes. I had never thought about that. But, you know, there are still limits to what everyone can do. Yeah. And as far as personal research goes, I would really recommend dimension 20. One of their DMs. Brennan I can't remember his last name to save my life but Brennan is really good at that improv stuff where, you know, he'll just ask for random roles to have a character do certain actions, whether or not it allows them to beat a villain it doesn't matter but if I'm, you know, looking for information or if I'm, you know, just I'm meeting people and trying to decide how charismatic I'm going to be in that interaction. He's really great about that sort of like what it takes to be a good DM so I would look to him as an example. Otherwise, running my events we usually do an hour and a half. And that's pretty, pretty much where my team start getting fidgety and wanting to go do something. But we do a zero session we just did a zero session here at the end of December, and we'll start our campaign, a new adventure in January. Hopefully, if everything goes well if everybody makes the right decisions will end that right around the time that school gets out, and we'll start another adventure for the summer. If you are really daunted by the idea of doing something that long. There are what's called one shots, which are meant to be completed in an hour to two hours. And there's a ton of free resources for that sort of thing, D and D beyond are two or is one place. And then if you search for D and D one shots. There's a wealth of resources people have posted things to Google drives and that sort of thing specifically to share stuff that they've written and want to share for free. You can also get D and D's like official books this happens to be Tasha's cauldron of everything, which is a nice resource, but then they also have published adventures like candle keep mysteries. We did the first couple of ventures in candle keep. I realized my kids weren't quite skilled enough to make some of the decisions that candle keep requires. So we transition to a one shot. And then get a zero session in December to start up this next adventure which is more beginner friendly. And a lot of those adventures that are written by somebody who's not Wizards of the West Coast just like a random D and D fan will say, you know, this is a beginner level one adventure that by the end of the adventure you'll be level two or something like that. It will kind of give you a guide to how much you'll be doing in that adventure. So if you start out as a level one and you end as a level one, you didn't do much but maybe that's okay if it's a beginner session and you're just trying to kind of figure out how the kids work together. So a lot of the camp like the candle cube stuff you start at level one. And by the time you end candle keep, I think you're level eight. So you do a lot of stuff. There's a lot of challenges. The multiple session. Yeah. Yes, in multiple sessions, you would do that over the course of a couple of months. So yeah, that's those are kind of the mechanics and in terms of maybe promoting it and that sort of thing. It was incredibly popular at the start in March when we were on spring break. We had I think 16 people at each of those sessions. Once school came back into session, we went down to about eight or average was eight for quite a while at school breaks. It would bump up a little bit. But a lot of the kids when I asked them, hey, could you take flyers to school or different. So you're in and share those with your friends. A lot of the kids said, well, I'm already here because my friends don't want to hear me talk about D&D anymore. So I'm here to do my D&D thing. So I've reached out to a couple of the gaming like sort of stores, gauntlet, hobby town, those sort of places where people may play or buy supplies for those games and had flyers and posters hung up there and handed out there. And that's helped out a lot as well. So I would say, even if your kids that do attend and do like it. If they don't have friends that can share it with their other ways to capitalize, you know, asking church groups or different things like that to promote a teen activity has been pretty helpful. Otherwise, I think that's kind of the nuts and bolts of what I've done. So if anybody has questions, that's, I think the best practice really is to just do it to just try it. So that that session zero, if anybody's interested in joining, that I think that's really the best way to just like rip the bandaid off and figure out how to play it. And that's definitely, yeah, if anybody has any other questions, go ahead and type in the questions section I've got a few here that I've been gathering up. Yeah, that session zero that you're talking about that I think is something I'm playing myself. Oftentimes your first session is not playing at all it's figuring out the characters and me and my friends we can sit there for like, three hours. I'm going through the books, figure out what I want to do, talking about it, hang out, whatever. And then second time is when you actually start adventuring I think that's something that is important to understand that you're not going to have people coming right away and jumping into this. Now we are in this tavern and we're going to meet, you know, with mysterious stranger of all about that's not going to be the you're not going to jump into that right away. Yeah. Yeah. So someone did have a question and you kind of answered it about how do you come up with a story or plot. Sure. There, you know, because that can be for some people like, you know, like I said for myself, coming up with a backstory just from my own character, I'm a little bad at that. But also comes with a whole storyline seems crazy intimidating, but then you can answer it. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that Wizards of the Coast has published that if you are like, I don't know enough about the rules to know what I'm bending or breaking. You can certainly rely on those there's a lot like I said that people have written on their own as fans of D&D. And then once you're kind of comfortable in your DMing, like for example, my boyfriend's DM for another group, and he will literally just read a book, you know, like read Lord of the Rings, for example, and just create a world based on that. He is, yeah, he's sort of a savant in that way. He's able to, well, okay, this one's not quite a Lord of the Rings monster, but this one's a close enough allegory we could say that this is the Balrog, you know, these sort of things, and setting up those challenges and stuff, knowing when a character needs to be met with some resistance versus Oh, this is just a posture that we're going to wander through until suddenly, you know, there's all sorts of versions of that there's not really a wrong wrong path. Yeah. Yeah. So, let's see here. Yeah. Okay, I've got some good questions coming in here. So get plenty of time to ask any questions anybody wants more details on everything definitely get your questions in there. You had mentioned that you started off with 16 kids that sometimes only eight. How do you deal with them coming in and out I mean, we have 16, potentially 16 teams all playing one adventure that's, that's huge, but how do you, so that's, that's, that's a lot of people like trying to get more smaller and more focused but how would you also deal with Okay, the kids that should have last week aren't showing up this week. What do you do with those characters that now aren't here to play them at the moment. Sure. Yeah. So I my approach to it and again I don't think that there's a wrong approach but my approach is if there was maybe some sort of spell book or you know like a piece of a loop that they need for the adventure. We all have disagreed that the magic hand of the dm will randomly assign that that piece to whoever is present. And I've kind of joked with my teens that have become regulars that if so and so joins us, they'll just teleport to join us in the adventure. The other thing that we did most recently was a space themed adventure so teleporting worked nicely for that. Otherwise, I kind of write them into joining, you know, like, as you enter the wood, you notice off to the left there's a small half or four who are you know and like, give them a chance to introduce themselves and join the party. And if they don't show up the next time we kind of say, you know, like, Oh, were they in the fallen, you know, like we'll remember them as we move forward in this adventure, that kind of thing. So it's not usually too disruptive. Although if you can kind of call to the regular group, those things dissipate. Yeah. Yeah. And then they'll be saying, Oh, they've gone off on a little side quest, I had to go and do something and we'll see if they'll join us later on. If they're coming back. All right, what else do we have here. Yeah, someone asked, I think it's similar where I was asking a lot because you have more than one DM for 16 people, but it's just, yeah, it's just me for the one session that I had, or the two sessions I had 16 kids. What I did was get a random number generator and assign them order. So no matter what we were doing, like, not just if we were fighting a villain, but no matter what we were doing, we would go and order and let those kids like that the next kid in line decide what we would do. So are we going to take the left fork or the right fork. And then the next kid would decide, you know, if we're going to engage the enemy or try to go around them, you know, like all that sort of thing. So everybody gets a chance to do something. And that way, if I let 16 kids all talk and try to decide what to do, we would never get past the first action. And trying that that ordering, ordering them right away and then using that order also for battle, you know, as you're attacking villains kind of cycling through that so everybody gets a chance to do something and we're not letting, you know, the one or two really loud kids dominate the conversation. So I thought we could get into the corral. Yeah. Have you ever considered or tried having the teams dm or have they expressed any interest in that? Yeah, so I had the adventure picked out that I would dm in January and when we did our zero session. I kind of proposed to them the idea. You know, I have an adventure ready to go we can do our zero session, or one of you could choose, you know, like one of the two that kind of seemed into doing dms one of you two could dm the adventure and they were like, no, I think I'm I think I want to still just play a little bit and kind of figure it out and then maybe next time I would be involved. The only hesitancy maybe from like an admin perspective would be making sure that it's the right kid doing the dm. Because if it's a, you know, one of the chaotic kind of players, it may not be as well run and therefore less fun to the other kids but if you've got a, you know, a studious kid who always is on top of how many hit points are left or what weapons and actions each player can take something like that. That could maybe be a good candidate for a dm. You just kind of want to make sure that it stays fun for everybody because of course if it's not fun, they won't come back. So. Right, right. And damning that's that's a lot of responses. And you don't be a certain kind of person that's into that like not everybody who plays wants to do that. Yeah, the DMs wants that wants to play to and I know in our group. There's always certain people who are always running it. And the other ones are like that. I'm good point. Um, let's see here. Oh, I was going to say, I think this isn't comment about when you're talking about the kids coming in and out. So I was playing one weekly game that's pretty much a sandbox because adult people drop in and out as available and things happen to come across it like a sandbox open world video game. And the newest player helped me learn the relatively low stakes to the group. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah sandbox would be another good search term for folks who are super familiar sandbox worlds would allow that it's kind of like Minecraft right like it's, there's a lot of things. So people can learn mechanics and like they mentioned in and out is much less of a problem if you know maybe and maybe a kid can only say for half an hour they can't say for an hour and a half. The sandbox experiences work nicely there too. Yeah. Jump in and just get a feel for it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you're a good question. How do you get the money to start the program what are the startup costs and to keep it interesting you have to keep buying new things. I know the books can be pretty pricey. Yeah. So, so what all physical stuff that you need to start again. So bare bones, like if I, you know, had only the things that I could personally afford, you know, like five was providing supplies or something maybe a $25 budget something really, you know, can really all you need is a single set of those dice, the 20 d 12 d 10, a single set of those dice. You can find adventures for free online. And if your library is able to print on paper that's, you know, like 11 by 17 or eight by 14 something like that. You can print maps and that size of paper that are just just fine. And that's usually what I do actually is print on like legal size or ledger. So the startup costs can be really pretty low. In terms of the, once the group kind of took off our cataloging department thought well maybe we should give the dnd books another world previously we had owned players handbook and some of the basics, and they tended to walk away. They did not have that experience with them this time. So I'm not sure if there's more of a culture of, I really enjoyed it, you know, I got inspired to do it because of stranger things or whatever. I really enjoyed it I should return the books so the next person can enjoy it too. I'm not sure but we haven't lost any of the books yet. So in terms of that, that cost there's been zero. The adventures also can be really low cost, you know, you can get PDFs for free but you can also get PDFs for, you know, five $8 depending on the author. Many figs you can print off on a 3D printer if your library has one of those. Otherwise, I don't really find that many figs are necessarily like a requirement. But a lot of times kids will be just fine using chess pieces or other board game pieces to represent their character. Especially if you have a jumble, a random jumble and they can kind of pick one that they feel like represents them. But yeah, I think the start of class could be really quite low if you weren't able to purchase, you know, the official Wizards of the Coast adventures, etc. Yeah, that's not necessary. Yeah. That's the good idea about the figures because I know you can buy a rogue figure or a wizard figure or whatever and they can add up. You don't have to use anything, you're just marking yourself on a map. It's not really important. What's in your head is what you're going to imagine. It's where you're at, yes. So it does not take much to get started with it. Let's see here. Okay, I'm talking about how to do one of these. How much time does it take for you to between games for preparing? How much dedicated time do you set aside for preparing for each session? Preparing for each session. Maybe in our, it's a little bit tough to estimate. Because at this point I have a nice backlog, a nice pad of those adventures lined up for the next one and the next one. But I would say maybe in our per session, preparation in terms of making sure if there's any monsters I'm unfamiliar with or a game mechanic that I'm not familiar with making sure that I know how that works. But mostly the time that you spend is reading that adventure to know kind of where it ends so you can help steer your kids. Maybe the time that it takes to read. I wouldn't say don't read the dictionary this way. Don't read the player's handbook necessarily. But watching the real plays and listening to the podcasts of people playing, at least for me, was a really great way to familiarize myself with gameplay and mechanics and those sort of things. Just because one group plays it that way doesn't mean that that's like the solid only way to play it. So you could listen to three different groups play the same adventure and it may result in a different end result. So I think I found the podcast and real plays more informative that way than just strictly like sitting down and reading a player's handbook. And things like the podcast you can listen to on a commute or, you know, when you're doing other tasks, depending on what you're reading to the adventure that you selected is a good idea so you know what's supposed to happen. Definitely. But it is very different than seeing people play it or participating in it. I would recommend you mentioned things like critical role. And, and that may be, well, if you had three or four hours just sit. They are not a cookie. Yeah, critical roles. Yeah, so if you want to just really get immersed into something and they do. Yeah, but they're, if you look up their YouTube, like here's a three and a half four hour session. Yeah, in one night that they do it. This is their regular thing that they do. And it's not interesting to see people have been playing it for years and years and how they do it. But I would also look for they have done some things and other people have done, you know, one shots bringing in other celebrities or people have never played before to see how other movies have been introduced to it and figures out. I've had fun watching that sometimes happen where they say, you know, we're going to do a special thing for, you know, a charity or just because this is happening or whatever. And then it's just a one or two hours. And it's a specific yet just this one day, just this one venture. And you can see the people who know who've done it before and make sure people who've never done it. And they're like, so what are you? Okay, you roll the 20. Yeah. Yeah, there's a role in the family has a guest episode with Brennan from D 20. And he, Brennan from D 20 is actually the DM for their group. But I think role in the family is a really nice kind of snapshot because all the kids that are playing you kind of get an idea how to interact with like what kinds of reactions you might get from kids. And also, like, a natural way to coach kids through the decisions. So that yeah, role in the family is just on YouTube and I want to say they're like 45 minute episodes. They're not too bad. Okay. Someone wants to know, and I know you're talking like, have you have you or else somewhere else in library done any sessions with adults, or have you are thinking about doing that. I think I have only, well, I've only had two people reach out and ask if the team group would accept adults. And at this point, I've just said no, because we're trying to cultivate some teen programs. And I don't know our adult librarian. I don't know that she has necessarily gotten feedback that Dungeons and Dragons is of interest to adults. But I think if you have a community member who comes to you and says, hey, do you have a D&D program or do you have, you know, hey, what would you like to DM the group. I would love to have you start, you know, like if you want to DM start the adventure, I can set up a room for you and I like kind of host it and foster it that way. But yeah, I couldn't say that I have a ton of interest in it from the adult side. It depends on your community and what you put out there. Yeah. Like I said, there are, you know, there's places here in town that already that well, that people need to do it like Gauntlet Games and Manna Cafe. We've got some, yeah, that is a new gaming cafe here in Lincoln. I don't even know the one that I can't remember. Anyways, so we're, you know, going to drink a beer and play the game. Right. That is an important distinction that we wanted to make with the library programs that they were beginner friendly and welcoming environment because sometimes the adult groups, whether they meet on their own or meet at one of those gaming establishments can be kind of gatekeeping and brocentric, if you will. So we wanted to make sure that we advertised in a way that it will be kids like it will be teams. We will be nice to beginners. We're not going to, you know, kind of turn our noses up or anything. We're going to be helpful. And it's not really a place for like no adults, right? Like we're all learning together. And we just, we kind of created that culture for ourselves. So it, for the libraries, it was an important distinction to be open and welcoming to that. You're doing team work anyway. So that's what you focus on yet. Yeah. The other libraries up there, I'm sure they have adult D&D groups too. Yeah. Like you said, stranger things and all these TV shows and things that are sometimes adults are just learning it. Yeah. Yeah, some of our adult staff were saying, you know, I would love to join a D&D group. I tried to play when I was a kid but the boys wouldn't let me. So I mean, there is, yeah, there is an argument to be made that adults might enjoy it. I just haven't necessarily gotten enough feedback to say like, yes, let's try it. Yeah. All right. Oh, talking about the figures, someone says, yes, about the 3D printing. If you want to do 3D printing, I highly recommend doing that collaboration with the makerspace. Yeah. To declare the option to 3D print emitting the likeness of their character is a great way to immerse them in the game and generate excitement for the program. Yes, there are. Hero forage is the big one. Oh, gosh, you're a horse. Don't get me started. Hero forage is a place where as a website where you can go and they will 3D print for you stuff. But you can also get from there and there's other many big places online music factory where you can get just the STL files, the files, then print out your own 3D printer. And a lot of libraries now have 3D printers is the thing. So absolutely. I'm getting involved in that too. Oh, here's interesting. Someone said for staff. Oh, wow. Okay. This library is the library system in Nashville. Someone in the team section started discord for staff to play off work. Oh, yeah. So when I pitched the idea of doing a D&D group, at first one of my coworkers is a DM for their friends. And I was like, Hey, can you kind of, can you run a couple of sessions for me so I get a good feel of what I might be up against. And so it was a coworker and I, and then we put out a call to the system like who would want to join us off off the clock to just play D&D for fun. And it would, you know, we'd all kind of be library cohorts. Discord certainly could be a fun way to do that. We happen to do it at village in just like, you know, OG. I would say that 1130 scenario, but yeah, especially if you're all into books, the candle keep mysteries is centered in a library. So there you go. Perfect for all this library. Someone says they do this other library is saying they have an all ages magic the gathering group. You can do things that are. Yeah. Yeah. We also have a kids D&D group and have tried starting an adult D&D group that they just needed to get a DM. Yeah, same thing. Somebody needs to run. Absolutely. And someone has, I have a lot of questions. So a lot more time at any other questions or ideas or thoughts, go ahead and share them. Someone else, someone here is sharing something called the quiet year. It's own game, but it's been interesting to building a map collaboratively and taking some weight off the DM. So the quiet year. I wonder if I'm spelling it wrong. This results that are coming up are like metal gear solid. So maybe I'm wrong. Quiet year, like, like, it's a math game. Okay. You can find the circles up close left to pop the lift at community and attempt to build something good in their quiet. Oh, like silent, silent gear. Silence. Yes. Quiet. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Kind of a sandbox type experience it sounds like. Oh no, it's, oh, it's snowing again. Dang it. Part of the dear necorn is the website for it's a map drawing game about the struggles with me living after the collapse of civilization. All right. Do you have any. Oh yeah, first of all, yes, it's a map making game you play it we play it to make a map for the campaign. Yeah, I like that crowd source map and build the world that way. That's kind of cool. All right, here we go. Let's see to have any suggestions of ways to make D&D more accessible to people with disabilities or other historically marginalized identities. Certainly so part of that would be marginalized identities. We encourage our players to share their pronouns. So if the pronouns are maybe even different from who they are in person that we can address them with the right pronouns in the game. As far as physical manipulation and that sort of thing. There are what are called dice jails and different dice rollers. So if it's a matter of physical manipulation of dice, there are different items out there that you can investigate to help people roll dice. For visual that might be printing the the grids of the map in larger font and pasting them together so you have a larger more visible map. But yes, that is a good question. There are certain virtual platforms also that might make playing more accessible. Where you are kind of playing a zoom game. I'm trying to remember words. It might just be called D20. Roll 20. So roll 20 is a virtual platform where you can load the map and everybody sees the map and then you're kind of playing like interacting as though you would interact on zoom. So that may be that one. Yeah, it became very big and of course when the pandemic started and people wanted to play with their same groups of boys and playing with. Yeah. Yeah. There's also dungeon masters guild. And I think dms guild.com is the website. And that's a lot of those folks that are like, I began for 20 years and here's the experiences and things that I can share for this conversation. So you might find some stuff there. Yeah, I'm trying to think if there's other kind of identities that I've missed, I mean, cutting out the race, moving to species, some of that sort of stuff has. That's the thing, like, I really like when they made that change, I like the new. I've been done. Yeah. The way to the coast has addressed that themselves already. So, yeah, attention to as well. I mean, we're talking about the books and I didn't mention there are different editions. We are on. 5e right now. So there are previous editions of the books the players handbook the DM guide monsters manual and all the adventures so you will want to pay attention to what edition, when you're looking at things to make sure it's, if it is something older that you understand that the rules might be different. They have some of the rules and things to change from addition to addition, drastically. If you see the classic red box from way back when it first started that totally happened today. So, pay attention that whole, which edition is something created based on like one of the people out there made up their own. They should somewhere and you say this is using the whatever edition rules. Yeah, and I'm pretty sure on that your master's guild, you can search for things that are just fifth edition, or, you know, if you wanted to play an older version, you can search for things that way as well too. Some people do have their, you know, they will be a previous version of something. Yeah. Well, there's the newest the spell jammer set. A lot of people have found more confusing some people have found it less confusing. Our group has elected to choose the fifth edition to just stick with that. So it really depends on what you are interested in maybe as a group or if you just as the DM want to make that call and just say, you know, sorry teenagers. We're going to do 5e I'm pulling that card, or if you want to vote, however, but yeah, this all sorts of ways to play. Here someone is asking, I'm going to do that now to bring it up again. Okay, so I'm going to suggest in here dnd compendium.com DM resources accessibility and inclusion. I will share the, they're just sent out going that everyone should be able to see that also put it in the chat. There are multiple places we can send this. So this is the answer to that question handling sensitive content, inclusive gaming physical and cognitive accommodations respectful representation of minority characters. Yeah, excellent. And a lot of this, like the tools that I found that I am sharing with you, I just found by the good old Google search, you know, figuring out what key terms to use. So that's excellent. I love that. What is the lowest age group you'd recommend for DMD. And you're doing teens, but I know I've seen people do younger kids even like a very young version but I'm trying to think how young rolling the family I think has like maybe a 10 year old is the youngest. And I did have a teen bring a much younger sibling like maybe a six year old sibling. And the six year old did was not grabbing it. But I think my event for being aimed at teens that that was kind of bound to happen. I think if you could find the right adventure, especially being guided by some resources like role in the family, you might be able to do it for like upper elementary school age kids but it's really a matter of how well they're able to work with a team and to realize, you know, like the the tavern in keeper told us we have to find the goblins goal to save the village. And if they're not realizing that that's the goal and they're going off in a different direction that you know the kind of understanding those cues is really what what makes the age appropriate. Someone asked for. Yeah, I know I've seen somebody said that they have modified D&D for the younger, very younger kids to small kids can play board games, but you've got to think of it in that type of you know, they're very much similar. And they're going to real yeah. And so there's a separate guide series by which is the code specifically made for younger players. Yeah. That depends on how long we're talking. Someone did ask for the link to the quiet year game. So I did send that out into the chat and the questions. The quiet year and the someone here. Okay, no question. Can you stop a quest at any time and pick up later. I don't see why you couldn't. I mean, if it if it was a matter of, you know, maybe kids are only wanting to attend during the summer break and then once school starts that you know they're unavailable because of extracurriculars or whatever. You can certainly join back in the adventure and say like previously on troll for initiative and kind of recap what you learned, what you gained that sort of thing and if there's new people joining you can write them into the story if people left you can, you know, help them exit the story. Yeah, I don't see why you couldn't. But I think you're It depends on when people decide I'm done for the night I have to go whatever you will pause here and we'll pick it up next time just like a TV show or Yeah, when our our adventures are just the twice monthly meetings and so we that's regular enough that they haven't forgotten what happened two weeks ago. And we've been able to do a con like one consistent adventure through that whole time. But yeah if you were to stop for longer, like for a month or two months, it might be worth doing a recap or something but that might be tough. I remember what happened last season. The quiet year their buddy in the district is going to love hearing that. Another resource someone is mentioning is the edition wiki and I've got the link here to be in the five. Yeah, that's a good one that is good for player characters, building them leveling up spells, etc. You just have to watch out for the different editions and stick to the game. Yeah. Yeah, by the tools. It's another good one. Got like the best year like the beast book items, spells, all sorts of stuff. So if you've got kind of a sandbox environment you want to throw in some some wild cards you can certainly find some stuff that way. All right, it is a little after 11am central time here. We did start a little after 10am so that's okay. Anybody have any for almost to the end of our hour. Anybody have any last minute desperate questions or anything you want to ask the people in, or if anyone open the group. Or any suggestions or thoughts or ideas you have get it into the question section. I've gotten through all of them that were in there. So far. We are recording this so we can always go back and look at the recording for any of the links and everything that are in the slides. I will try. There are a lot of good resources that was suggested when I put up the archive reporting, I will try and include links to all the different things that were suggested today. I think it's not already that people that you all in the audience suggested so that you can, anyone who goes to this later can access all of them as well. Oh, here's a good, I think that's a good question. How do you handle regularly disruptive players? Yeah, that's a good question. So I had one team who was struggling with some social cues and things like that. So he would just randomly interject and want to take over action. And so that was one of those times where we instituted the order rule. So even though there are only eight kids there, I still said, you know, all right. Number one, you know, it's Jones turn so Joan what action would you like to take and then when he would try to interject, I would remind him that it's Jones turn and those things would sort of kind of dissipate. It's tough to balance the kids who are really disruptive with the kids who are there to have fun because if somebody is really disruptive, it tends to not be fun for the other kids. I tend to focus my energy and my storytelling, etc. on the kids who are having fun, because I think a lot of times to the disruptive behavior is to get attention. So if they're being starved without attention, they kind of quiet down and that's a little bit more of a hot psychology take but I think that's a more productive way to handle it. The number order tool working particularly well. If you do like a talking stick or, you know, whatever way to kind of trade around the group. I just have found that the number order is really like non partisan. There's nobody playing favorites. This is what the rate of generator. It's not my decision. It was the number generator. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're just doing things with some, I would say some co players also cast like silent spells or, you know, like wrapped him up in duct tape or something like that so that he couldn't speak, you know, so then they'd be like well, you know, Jude, you can't speak because actually, you know, Joan has tied you up remember like she she's gagged you so you actually, you can't speak until somebody cuts again, you know, those sort of like jokie things that maybe the co players can kind of play into the story, sometimes work well or a trade off maybe with like, you know, like, I will let you roll to see if you become friends with the squirrel. But then we've got to move back to the puzzle, but that's Jones, Joan wanted to wanted us to solve the puzzle so you can roll and if you fail. We got to move back to the puzzle, sometimes trade offs are worth it to so. And here's a related question to disruptive but it's a specific type of disruption which I think and we'll explain this to you. How do you deal with potential murder hobos that might start to arise in the group. And those are no murder hobos that's people that just, they don't really do anything about how we're going to figure this out how we're going with this guy they just want to go in and kill every kill everybody. Right. And don't even think about the story and whatever they're just here to beat things up. Yeah, so for my group, as we're learning it that was a useful time for me to be like well the invisible hand of the dm has protected this individual from dying. It doesn't matter what you do. He won't die. You can't kill him. So what else shall we try. Or, you know, like moving once you're more comfortable with those improv elements, you can move characters around and say, you know, well it seems like the door that that person is in is locked. We either got to find the key or move on to a different thing, you know, like, there's some things that you can kind of make up and some lacking in that sort of skill. I have just said, you know, the invisible hand of the dm that has told you this might be useful. If you don't want to light it on fire. And then just leave it at that so they're still trying to problem solve what else they should do with that item. But they know that they can't destroy it. You know, distract or just let them to something else. Yeah, having another. Like, no, you don't kill the guy is giving you the quest just because you want to. Right, right, right. Are you going to get your reward when you're done. Yeah. Well, and my, my big struggle is no matter where we're at they want to find an animal to make friends with. But like I said, our last quest was in space. So there were no animals to the friend. So that yeah, that was I intentionally put us in space that maybe they would be like, you know, there's no animals to the to the friend here. Let's focus on the quest, but every room was like, I cast. I, you know, I use animal handling to see if there are any animals or friend in the room. No, it's still space. Interesting. Yeah. All right. Um, I think we'll start wrapping things up here. I'm almost 10 after. And we've had a great conversation, great ideas and thoughts here. Thank you so much, Caitlin for talking to us about this what you're doing this library. I know there are many libraries you're doing and kids and adults out there I'm sure. And, and this is, I think, awesome. Here are the basics of what you need to know and how you can do it yourself. And thank you everyone for the great conversation and the other tips and tricks and ideas. I am going to bring back the center control to my screen. All right, so here is this is that quiet year page. Like I said, I will share the links to all these things everyone recommended and suggested when we put up the archive. But that's the quiet years are very kind of. The dnd compendium about accessible inclusive gaming, the dnd fifth edition wiki and there's many other ones to ensure that I'll make sure I include. So I got some thank you. This was awesome. Thank you. Yeah, thank you everybody for being here with us this morning. I'm going to go back to our end compass live main page, whatever search engine of choice you'd like to use if you type and compass live in the original the only thing called that on the internet so far. No, no. This is our upcoming shows and schedule but here I'm going to show you our archive links are right here. And there you go. And the most recent one at the top of the page. Today show will be there should be up and done by the end of the day tomorrow. And you do cooperate with me. Everyone who attended today show and registered for today show going to email from me like you know when it's up. There'll be a link. Here's last week a link to recording a link to kitten slides. And as it's an extra links that I'll add for all the things that people have shared. So, push out our information on to Facebook and Twitter and cover by Facebook page if you'd like to use Facebook. Those reminders and reminders to log into today's show, meet our speakers and then when our recordings are available. And we'll let these recordings, we've been out those on here as well. If you like to use Facebook give us like there, or look for our hashtag and come live a little abbreviation that we use elsewhere. In the archive that will show you there is a search feature if you want to see who's going to show any other topic. You can search the full show archives, or just the most recent 12 months you want to make sure it's something current. And because this is our full archive, I'm not going to scroll all the way down if you look at the side, you can see that this is a long long page. These show archive go back to an end of this life here, which is in January 2009. So, this is our first show of 23 and this is the beginning of the 15th year of a lot. Wow. You've got now 14 years worth of recordings here to go through. So, if you do watch something on here that's great, as long as you have a place to host them we'll always have them up there or everything's on YouTube right now. We're librarians so we do things available for historical purposes, but just pay attention to a the broadcast date of anything. Many shows would be great and stand the test of time and be good useful information, but lots of things have become old outdated resources and services may longer exist anymore. Products may have changed drastically people who work for the library 10 years ago, possibly aren't there anymore. So, just pay attention to date and you are watching any of our archive shows. Alright, I think that's it. Thank you everybody. Next week, our topic will be the best new teen reads of 2022 as determined by our coordinator children young adult library services here at the library commission Sally Snyder. She's going to be talking about the books that she has come across that she thought are great to share with you. Thank you for that for next week and ever other upcoming shows Sally's this best of teen reads of her is a companion to her best of children books which she did back in November. So, if you are any sort of children slash team librarian you can go back and watch the recording and see her slides, and she has to hand out with more all of the publisher information of all the books that she talks about for both her and her team sessions that she does for us every year. So that wraps up today. Thank you everybody for being here. Thank you for sharing this was a great session. I'm glad to get the word out and hopefully get more teams and people playing. Yeah. All right, and yeah, welcome to the 2023 first episode of the good news. Thank you everybody I'll see you on a future episode of this life. Bye bye.