So a couple of years ago as a lark I had my daughter Julie make up a character for Dungeons and Dragons. She was really too young to play at the time but I was curious as to what she would want to be. I was not at all surprised that she wanted to be an elf-princess who can use magic. Even then she was a Harry Potter fan along with her classmates. She named her elven princess Ruby Rainbow.
So Julie is now almost 9 years old. Her birthday is this coming Thursday. We have actually begun playing the game with little cardboard cutouts with pictures of the various characters and monsters on them that I got at the game store and a dry erase board that I am using to draw the forests and monster infested mines that she is exploring. Julie really gets into imagining all the different things about her character Ruby: her pet cat "Ghost", her pet dog "Strawberry" her horse (I forget what she named the horse), her "sparkly dress" and golden jeweled tiara for parties at the palace (I made her roll the dice to see if her character would remember which fork to use - she succeeded). She asks me who Ruby's friends in the game are (the supporting characters I made to help her). I let her pick which spells Ruby would have - and was not surprised that her favorite spell is one called "Color Spray" wherein Ruby throws colored powder in the air and transforms it into a display of red, blue, and yellow swirling hypnotic colors that will make anyone looking at it get dizzy or even pass out. So Julie has this whole rainbow motif down for her Ruby Rainbow character.
So anyway, I have been using a campaign called "LIttle Keep on the Borderlands" as the basis for her adventures. "Little Keep on the Borderlands" is kind of a parody of an old AD&D adventure originally called the "Keep on the Borderlands." This one, however, was actually written for a game called Hackmaster, which is a parody of the old Advanced Dugeons and Dragons rule books. I've been adapting these parodies for Ruby's stories but sometimes it is difficult as they have been written with a very cynical take on human nature and how incongruous such things would be in a fantasy adventure setting, and it also plays up the machismo of the game and wannabe machismo of many gamers (or at least adolescent boys) and some other things that I find very funny but would be completely over Julie's head if not inappropriate. So I just leave that stuff out.
Still, the "Little Keep on the Borderlands" is filled with some interesting moral dilemmas that were not present in the rather naive original version of the "Keep on the Borderlands" that I remembered. One such dilemma is that in the original story the castle is filled with stalwart knights sent out to the frontier to defend the human towns and villages from goblins and hobgoblins hidden away in caves in the mountains. In this version, the castle is considered to be a "speed bump" to slow down invading armies of monsters so that the actual army will have time to rally - much like our soliders on the 38th parallel in Korea were set up for so many years to basically be a speed bump that would be annihilated in the course of perhaps slowing down a North Korean invasion. As such, the soldiers in this story are all very demoralized, self-serving, and mean spirited. Several of them even began secretly mining gold in the mountains without reporting it to the authorities, and then to cover it up and expand their wealth they began making counterfeiting gold coins mixed with copper and murdering anyone who might squeal on them. Even the commander of the castle got in the act in order to cover up his own embezzling of the castle's funds to buy luxuries for his girlfriend.
There are many ways this "adventure" could be played out. One of them is that the players will get sent out by the soldiers involved in the gold conspiracy to retake the secret gold mine from a band of orc bandits (for those of you who didn't see the Lord of the Rings movies, orcs are basically uber-goblins that Tolkien adapted from Anglo-Saxon myths and have since become standard footsoldiers of evil in fantasy role playing games). In the course of retaking the mines, the players are supposed to find a ledger with the names of all the conspirators. The idea is that the players will most likely blackmail the conspirators for a cut of the profits (the assumption being that the players of the game will be insecure bookish 13 year old boys with no morals who play D&D in order to satisfy their desire to grab wealth and power and bully everyone else for a change). However, since this game was being played between a 39 year old Buddhist minister and his innocent 8 year old daughter - things went a little differently.
One thing that happened differently is that Ruby and her friends did not end up slaughtering any of the orcs the way 13 year old boys playing the game would have. Instead, they ended up capturing all of them alive. I had no idea this would happen actually. My view has always been that magic users (esp. in the beginning) should hide in the back and only use their spells to back up the fighters. But as the game played out, Ruby kept charging in first and using her color spray to knock out all the orcs before any fighting could start. I had no idea that Julie had, with virtually no knowledge of the game, made for herself a really potent character. So in the end, Ruby ended up with a half-dozen orc prisoners and she discovered the secret ledger.
I then decided that the soldiers from the castle would have set up an ambush outside the mines in order to greet any surviving party members and get the ledger back. Ruby and Co. stepped outside and saw the two soldiers who suggested the investigate the mines and then spotted more soldiers with crossbows hiding (ineffectively according to the dice rolls) in the bushes. So here is what happened:
Me: So Julie, you see the two soldiers from the castle waving to you, but there are people with crossbows hiding and aiming their weapons at you. You remember that the names of these two soldiers are in the book you found which means they were secretly mining gold when they were not allowed to do that. Do you trust them?
Julie: Noooo!
Me: They are congratulating you on beating the orcs and asking you to come down out of the cave. Do you go to talk to them?
Julie: Noooo!
Me: So what are you going to do?
Julie:
I don't know.
Me: One of your friends suggests that you run back into the cave and find another way out. Does that sound like a good idea?
Julie: Yes, we do that.
Me: Ok, you run back into the cave and the soldiers fire their crossbows at you, but no one is hit. Now what are you going to do with the orc prisoners?
Julie: We kill them.
Wow! So obviously they do not teach the Geneva Convention in grade school. I was not at all expecting my 8 year old daughter to say something so rutheless. This really took me aback. So the following conversation happened:
Me: Uh, Julie, is your character good or evil.
Julie: She's good.
Me: Do good people kill helpless prisoners?
Julie: Uhh, no?
Me: Right, if Ruby is one of the good guys, she would not do something like that. Good guys always take care of their prisoners, don't treat them badly, and make sure that they get a fair trial.
So in the end, the orcs showed them the back way out in return for being freed once they promised not to hurt anyone anymore (yeah right) but Ruby did take their weapons away and throw them in a river.
After Ruby and her friends got away to a safe village we had another conversation about the secret ledger.
Me: So what do you do with the book that shows that the soldiers are mining gold when they are not allowed to?
Julie:
Me: Bremen (the lawful good cleric I made to help Ruby) says to Ruby that the book needs to be turned over to the police so the bad guys who mined the gold and then attacked you to get their book back will be arrested. (Yeah, I know there are not exactly police in a medieval setting, but I was trying to keep things simple for Julie).
Julie: But what will happen to them?
Me: They'll be arrested and thrown in prison.
Julie: But then their families will miss them.
Me: Uh, Julie, they tried to kill you and in any case they broke the law.
Julie: Yeah, but if they have children, they will miss their fathers.
Me: True, but if you break the law you have to go to jail, and esp. if you try to hurt other people.
Julie: That's sad.
Me: Yes, it is. That's why people should obey the law and not try to hurt other people.
And so that is how I ended up realizing that you can't assume that 8 year olds will spontaneously abide by the Geneva Convention. I also discovered that kids are very sentimental and don't quite understand that breaking the law has consequences no matter who you are - even if you have a family. Of course, that's part of what I remember from reading about children's psychological development - it takes a while to understand abstract things like law and order beyond the values of sentiment and family relations. It's still startling to realize how amoral 8 year olds are - their worldview is not governed by rights and laws but by sentiment: killing prisoners is ok if you don't like them, putting criminals in jail is not ok because their families will miss them. Hopefully, without being too preachy, I can use the D&D game as a kind of arena in which to explore and discuss basic morals and ethics, a job that is made easier by D&D use of alignments - wherein characters are governed by the polarities of good vs evil, and law vs. chaos.
Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei
