Questions?
email: lso@schools.nyc.gov
Officially known as "Quill and Parchment", the guild is another name for the tabletop roleplaying club available for all students and teachers. We mostly play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) but there are other game systems available if there are enough players interested.
A roleplaying game (RPG) is a cooperative storytelling experience between players and Dungeon Master, or DM. Like many games, it has rules, components, and dice to help describe and resolve the action. Unlike most games, an RPG has no winner or loser and no opposing teams.
The DM serves as the judge and the storyteller. It’s his/her responsibility to present an exciting and compelling situation to the players, and to help determine what happens next when those players respond to a situation. GMs can invent their own stories, characters (NPCs), and adventures, or use adventures written by somebody else.
2-6 players take on the role of individual characters in the story. Over the course of the game you will choose what your hero does and says, and use the dice and game rules to determine whether you succeed or fail. Characters controlled by hero players are called Player Characters, or PCs.
The Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of swords and sorcery. It shares elements with childhood games of make-believe. Like those games, D&D is driven by imagination. It’s about picturing the towering castle beneath the stormy night sky and imagining how a fantasy adventurer might react to the challenges that scene presents.
Unlike a game of make-believe, D&D gives structure to the stories, a way of determining the consequences of the adventurers’ action. Players roll dice to resolve whether their attacks hit or miss or whether their adventurers can scale a cliff, roll away from the strike of a magical lightning bolt, or pull off some other dangerous task. Anything is possible, but the dice make some outcomes more probable than others.
In the Dungeons & Dragons game, each player creates an adventurer (also called a character) and teams up with other adventurers (played by friends). Working together, the group might explore a dark dungeon, a ruined city, a haunted castle, a lost temple deep in a jungle, or a lava-filled cavern beneath a mysterious mountain. The adventurers can solve puzzles, talk with other characters, battle fantastic monsters, and discover fabulous magic items and other treasure. (D&D Basic Rules, pg 3)
Watch this video to learn how to play.
Cultivates Creativity
Levels Up Social Skills
Encourages Team Work and Cooperation
Teaches Problem Solving Skills
It's Fun!
All students and faculty at I.S. 77 may join.
A party has 4 to 6 adventurers along with 1 Dungeon Master in charge of the session.
No worries! All are welcome, no matter how much experience you have playing tabletop rpgs. The DM will help guide you along your adventure. Other players who are experienced are there to help also.
All new inexperienced players will have a "training" session on how the game mechanics work.
Roleplaying is another word for pretend or make believe. As children, many of us have pretended to be astronauts or jedi knights. We played pretend and walked around swinging lightsabers or rescued people from a burning building as a firefighter. Roleplaying is the same thing. You take on the role of the character you are playing. You act as if you were that character.
It's not required but can be fun! We encourage players to try it.
First, you need the right attitude and the sense of adventure! Then you have a choice of using a pencil or a computer. All other materials are provided but if you wish, you can purchase your own set of roleplaying dice.
Sessions will occur during after school hours.
We will be playing by the Dungeon & Dragons 5th Edition Rules. The Basic Rules can be found here. If you want more detailed rules and explanations, you will have to purchase the Player's Handbook. For now, we will only play by the classes, races and variants found within the Player's Handbook. In the future, if there are enough players and DMs who have a grasp of the other sourcebooks, we may include them.
Think of an adventure as a quick multiplayer game. You have an objective, you work toward completing it. Once finished, you move on. They're quick, easy in, easy out. A campaign is like multiplayer story mode. You are invested for the long haul. Your party journeys together, grows together until the entire story finishes. For a campaign, you have to make a commitment to be there for all the sessions until the story is complete. Campaigns can last months. Some of the longest campaigns have been going on for twenty years!
It's Latin for "Beware the smile". There is an old D&D saying "Beware the smiling DM". If the Dungeon Master is smiling, there's something big coming at the party.