Please familiarize yourself with the documents before deciding on whether or not you wish to pursue this as it is a lot.
STEP 1: Arrange students into groups of 4-5.
STEP 2: Hand out (print may be easier than digital) this D&D Character Sheet. Students will build their adventure party together within their groups. Each student has their own character, but these characters will be working together.
STEP 3: Guide students through building their characters with the D&D Character GUIDE. Grade 8 students are building level 3 characters.
USE THE SPELLS AND SKILLS RECOMMENDED IN THE RULES
STEP 4: This Character Backstory & Party Collab document has a section for students to develop independently and a section to develop collaboratively with their adventure party.
Students enrolled late in your class? Use these Newcomer Characters for students to quickly fill out their character sheets.
To be clear, this is not perfectly easy. I provide three options.
1) Allow students to explore and collaborate to comprehend the rules as they level up their characters.
2) Use this simplified version of levels.
3) The character sheet I created gets rid of proficiency, but all classes grant bonuses to proficiencies to skills at higher levels. It changes per circumstance, but in place of proficiencies, I have been allowing students to add +1 to an ability of their choice. This option requires you to be a little more familiar with character leveling.
I use an adventure I paid for and cannot legally reproduce it here. Below are some options to consider:
1) Purchase the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide for access to a level 3 adventure and several others. I use the level 3 and level 5 adventure in this guide for my grade 8 class, and the level 7 adventure for my grade 9s.
2) Web search free D&D adventures of whatever level you need. There are LOADS. Single-level adventures are commonly referred to as One-Shots. Winghorn Press, for example, has several free one-shot adventures.
3) Ask AI (Gemini, ChatGPT, etc.) to make you a level 3 adventure! You can even ask it to create scripts for the DM and guidelines for beginner DM and players.
Once you have an adventure, provide students with this Collaborative DMing Guide.
These are the FREE D&D RULES which, in reality, can be bent or broken as much as students want. If a student has an idea for their character to perform a certain task, just ask them if their character would realistically be ABLE to do that, if the group is OK with that happening in their fictional world, and what difficulty class you might apply to that task (see below).
This DIFFICULTY CLASS EXAMPLES and this WHAT ARE THE SIX ABILITIES poster hang on my walls to help students keep things simple and flowing.
After or even during their playthrough, students can complete this D&D Paragraph Writing organizer to keep track of their adventure.
Dice can be found free online. Type "dice" into your Google search bar.
Students have just completed whatever level 3 adventure you provided them. Repeat whatever you did in finding a level 3 adventure for a level 5 adventure this time. Inform students of the premise of your new-found adventure. This is where your class will take over and build the middle adventure (level 4).
Provide students the D&D Level 4 Adventure Building Guide as well as this Level 4 Creatures & Challenges document to provide them with fodder.
Students will build and play their level 4 adventure.
Once complete, provide students with your selected level 5 adventure and, again, the D&D Paragraph Writing Organizer.
Campaign Codex 8 is their final assignment to wrap up this unit.