Daniel D. Fox talks the power of parenting through D&D and the new YouTube series with his son

Daniel D. Fox and his son, Jack, have started streaming their Dungeons and Dragons campaign on YouTube. // Courtesy photo Daniel D. Fox

Formerly an employee in advertising, Daniel D. Fox started creating tabletop RPG board games seven years ago with his game Zweihander. He has now created several more tabletop games based on Zweihander‘s lore and mechanics, and he is head of the gaming division of Andrews McMeel publishing in Kansas City.

Though Fox’s games still utilize tabletop gaming tropes such as violence and class warfare, his games engage with these themes in a way that is subversive and thought-provoking.

“Zweihänder is the tale of a nightmarish civilization and the horrific acts that it commits. As a game, it’s based on an ethos that mixes darkness with the brutality of mortality. This is not a wacky world for bards and wizards to faff about and inevitably stumble through solutions to their problems. Zweihänder’s baseline is that existence is unfair, and nothing will bail you out,” writes Pitch Editor in Chief Brock Wilbur in a profile of Fox.

Fox’s games make a bit more room for everyone at the table(top), which is historically dominated by men.

Recently, he started a new YouTube playlist with his six-year-old son, Jack, entitled Dad and Jack Play D&D, in which they post recordings of their Dungeons and Dragons campaign. We sat down for a conversation with Daniel about the joys and challenges of creating tabletop games and of parenting and how the two go hand-in-hand.

The Pitch: Could you tell us what your introduction to tabletop gaming was, and why you fell in love with it?

Daniel D. Fox: I’m 46 now, but I discovered tabletop gaming when I was 11. I was a break-dancer, and I was nursing an injury, as one does. And I was given an advanced Dungeons and Dragons monster manual by my friend’s stoner brother, and I immediately fell in love it after that. We started playing within weeks of getting that manual, and then I ended up buying some new books. But I think for me what tabletop gaming offered was an escape from where I came from. I came from Oak Grove, Missouri, and grew up really poor. Dungeons and Dragons was kind of that outlet for me when I was younger, to enter new worlds and have new experiences that I could never have in real life. And over time, I just continued gaming throughout my youth until now.

How has your new YouTube channel playlist with your son changed your relationship with him, and why would you recommend that parents play tabletop games with their kids?

So, my son Jack, he’s six years old. I’ve been designing tabletop RPGs for seven years now, and I started with a game I created back in 2018, called Zweihander. And he had always shown interest when he was younger. When he was three years old, I tried to softly introduce him to what the concept of an RPG is by playing Dragon Quest with him. So, he sat beside me and I would teach him about how hit points work and how defense works. And he began to learn to read by playing Dragon Quest with me on PC.

So over time, that of course developed into an interest in tabletop RPGs because my friends and I get together every Wednesday and we play Zweihander here in my basement, which I’m in now. And I would take him with me to Tabletop Game and Hobby in Overland Park. We bought him a couple figures and bought him a set of dice. And one day, he was like, Dad, I think I’m ready to start playing D&D. This is literally like about three weeks ago.

So, we played D&D in the car without dice, just kind of storytelling. I knew that he understood some of the general concepts. I started off very simple with them, like some simple things like attributes and simple dice rolling, and he immediately clung to it, like it immediately engaged his imagination. He’s a pretty imaginative kid. He’s a little advanced for his age, too. He’s reading, writing, doing division and multiplication, writing in cursive, stuff like that. So, I knew that he’d be able to cling to it pretty quickly.

But the concept of pretend, I think, is innate in a lot of children. And because he pretends a lot, we found that translates really well to the tabletop gaming experience. Of course, it’s just him and I playing. But it really engages his imagination in a really interesting way. And I’ve been able to kind of bond with my son over Dungeons and Dragons, which we’re playing the original edition I used to play when I was younger, as opposed to the more complicated, complex versions now. So it’s interesting to see. I wonder what would have happened if I learned to play D&D at that much younger age like, how would it have changed who I was as a person, my career path. But most importantly, for Jack, it’s really about continuing to augment the skills that he learned at school, like the addition and subtraction, learning a little bit about probability, and he’s starting to kind of pick up on that and understand how to problem solve creatively in the game. And that all kind of stems around it activating his imagination, and it’s been really fun. We’re playing tonight, in fact, this’ll be our fifth session in two weeks. He’s like, an addict now.

Do you think playing D&D, or tabletop games in general, improves your abilities as a writer?

DF: Yeah. So, I had challenges reading when I was younger as dyslexic. And by playing Dungeons and Dragons, because the manuals back then were very long and big and verbose, but they speak often about probability, in some ways, it helped me wrap my head around the importance of math in a fun way. And I think that’s the big challenge within education is like, how to make learning fun. And for me, Dungeons and Dragons is a way I can learn about, you know, quote, “medieval history” and engage my imagination that way while learning to read better. And I attribute a lot of my career trajectory because of D&D. If I didn’t have D&D, I wouldn’t be where I’m at today, not just because I’ve been developing games for seven years, but I spent 18 years in advertising. And I can trace that DNA all the way back to Dungeons and Dragons, which taught me how to read, taught me how to write, taught me how to tell stories, taught me how to interact with people. It can build up a lot of social problem solving skills, deduction skills, interactivity with people. I was an introvert, and that helped me kind of come out of my shell, so to speak. And then I became the Forever DM, which I love and am an extrovert, but it is all due to D&D. D&D is like, that seminal thing in my youth that has been so influential in my life, and I really want that for Jack, my son.

Could you describe your and Jack’s D&D characters for us? Did you come up with the characters together?

DF: We’d spoken before we started playing. I was like, Hey, Jack, you know, in Dungeons and Dragons, there’s these different classes, like, there’s the fighter and the wizard and the thief. And he’s like, oh, I want to play a thief because I want to get gold and treasure. And I’m like, yeah, it’s a kid thing to do.

So, I’m like, Well, what do you think your character’s name would be? He’s like, his name is going to be Rigg, like R-I-G-G. So we made him a thief. And we didn’t generate his character, like the first character sheet was on an index card and it had just three stats on it. So, I would have him roll a d6, and add his stat to succeed or fail at things. And I knew I wanted him to succeed at least 80% of the time. So, I figured out the right probability for when he would roll a six-sider.

I was still making him do the math, like add your strength to your six-sided die to determine if you succeed or fail, but I knew what the numbers were in my head. So, the next session we started, we actually gave him some standard stats like strength, dexterity, and intelligence. And we started using plastic hearts for his hit points, because I wanted him to have something tangible to hold on to. And then we started color coding dice to his weapons. On his current character sheet where we color code yellow dice to his backstab, yellow dice to his dagger, and orange dice to his sword. And now we got a 20-sided die, we do all the color coding around his stats, too, so he knows what to roll.

So, after our fourth session, he learned about armor class, he now knows all about spells. And his character is now second level. And the story has been his. It’s really interesting to see, the choices that he makes in the story are things I would not expect. I think when you play tabletop games, you kind of get in a mode of like, people react certain ways because of the mode of gameplay. And a child has this kind of open act of imagination that’s unbound by years and years and years of gaming. So they make very surprising choices and kind of put thought provoking challenges in the game that are all mostly, you know, driven by a six-year-old’s wonderment of a world and what they can do within it. It used to be he would lift up his little figure and he would bounce this figure around, and now he’s personifying the character.

In fact, in our last game session, I could tell Jack was getting a little bit scared. So one of the non-player characters in the game gave him a little necklace and that necklace was called a teleport necklace, and I was like, any time you get scared, you can wear this necklace and all you have to do is say “teleport,” and it’ll bring you right back here. And then that becomes a TTRPG safety tool. One to give Jack a way out, like this is his parachute if he starts to get scared in the game, but also an in-story way to justify it. So, it kind of introduces the idea of, at least in modern TTRPG, having safety tools around the table, one for a child especially. And then also within the game world having that function as an actual living magic item.

And the first thing he said after he got it is like, Well, what about Edward? Edward is an NPC who is a slime, who was a person who was probably morphed into a slime that Jack saved and turned back into human. You want Edward to have a teleportation necklace too. So, I had a second one on hand because I had a feeling he would say that, and I put it around my neck. So, when we play by now on our fifth session, we’ll be wearing our teleportation necklaces.

He’s really all about the physicality of the things that he gets. So he has little metal tokens in his purse for his gold. We have his little dice tray and his figures and his hearts for his hit points. And whenever he gets into an encounter with a monster or a foe, I pour out hearts onto the table. And when he calculates the damage and he subtracts the hearts, he’s an active participant in tracking health of the monsters that he’s fighting.

But it’s really interesting, at the end of the last game session, he said, Can I do a retry roll? And I’m like, that’s an interesting concept. Like what would a retrial roll look like in D&D, because in traditional TTRPG it’s like, you spend a fortune token or a story point to reroll. But D&D has nothing like that. So, it’s like, yeah, let’s introduce a retry roll. And that’s how we ended our session, he actually created a game rule at the table with me, and it was pretty interesting to see. And then we talked afterward about how often you can use it, and is it fair or not to be able to retry every roll. But it’s been a wonderful experience to see how his little mind can cling so quickly to D&D.

Tonight, we’re playing our fifth session, he wants to play for two hours. I’m like, You’re not gonna make it two hours. But our last session was 46 minutes. So that lasted quite some time. But we’re also using little pieces of terrain. Like when he fights in the dungeon, I have little terrain pieces that we have made. So he can visualize it in his mind, but he has something tactile he can play with and move a little figure around the grid and stuff. It’s really incredible to see how quickly he’s taking to it. And I know other parents who have young children, if they can find ways to activate a child’s imagination through gameplay through board games or tabletop games. I think that it’s a character builder. It helps build character, and it also starts to help them think very creatively, beyond just writing and drawing, but imagination and personification of characters.

What has been the most surprising since you’ve began posting your play sessions with Jack on YouTube? What has the reception been like?

DF: I have two YouTube channels. One is for my normal game that I televise on YouTube, and the other is for our channel he and I started. He’s been begging for a YouTube channel, but I’m very adverse to him being an active participant on YouTube. But I told him if we started doing this together, we can start a YouTube channel. And what I’ve discovered in these last three weeks, I’m getting a lot of commentary on Twitter from parents who are trying to teach D&D to their kids. I found another Dungeon Master, this guy named Redworm, who actually has been actively posting about his games with his children since they’re five years old on Twitter. And he and I are now interacting about tips and tricks to run a game for a child that isn’t complex, but still plays fair with the rules, but also is you know, less scary, because the games can sometimes be scary. But I’m hearing from a lot from parents who were just talking, sharing their own experience on Twitter in particular. And now I’m getting Facebook comments too, which is nice. Our channel’s not very strong yet, but I think it’s because mostly tabletop RPGs are kind of the domain of like 25+ year olds, at least on social media. But the parents that do comment have a lot to share about their own experience. And there are a lot of questions around like, Well, how do you start? How do you just throw them in? You know, just start them with all the rules. I talk a lot about like, how do you layer all that in and how to start small and grow with complexity as your child begins to understand the mechanics of the game.

How did you break into like the game writing and designing industry and what advice would you give to young people who want to go into that same field?

DF: I made a tabletop game for my home table. I never intended to publish it. And then my gaming group convinced me to put it on Kickstarter and I raised like a quarter million dollars of revenue. And I was like, oh shit, I guess. It was like a for funsies thing. And it did extraordinarily well. So, after that, I took it to Gen Con in 2018, and it won Best Gaming Product of the Year. And then I decided to shift away from my advertising career to actually work in games full time, because I felt if I’m going to do this, I should probably do it now. The older you get the potentially more risky it is to change careers.

The interesting thing about the tabletop RPG industry is that barrier for entry is so low. Anyone can go to Kickstarter, anyone can use H.O to distribute, anyone can build a social media profile, anyone could share out their content. And I’ve always been a big believer that every Dungeon Master is a game designer, full stop. If you write one rule on a napkin, you are now a game designer, whether you publish that thing, whether you monetize that thing, whether you just use it at your own game table, you are a game designer. And if you’re wanting to kind of make a break into the tabletop RPG industry, the great thing about the industry is that, particularly on social media, indie games are king. The more popular games like Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons are not as well received by younger gamers, because they want to create their own worlds and create their own things and subvert what the standards are for RPGs. So, the advice I would give is just start sharing what you’re working on. Find other people who are hungry to create, find an artist you can work with, a layout designer you can work with, pay people fairly if you’re gonna pay people, but most importantly, if you’re just starting out, find another person to just pair up with and share ideas, create things together, share them online, solicit feedback, because that’s really what the indie tabletop RPG industry thrives on is this feedback loop between game designers and players for that matter, too.

What is the most challenging part of creating a game, and why?

DF: Time, time is always a factor, whether you’re working in the game industry professionally, full time, or you’re doing it when the sun sets, like a lot of people do. Time is always a factor, and the challenge that RPGs tend to run up against. And this is just because big book RPGs take a long time to write and play test. And this is why I think the indie RPG industry is so intriguing because they don’t do that. They write small, zine-sized RPGs. And they get to market faster. But more importantly, they have a way to share their ideas very quickly. And in some ways, they can use that to solicit feedback to create the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and everything all those things eventually layer into, hopefully a big RPG release they can do on Kickstarter, like a full book. But time is always the challenge.

The nice thing about the industry is that despite the fact that the barrier to entry is so low, gamers are hungry for content. They want more stories, more characters, more worlds and ways to subvert the tropes that kind of surround fantasy RPGs. And when time isn’t a factor when you’re working on smaller things, you could produce more. And I think about it the same way like how artists do a warm up drawing or guitarists do a warm up strum. Some of these games are warm up for something bigger that could come out of it. So, I think the way you can solve the challenge of time is by releasing smaller things, ideations, even if they’re not play tested, just to get them out there to let people react to them and have their game designers talk with you about what they’re working on. I think that’s a really good way to kind of solve that challenge.

And what do you think is the most rewarding part of the process of creating a game?

DF: Getting together with friends and having a good time. I oftentimes talk about this as a professional, like I love making games and I love seeing people play the games that I create. But at the end of the day, I really love being with my friends and playing the game together. We get together every Wednesday and we play test right here in my basement. We continue to play test a new game I’m working on right now, but it’s a way for me to connect with my adult friends where we can leave behind all of the stress of work and family and get to just play together. And that’s it, a tabletop RPG is like a really complex version of pretend, and we just happened to throw some math rocks in there to figure out if it actually works or not. And that’s the thing that I just love the most about all this, is the opportunity to continue playing with friends. I’ve known friends for many, many years who do big, important things, but we can get together almost every Wednesday and roll dice and pretend to be somebody we’re not in real life.

Yeah, I love that. It’s playing with probability involved.

DF: Yeah. I love shiny math rocks. [Holds dice aloft.] That’s the thing. Like, I just got these really cool set of dice that I absolutely love. I love math rocks. They’re my favorite part of the game. I could stare at those dice forever.

I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your creative process. When you’re conceptualizing a new game, do you begin with a story in mind? Or with an idea for how the game works?

DF: I created a mechanics-based system called the Power BI hitter system back in 2017. And a lot of games I’ve made, I’ve layered worlds and stories on top of it, but I’m actually going to be changing that now. I’m starting instead this time with the world of the story. So, a lot of the games that I make are actually brought from my own home game. So like, right now, I’m working on a game called Gangs of Kahabro, and I was wondering, when I first started concepting, this, if it’s not just the game at my table, it sounds like a product. Like, what does it look like as a product? And I think the pitch is, it’s like medieval gang warfare in Venice, with some influences from The Sopranos, influences from the gangs in New York and this idea of exceptionalism.

This world of this city has a cauldron of culture and arts that just melt it all down. And I thought it was a really interesting analogy to how New York was during the early days of immigration, where American exceptionalism was a big thing. And in particular, because it is a cultural touchpoint with a lot of conservative groups around this idea of being American versus, for example, being Black, or being Hispanic, like American determinism, specifically when American culture says, Well, you melt that culture down. So, I was wondering, what that would look like through the lens of gameplay.

And then there’s gang warfare in the streets, where you’re competing for turf, in a way, and you create your character, but you also create your gang. And then you create the rival gang. And there’s a world building aspect that players do as well. So, I took that concept and started distilling it down into what’s most important at the table. And I knew that some concepts around this particular thing was it needs to be fast and it needs to be narrative based. So, it’s not a crunchy or complex game. It’s more narrative based, and it uses just a handful of dice as opposed to different ones. I want it to be really snappy. So, it doesn’t use like, 20-sided dice, it uses six-sided dice. And that’s it.

But it could be a potentially a very violent game. And it’s also a game about the politicking between these different gangs. And I love the movie, The Warriors, so that’s a really big inspiration to the idea that these gangs run this city called Kahabro, and they’re all competing for the main thoroughfare. So, I knew the gangs need to be close, and I was like, okay, so that’s the premise. That’s the world setup. Now, how do I invest the players into it, and that’s through the act of building a character and the act of creating your own game through creating your rival gang. So, players are an active participant, not just in creating their percentage at the table, but also the wider storytelling. We kind of were able to kind of zoom out and look at the 10,000-foot view, and they get to create some of the world with the Game Master through the act of creating rival gangs.

That concept started three weeks ago, and we just had our first play test last night. And it went over pretty well. This is just an example of how I work and it always starts with with story and themes. And then I typically talk to my players because I trust them implicitly about anything. And I’m like, Well, what are the things that excite you about gaming that we haven’t done before? And it’s always about what haven’t we done at our game table, not about what hasn’t been done in the world of game design. And they’ve become a good way to kind of bounce ideas back and forth and I rely on them heavily for their feedback to help me develop new games. I mean, they’re willing participants, but only because I give them snacks.

And the game might be fun.

DF: [Laughs] Yeah, and the game is typically fun. We’ve been recording our game for four years, I think we have like 236 game sessions on YouTube alone. And we were recording with different cameras and microphones. Now we have a professional setup, but we’ve been recording for a long time, and we started recording just so we can go back and watch old sessions together. And that’s one of the things I shared with my son, when we were talking about this idea of gaming, I was like, you know, the really cool thing about this is that you’re six now, if we record and put these on YouTube, when you’re 10, or 16, or 26, granted YouTube’s still around, then you’ll be able to go back and look at where you started. And that’s the one thing I am remiss not to have done when I was younger is to take extensive notes and carry those forward, or having a YouTube  and being able to go back and just watch a video of what happened. It’s helpful not only to revisit old memories, but for storytelling purposes it’s really good too. Because I can recall where we left off the previous session, and Jack of course is like, fascinated with it. He did a solo introduction to the game last week. He was like, I want to be on camera alone and tell everybody about what happened. I want to recap the session. He recapped the session, like every single story beat. That’s cool. Like that just tickles me pink, what a rare privilege it is to be able to game and to be able to share a hobby with a child and as a professional be able to share that and to have them want to be a part of it.

Yeah, and to see him become so confident with it and take charge with it must be rewarding. I was wondering if you have any last thoughts about in what other ways tabletop gaming might be used for purposes like education, team building, or community engagement?

DF: I’m not an educator. But I will say there are a number of educators in this space who are using games as a way to activate imagination. D&D, in particular, has become a tool for therapy. Therapists are using it to help people with PTSD in particular. I follow several soldiers who are fighting in Ukraine, and they oftentimes play D&D or Blood Bowl remotely with their children while they’re in Ukraine fighting Russians, and they have cameras set up. I just saw the other day this soldier had laid out all these big, grand characters and dragons and stuff he brought with him so he can play with his son while he’s out over there fighting. And I think it’s really interesting that it can be used as a tool to connect with your family. But D&D social clubs, like after school clubs are great. I had one I was in when I was younger. And I think that D&D is such a fantastic tool to make learning fun. If I could create a curriculum around that, or write a book or add a critical element, I would 100% do it. I’m not an educator and I’d need to find somebody who’s an expert. But for now, I’m just sharing my own anecdotal experience on YouTube and the parts I think that are really interesting for Game Masters or for DMs to explore with their own children. Like I’ll snip those parts out, like the safety tool of the necklace or showing Jack when he gets excited about rolling really high on a die. It’s a universal concept, when you roll something really awesome on any board game, it’s like, Yes! It was instinctual for him.

I think it’s really interesting to think about how you can use these games as a tool not only just for, you know, like engaging kids’ imaginations, but also the educational elements, the therapy elements, or the ways to connect with families when you’re afar. What a world we live in, where we can talk like this, and be able to game with somebody either in person or thousands of miles away.