Tuesday means working on a new lesson plan for my ethics classes. This week I’m going to be teaching kids how to design a government!
The premise at the start of the class will be: Imagine we’re setting up a new country. We have land and a few million people, but we don’t have a government yet. It’s our job to decide what the government will be like.
We’ll go through various stages of selecting what sort of leader we want, how we’ll decide who the leader is, what powers should they have. And then think about how to make laws. Figure out what jobs the government should or should not do – should it provide health care, for example, or education, or food and water, Internet, should it regulate business, support the arts, etc. And then we’ll think about how we can ensure that the people in the government don’t become corrupt or authoritarian. This should be plenty for kids to chew on and debate about in class!
I took Scully for a walk at lunch, and again with my wife after she got home from work. It was very cold again today.
And I’m starting to plan for Friday night’s upcoming Dungeons & Dragons session. I’m adding a new rule, co-opted from Dungeon Crawl Classics (with some modifications), which is highly regarded by many gaming groups: Mighty Deeds of Arms.
When fighters or dwarves attack, they may declare a Mighty Deed of Arms, an additional effect of their attack. e.g. disarming opponent, pushing opponent back, tripping opponent over, grappling, headbutting, blinding attack (picking up and throwing sand, or aiming weapon at eyes), etc., or whatever cool manoeuvre you can think of, like swinging on a chandelier and kicking opponent in the face. You have a Deed Die (d4 at 1st level, increasing in size with levels). Roll your Deed Die with your attack die. If your attack hits and the Deed Die is 4 or more, your mighty deed succeeds! Score normal damage, plus a bonus effect depending on your declaration and the Deed Die result (better results for scores above 4).
The idea is to give fighter types something cool and interesting to do that scales up with level. (We’re playing 1981 Basic/Expert rules, not 5th edition, so we don’t have all the ridiculous bells and whistles of that edition.) Hopefully it’ll be fun!