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December 6th, 2007
01:42 am - D&D for Kids at Thanksgiving
So on my Thanksgiving trip to home, I ran an AD&D game for my three nephews and son. My nephew Nat (age 8) had written an email to me earlier to pointedly ask me to run a D&D game for them. Later, his father explained that a friend of Nat and his brother had gotten them interested in D&D. The dad had played it in high school back in the early 80s, and still had his first-edition AD&D books that he lent to the kids. For myself, I packed up my 2004 D&D Basic Game and my pile of D&D miniatures for the trip. I also brought along my 1983 Talisman boardgame as something similar but easier for the kids.
The kids are Nat (8) and his brother Zack (6), their cousin Truman (7), and their other cousin and my son Milo (7). Also, Truman's little sister Lillian would peek in on games a bit.
Over vacation time in their grandparents house, we played a bit of Talisman at first, and then a full Talisman game (in two sessions) later. It has a number of role-playing-like elements like the character sheet, gold, and experience. It's very easy to get started with, and has clear rules that the younger players understood easily.
Which D&D?
Nat had originally waffled on whether he wanted to play with the rules from the original AD&D1 books that he had seen, or the rules in my fancy new 3.5-era Basic Set. During the break, he said he wanted the original AD&D, so I borrowed his dad's first-edition PH, DMG, and MM along with DM's Screen. However, I still used the current-edition dungeon tiles and prepainted minis.
The Action
We played in three sessions. A morning session of character generation, a fight with kobolds in the evening, and then exploring and taking on the evil necromancer and his very young black dragon the next morning.
Most of the action was all mechanics and fighting. I found that any sort of description that didn't have something down on the table for it lost their interest extremely quickly. That's partly personality and group dynamic rather than strictly age. For example, I know that Milo can hold attention longer, but it is a struggle.
Players and Characters
We did regular AD&D character generation -- best 3 of 4d6, arranged to the stats you like. House rules were you had max hit points for first level, and started with average gold. It took nearly two hours to explain everything and walk through all the character creation, especially equipment. However, I had basically planned on this.
The players and their characters were: - Nat, age 8, played "Sir Aralon (Lord of Fear)" -- a lawful good human fighter
- Zack, age 6, played "Sir Hittr" -- a lawful good human magic user
- Truman, age 7, played "Sir Dragonair" -- a neutral good dwarf fighter
- Milo, age 7, played "Eodred" -- a neutral good elven magic user
- Keary (Nat and Zack's dad) played "Ralf" -- a lawful good human cleric
Names were a troublesome point for many, including Milo who demanded I suggest a good elven name for him.
How Did It Go?
The kids loved it and were extremely eager. My parents called me "heroic" for keeping the kids all focused and entertained for that long. For the kids, the highlight was certainly their feeling of hard-won victory defeating the necromancer and her very young black dragon. It was an edge of the seat victory, and I made all my rolls out in the open declaring what number I needed. Everything was by the book, though I was prepared to fudge with the dragon's attacks by not saying which rolls were its 1d4 claws and which was its 3d6 bite.
There wasn't any depth to the game -- much less so than my Kids Games at ConQuest SF 2006. The kids were younger and had more trouble focusing. The real struggle was keeping them from arguing with each other too much, and focused on the game. The miniatures and illustrated dungeon tiles were invaluable for this. The one token role-playing interaction was that there was a captured bugbear whom I convinced Nat to not kill immediately because he agreed to help them, though he did run away when things got tough. The rest was all pretty much tactical.
Overall, it went pretty much the way I expected, except that their attention disappeared even more quickly than I thought for verbal, non-combat action.
P.S. For reference, I've added a new LJ tag for my posts covering role-playing with younger children, "kids".
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May 20th, 2007
11:06 pm - D&D for an 11th birthday
So yesterday I ran a D&D game for an 11th birthday party. The birthday girl Ellie is the daughter of non-gaming friends, but she's had an interest in various games for a while. I'd run RPGs twice before for her -- once at ConQuest where I was running games in the kids room and helped out with a D&D game run by Scott Bagley. See my ConQuest 2006 Report for details. I had also run a nominally-D&D but mostly-freeform game for her and a friend at our house once, a Harry-Potter-esque game which had her younger sister and my son Milo in it as the familiars of their student wizards.
Ellie had especially asked me to come and run specifically a D&D game for her party a week or so earlier -- using the D&D Basic Set that she had gotten a little while ago. I had a strong impression that she wanted the "real thing", as she saw it, and I didn't make alternate suggestions. I've only played D&D3E a few times, and I took a few steps to prepare. She told me that there would be seven players and I knew there were only four character sheets in my Basic Set, so I had hoped there would be some extra Basic-Set-style character sheets online. Sadly, I didn't find any. I started a short ENWorld thread, "Pregens for an 11-year-old's Birthday party?" -- and I got some other advice but no actual character sheets. I mocked up one extra character sheet, but didn't have time to create more. I was prepared to give some people identical sheets and use different miniatures, but luckily it turned out better. I had been busy that week, and to complicate it further was feeling pretty sick with a cold at the time. I called off out of a game earlier in the day (sorry, Jim) and rested up.
When I got to their house, Ellie had decorated the living room with cray paper in a dungeon theme (with her parents help, naturally). The lamps had orange and yellow paper flames coming out, and there were black curtain-like walls. She had copies of a bunch of Basic-Set-style character sheets besides the four in the Basic Set (I'm still not sure where from), and she was explaining about it to the kids who were there. A few were late, though, and I let Ellie do most of the introductions with her friends and have them pick characters.
There were color sheets for the four standard characters. Ellie had photocopies of four other sheets that were of different characters, perhaps from the boardgame (?). And I had my one mock-up sheet in color. The players and their characters were: - Ellie played Lidda, a female halfling thief, one of the standard Basic Set sheets.
- Bobbie played Alhandra, a female human ranger that I had mocked up.
- Devon played Mialee, a female elven wizard whose sheet Ellie had copied from somewhere.
- Sherry played Aramil, a male elven sorcerer, one of the standard Basic Set sheets.
- Julia played Naull, a human female wizard, a copied sheet.
- Sydney played Tordek, a male dwarven fighter, a copied sheet.
- Jake played Eberk, a male dwarven cleric from the Basic Set.
It might not be clear from the names, but Jake was the token male at the party. He and Bobbie left around 8:00, while the others were all sleeping over. Everyone had a more-or-less appropriate miniature -- though I'm glad I scoured for some extra female miniatures about the house.
I briefly explained that they were going to rescue a woman Sharia and her young brother Telned. They had traced them to an ancient tomb of their people that had been taken over by an evil necromancer. However, I cut my explanations very short. The kids were all reasonably interested in the game, as talked up by Ellen, but I think with any group of seven pre-teens the group attention span is remarkably short. So I quickly started them at the dungeon door and started everyone on the basics of combat in a clash with some kobolds. There were a bunch of questions like what a d20 was, and I think it was much better to explain through doing rather than trying to teach the rules beforehand. They captured one kobold and it told them a bit, and they explored ahead but we quickly moved into the second combat. I was quick about this because a few of the players really didn't engage unless they were actively called on, and that was hard to arrange. After the second combat against the more powerful monsters, we took a break for a while. (Around this time, my spouse and sprog arrived and took a few pictures.)
There was pizza, present-openeing, some nebulous goings-on in Ellie's room, a war out in the backyard with plastic swords and rubber balls, and then cake. We then resumed the game. They searched the tomb and got some scrolls and defeated a skeleton to get a magic sword, as well as finding and rescuing the little brother. Then they faced down the necromancer, who threatened to kill the hostage woman. This got them into their first group discussion and tactics. Everyone deferred to Ellie as the leader, but most of them still had input. I pushed back a little bit here to get them to think things through, and it went pretty well. The twist in the end was that the capture woman had become a vampire and attacked them, who was quite tough and also brought in some pathos to the ending.
Her mom reported in her blog: "Everyone is playing D and D at the moment, and they're all getting sucked into the game. It's hard to follow from the outside, particularly since I've only played it once in my life and then i was pretty drunk so I can't remember it. Rook is being very patient and participating at all moments. He's awesome." (In a prior post, she described the preparations-making as "Wow, so we set up the "dungeon" with black streamers and torches, and it looks awesome! It's so exciting! The party will be really fun, if all the kids get into it and play. Eliz keeps bragging about how her dungeonmaster who is coming is "totally famous" and an international star and all. Excellent. We're lucky to know Badger's husband Rook, indeed. He runs games all the time. Internationally! I'm not kidding!") Heh.
So it went off pretty well, and we more-or-less stuck to the D&D rules, though not at all the scenario described in the Basic Set. I think that the general premise is reasonably well suited as an introductory game. The limited choices of a dungeon are excellent for a fractious group. There were a number of things which bothered me, though. - Having only four characters is really limiting, especially given that only one is the token female (the halfling rogue Lidda). Probably not coincidentally, Ellie as birthday girl got dibs on Lidda as her character.
- The dungeon scenario in the Basic Set was really empty and dull. Having a mission and an opponent were vital.
- Magic items should be really special and powerful. In particular, the players of wizard and sorcerer characters seemed a bit underwhelmed by their magic, so I really wanted their detect magic and read magic to have solid payoff.
I'm going to look at putting some introductory material online, because I was pretty disappointed at what I could find for helping someone do this.
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September 20th, 2006
04:02 pm - Kids Games at ConQuest SF 2006
So this year at ConQuest SF, I ran two games in the young person's room -- motivated mainly because this was the first year that my son attended. So here's my draft of the write-ups from my soon-to-be posted convention report....
The Haunted Mansion I helped run this D&D event in the ConQuest "young persons" room, which had its own track of events. This was my first time running events for purely kids at a convention, though I'd run a few at home. There were several kids I knew there: my son Milo (age 6), and two friends' kids: Zelly (age 7) and Ellen (age 10). I got to the room later than I thought, and wasn't quite ready to start a game. However, it turned out that Scott Bagley was running a D&D game and had an excess of players. To help out, I ran an improvised adventure for a group of five kids -- including Ellen, Milo, and Zelly along with Anthony (who I'd guess was 11) and Nick (who I'd guess was around 9). At Scott's suggestion, we had two tables. The first had his Dwarven Forge dungeon set. The second we set up with a big battlemat, and two model ships that he had. I would start out with the ships and play out their approach to the island of the haunted mansion, then halfway through we would switch tables. Scott's players would escape the mansion, while my players would arrive. In general, it was rough running a game for a different age range of kids. I started them out on a ship approaching the island when they were attacked by a pirate ship full of skeletons. It was a straight combat, but made fun and colorful by all the pirate trappings. They got along together but it was definitely a strain. Ellen and Anthony plotted together the best strategies and creative tricks for getting past the pirates. They then landed and started up the path when they saw lizard creatures lead by a dragon surrounding them. On the pirate ship, Milo had cast "Animal Friendship" and gotten a monstrous rat as a friend. Through the rest of the game, he was very attached to the rat and got really upset at anyone messing with it. Ellen and the older boy came up with the idea of just buying the dragon off, because their characters (pregens supplied by Scott) had tens of thousands of gold pieces. I made it a little difficult in negotiations, but went with it since they liked it. We then switched tables and started on the dungeon. So sifting through the miniatures which I had, I improvised some encounters. They got past a door trap, into a room full of pools. I had a burning skeleton approach them and tell them he was cursed, doomed by the monster that lives beyond, and asked for their help. He told them about a tentacled monster. In the fight past the pools, they used a lot of ingenuity to avoid pools and get at the monster. I particularly liked Ellen & Anthony's casting Water Walking to avoid being dragged under. Unfortunately, Milo misunderstood this and got really mad at Anthony, thinking he was doing something bad to the rat and pinched him -- which was terribly because Anthony was trying to be nice. We got through that room, fought a souped-up Taer, and then wrapped up. This was hard for me. While I do well with kids in general, I didn't have a lot of experience. Ellen was disappointed with my lack of preparation, I could tell. The real tough one was trying to keep the 6 and 7 year olds working with the 10 and 11 year olds. I think I did pretty well, but I look forward to doing better next time. Points that I think of: - The group dynamic problem was tough. Basically, I think I need a stronger turn structure of some sort -- where each player has a real chance in the spotlight rather than just an action.
- I did avoid the bloodthirsty kill-and-loot that's common in these games. It's important to frame it as opportunity rather than a restriction. So, the cursed skeleton asked for their help but there was no attitude of having to do the right thing.
- The spell lists were an enormous time sink. It was paralyzing to the pacing for Ellen and Anthony to sift through their long list of spells.
Faery's Tale With Polaris cancelled, I had a little more time to prepare for my second young persons game. I had been debating running either John Wick's Cat or Faery's Tale, and I went with the latter in part due to support. There were two introductory modules: a "Jack in the Beanstalk" in the core book, and a downloadable module "Tournament of the Fey". Neither of these appealed to me, so I mostly improvised. I wasn't on the schedule, but I talked to the kid's room organizer that morning. I added the game to the schedule posted on a whiteboard at the door, put up the Faery's Tale poster beside it, and put out a sign-up sheet. Besides my son Milo and his friend Zelly, I got three players. We went through character creation -- I gave the book to the older kids to pick their qualities, while the younger kids filled out a character sheet from the pregenerated characters. The players and their characters were: - Zelly played a pregenerated character -- a pixie named Willow, whom she renamed Sandy two-thirds of the way through.
- Milo played the pregenerated character -- a sprite named Flynn who flew about on his bumblebee companion.
- An older boy Erik (age 10 or 11) created a pixie character named Zimble, who had a sidekick of a miniature ice dragon named "Frosty".
- Erik's younger sister Kate (age maybe 8 or so) played a pre-generated character Gimlock, except that she substituted out his "Seer" gift for "Sidekick" and also took a miniature dragon -- a flame dragon named "Flame".
- Nick (maybe 9?) created a brownie named Elfrica, who lived in a ruined castle. The details here took a lot of negotiation. I explained that brownies lived with humans, and had household magic which meant magic affecting human artifacts. It seemed like he wasn't quite sure what he wanted, and we went around in circles a bit.
With the miniature dragons established as Gimlock and Zimble's sidekicks, I decided that the adventure was going to be about saving a full-size dragon from a group of rough dragon hunters. This was, of course, a deliberate dig at D&D. They found the camp of the dragon hunters, and then the others distracted them by talking the horses and letting them go to run around -- while Elfrica invisibly stole all their arrows. The dogs and the horses were both mistreated by the group, and they helped them by getting them some nice food. There was also a family (two parents and a young son) who tended the supply train, and I noted that after the horses got loose, one of the dragon hunters went and slapped the kid for not having tied them right. I should note about the system. Nick was the type to narrate a lot about what was happening, which annoyed Kate in particular, who insisted that he couldn't just say whatever he liked. Here the system was of use, in that I explained that Nick could narrate but that he had to pay with Essence Points. I had brought a bunch of crystals which I handed out as Essence Points -- and I gave them out, for example, to Kate and Eric when they helped out the dogs and horses. After this, they went to see the dragon, and found that he had been poisoned by the dragon hunters -- who had dumped some toxin into the nearby stream. I said that they could cure it, but they needed a sample of the poison to brew the antidote. Now, at this point I think Nick said that he wanted to have run across the poison before, and could get a sample from the stream which was poisoned. I charged Essence for this. However, this was pushing it -- it seemed that if they paid enough Essence they could do anything. But they brewed up a potion with the sample and cured the dragon. The last bit was dealing with the dragon's attack. So, playing the dragon, he said that he was going to eat the horses first so that the people could ride away to escape. The kids naturally cried out at this, and got the dragon to agree not to hurt the horses or the family with the supply wagon if they would first make sure that the horses escaped. So they slipped in, sabataged further the dragon hunter's equipment, and let the horses loose. I then narrated briefly how the dragon attacked the dragon hunters, stopping only at the last minute to leave the wagoneer's family alone. They then got a Boon (one of FT's reward systems) from the dragon. I was rather proud of this, mainly because it was an adventure that had a lot of action -- but it was all about helping people, and none of the PCs ever attacked anyone. It was a bit of a tough sell in the first place getting Erik and Kate sold on this, but it went well. Milo and Zelly were difficult to engage, but still liked it.
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July 24th, 2006
01:33 pm - RPGs for Kids: How Strict or Loose?
So while I was at End Games in Oakland for the mini-con, I picked up John Wick's Cat, which is about role-playing cat's as the secret guardians of humanity. I had earmarked it as a possible game of interest for playing with my 6-year-old son. I also note that another kid-oriented RPG, Faery's Tale, has come out from Firefly Games, written by Patrick Sweeney, Sandy Antunes, and Christina Stiles with Robin Laws.
Currently, my son is enjoying playing Talisman a lot. It's kind of dull for me, but he enjoys it immensely. And I can tell that he gets into imagining all of it. He asks to see the picture of each card, even if it doesn't affect him.
I also saw, via a Story Games thread, an article by James Wyatt of Wizards of the Coast about playing with his 9-year-old son, called "D&D: The Next Generation". In that, he notes that he bent the rules to allow it when his son narrated the background at one point. On Story Games, they tend to see this as a natural tendency to use director stance. Another interpretation, though, would be a tendency against strict rules. For example, the same kid might try to jump in and declare something in a conflict even though he is the New Moon in Polaris.
It's a tricky line. I've mostly held to strict rules with Milo when we're playhing an official game like Talisman. However, I'll also just play make-believe with him at times. When I start different RPGs on him, like Cat, I'll probably still go with the semi-strict rules. But I will be pondering the issue, and considering James Wyatt's looser approach.
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