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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5529764" data-attributes="member: 3448">The Twelfth and Thirteenth Adventures of DeforchThe two most recent games of D&D with my son have been unusual in several ways.  To begin with, the two games were really part of a single continuous story, and for that matter a story that hasn't yet finished.  But much more significantly, it's only vaguely accurate to say that I ran the game while my son played.  As I'll explain, my son basically ran the game for himself, with me providing a little bit of input and some rules advice.  I'm not sure that the first session even really qualifies as being a game, as opposed to just being a story he constructed about his D&D character (although I suppose it had a little bit of game-like aspects, so calling it a game makes some sense).We sat down to play a game of D&D, and my son immediately took charge of the storytelling aspects.  He grabbed a miniature of a wraith I had (although he often referred to it as a "wreath") and announced that today's game would be about a good wraith who had asked Deforch for help.  I decided that turning this into a test of wills wouldn't make it more fun for anyone, so I just followed along.  "What does the wraith need Deforch's help with?" I asked."Some bad guy has stolen all of the wraith's pogo sticks and baby bottles.  And his babies are really upset about not having their pogo sticks and baby bottles.  He wants Deforch to get them back."Okay, then.  Apparently, this is all about pogo sticks and baby bottles?  I have to admit that I found parts of my son's creative storytelling to be hard to follow, but I tried to keep up as best as I could.  As I remember it, Deforch began looking for clues to try to figure out who the "bad guy" was and where he had taken the stolen goods.  The baby bottles and pogo sticks (two of each, apparently) were supposed to be kept in a secret cave, with heavy sealed doors.  My son explained that the outside walls were undamaged, but there were claw marks on the inside walls--claw marks like the wraith could make with its long claws.  (I figured that explaining that most wraiths are insubstantial would not really help.)  Maybe the things had been stolen by a bad wraith that didn't like the good wraith?  My son softened this to a good wraith and a sorta bad wraith.At this point, my son explained that Deforch encountered a floating magic sword that could attack on its own.  I think the sword may have had a skull on it, but I'm not sure--his description was a little unclear.  At this point, I stepped in to DM the combat.  I just improvised the sword's stats--Deforch would attack, and if my son rolled well, I would declare that it was a hit.  I did the same thing in reverse when the sword attacked.  Once I felt like the fight had lasted long enough, I declared that Deforch had prevailed.With that, we were out of time, so we wrapped up.About a week later, we got a chance to play again.  This time, the plan was for my son's mom to join us (playing Deforch's mommy, Alberta Lovestar).  I had planned on following up on the vampire adventure, but my son said that the vampire was too scary, even with Deforch's mommy along.  I wasn't going to force him to play an adventure that he found too scary, and he was very definite about this.  Also, as we started to play, Robbie became progressively more upset, so their mom went to take care of Robbie, rather than actually playing with us.  This functionally meant that Deforch's mommy was on the adventure, but my son's mom wasn't, which made it a particularly bad time to try something a little frightening.So instead of finishing up the vampire adventure, my son launched into continuing the effort to recover the missing baby bottles and pogo sticks.  He declared that Deforch and his mommy were in a cave tunnel in front of a stone door.  In front of the door were two white squares (my son put down small white cardboard squares (the backsides of my "Bloodied" tokens) for this) and two red gems (tokens in my mini bag).  He quickly solved the puzzle that he had created for himself, putting the two gems on the white squares and unlocking the door.  My son declared that there was a group of five skeletons on the other side of the door.  The skeletons attacked!Like in the previous game, when combat began, I basically took over the GMing role.  Interestingly, my son was at first hesitant to use his "Dire Wolverine Strike," which attacks all adjacent enemies, because he was worried that it would hit his mommy.  I was surprised that he came up with the concept of friendly fire on his own, but I reassured him that that power (unlike some others) only affects enemies.  After a little while, all five skeletons were destroyed, and they spent a little time healing up.He then began describing a second skeleton attack.  I suggested that while that might be okay, it might be more fun to have a little variety--to follow a fight with skeletons with some other, different sort of encounter.  He readily agreed, and said that instead they would encounter two bad guys and engage in a "match the things that are the same" competition.  So I laid out eight miniatures--3 pairs and 2 minis that were similar but not quite the same--as well as two figures to represent the bad guys.  Deforch went first, picking out two of the minis that were the same.  Then the bad guys picked out another pair.  Then Deforch grabbed the third pair.  The bad guys tried to match the last two minis together, but my son pointed out that those miniatures didn't match.  After he pointed out several details that were different, the bad guys conceded, agreeing that Deforch had beaten them.  They proceeded to leave.Deforch and his mommy continued down the passageway and encountered two kruthiks.  The kruthiks initially planned on attacking, but my son announced that he would use the "tile flingers" (he had apparently decided that the cardboard tokens with the gems on them were now miniature catapults of a sort) to fling tiles at the kruthiks.  After that the tile flingers hit the kruthiks, they began to run away, but not before saying that someone had stolen the spikes for the backs of the baby kruthiks.  Apparently, the bad guys weren't just robbing good wraiths…With that, we wrapped up the game.   These games were interesting experiments.  My son clearly had a lot of fun making up the stories, which is of course the key part.  At the same time, his stories continue to have the disjointed surrealist aspects that you would expect from a young child, which makes it both harder to understand for me and a little frustrating.  And sometimes I have ideas for games that I want to share with him.  Still, I think these games were both successes; I'll probably continue to play it by ear, running a game in a more traditional way when he seems interested in that, but not trying to prevent him from making his own stories in games where I'm really mostly his fight coordinator and rules consultant when that's what he feels like.</blockquote>

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