Getting my younger children involved in RPG

[Matthias]

I'm the DM of a small gaming group who happens to consist of my fiancée and her three sons. She and her oldest (14) are gung ho gamers. They love the stuff. The two younger ones are twins (8) and their reaction can be summarized as "I'm only playing because Mom said so"--the younger ones would much rather be playing their Playstation or Nintendo DS or watch a movie rather than roll dice and shuffle miniatures around a battle grid. This, while they so much enjoy playing "old style" make-believe and lets-pretend as children often do. They are all sharp as a whip with their imagination but if what they're doing doesn't involve flashy 3D graphics and console controls, then it just isn't interesting enough.

What I'd like is some suggestions or advice that other parents as DM can give for getting these younger would-be gamers interested in playing along and enjoy themselves versus going along with mom and future-stepdad and having more fun arranging their dice into little towers, than beating up monsters and taking their stuff.

 

[On Puget Sound]

One trick that helps with kids is to ham it up a bit more than you normally would. Put on your ogre voice. Be silly and even a bit juvenile - a monster lair should include an outhouse or a pot of bubbling stew with tentacles in it, or some other awful place they can push the bad guy into. Monsters should insult them - stick out their tongues, fart in their general direction, threaten to kill a kitten, whatever it takes to get them riled up. Instead of "you did 16 points? OK, he's bloodied", try something like "You hit him so hard it sounded like a bell ringing. He shakes his head and wipes the blood out of his eyes. IZ DAT ALL YOU GOT? I IZ GONNA PUT YOU IN DAT STEW POT!"

Emphasize the freedom to try things that aren't in the rules, and be prepared to wing it when they do.

Simplify the power cards so that their meaning is clear, and print them big and plain enough to see, with only their own customized formula and what they actually need to know, not all the fine print, and with reminders inserted for conditional modifiers. Example:

TWIN STRIKE: Fire two arrows, at the same target or at two different ones. Attack: +7 vs AC (+8 if you are closest or tied for closest). Damage: 1d10+2. Quarry: +1d6 damage.

 

[malach_re]

I've recently gotten my kids into roleplaying. My son didn't enjoy the first game we played which was rpgkids. He's not big on fantasy settings so we switched it up to starwars. THey like roleplaying so much now they do it on their own.

One thing that helps is having a mandatory quiet time at the end of the day. they can play video games for an hour or two each day but the last few hours of their day is always quiet. We did this originally to promote reading and actually playing with toys rather than watching tv and playing video games. quiet time just happens to be the best time to roleplay now.

My son is 11 and my daughter is 9. I'm not sure what to do with the teen since they all seem to be driven by peer pressure at that age.

good luck!

 

[nedjer]

I'm the DM of a small gaming group who happens to consist of my fiancée and her three sons. She and her oldest (14) are gung ho gamers. They love the stuff. The two younger ones are twins (8) and their reaction can be summarized as "I'm only playing because Mom said so"--the younger ones would much rather be playing their Playstation or Nintendo DS or watch a movie rather than roll dice and shuffle miniatures around a battle grid. This, while they so much enjoy playing "old style" make-believe and lets-pretend as children often do. They are all sharp as a whip with their imagination but if what they're doing doesn't involve flashy 3D graphics and console controls, then it just isn't interesting enough.

What I'd like is some suggestions or advice that other parents as DM can give for getting these younger would-be gamers interested in playing along and enjoy themselves versus going along with mom and future-stepdad and having more fun arranging their dice into little towers, than beating up monsters and taking their stuff.

Much of the fun in beating-up monsters and stealing their treasure comes from making effective use of the rules. If you don't have a handle on the rules system its hard to 'get it'. Equally, it's hard to get excited about a vorpal blade when you're not sure what it does.

Mike Mearls recently posted on 're-instating' exploration into mainstream gameplay alongside or on equal terms with combat encounters. Without in any way setting combat aside the full gameplay finery of RPGs could maybe be seen as involving combat, exploration, investigation, discovery, invention, enterprise and storybuilding.

To a player with limited understanding/ appreciation of rule sets all of these options are, initially, more accessible than full-on combat encounters. I.e. it's often going to be much easier to 'sell' a kid an adventure such as sort out the cheating at the fantasy Olympics; over work out which of the 34 options you don't understand on your PC sheet are you going to select carefully - as the rest of the session hangs on making the right ill-informed choice. To an expert player it's speed-dial to the novice it's which random button do I press.

Good prompting's going to help, but without mixing-up the gameplay options it's diffiicult to bridge the skills gap with kids. Must dash, but here's a few posts which might be relevant:

Challenges

RPG Props

RPG Options For Kids

HTH

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

My experience is with a younger player (I've been running some games for my older son, who is just short of 5, and in some cases for a friend of his who is roughly the same age), so it may not be fully applicable to 8-year-olds, but here are my thoughts:

1. RPGs can be complex and confusing. Especially if a child is playing with older and more experienced players, they may be in a position where they don't really understand things and can't have the fun that the older players are having. One possible solution to this is to run games just for their age. Try running a game just for the two 8-year-olds. It should reduce the pressure, give them time to figure things out, etc.

2. Don't be afraid of easy puzzles and the like. I've used puzzles for my son that would be utterly lame in a game with adults, but for him, the benefit of getting to figure things out was awesome. Easy fights can also be fun--we might look at a fight and say, "that was lame, I knew I was going to win the whole time." A young (and inexperienced) player may say, "that was awesome! I beat up all those zombies!" Again, this may be difficult in a mixed game--you risk boring or frustrating the teen (and the adult, but I assume your fiancee is more likely to be able to enjoy watching the younger kids handle something on their own). But letting the kids win, and win big, on their own, can be very satisfying for them.

3. Follow their lead. My son will often give me the premise for our adventures. At the beginning of one of our recent games, my son said something like, "Deforch's friend Freezie the Dragon wants to go visit some of his other friends on the top of a mountain, but he knows that it might be dangerous and there might be monsters on the mountain, so he asks Deforch to come with him." (Deforch is his PC.) At that point, I improvised an adventure to fit the description. If they're excited about something, or want to do something, you can make your game fit their wants, which will make it more fun. To some extent, this works for all players, but it's especially valuable with young players--they're unlikely to get as much out of a consistent, well-developed world or an overarching villainous plot that plays out over months (although recurring antagonists can work well), so even if their ideas aren't so consistent with what you were thinking or planning, incorporating them anyway may work well.

4. Kids should be gaming because they want to play. You can make an eight-year-old play a game that they don't want to play, but it's unlikely to be fun for anyone. But at the same time, they're likely to find it fun to actually play if they want to. So perhaps you should try making it desirable for them to want to ask to play, rather than "D&D time, everyone!" My son knew that his mom and I liked playing D&D, and that it had cool props (like minis). So he was excited by the idea of playing and would say things like "can I play D&D when I'm older?" before he could play. Now that we are playing, he will ask to play: "can we play D&D today?" On occasions when I've tried to start a game and he hasn't been into it, the game hasn't been as much fun for either of us. So I might try creating an environment where they see other people having fun, but aren't required to participate. If they then want to, great!

Good luck, and have fun!

 

[jcayer]

My experience has been 4e is a little slow for kids. They don't appreciate the tactical part. I'm not trying to start an edition way, but with a 7 year old, I threw out most of the rules and used AD&D as a basic guide. Combat gets streamlined quite a bit and her imagination gets to run wild. We do use miniatures but those are more for her to have something to aid with her visualization and understand the layout of the room.

 

[malach_re]

yeah one thing I did that helped too is that I allowed them to fudge the rules in some places. Rules lawyering a kid is the fastest way to get them off the table. After all having fun is the goal.

 

[nedjer]

My experience has been 4e is a little slow for kids. They don't appreciate the tactical part. I'm not trying to start an edition way, but with a 7 year old, I threw out most of the rules and used AD&D as a basic guide. Combat gets streamlined quite a bit and her imagination gets to run wild. We do use miniatures but those are more for her to have something to aid with her visualization and understand the layout of the room.

White Box Swords and Sorcery seems a real accessible entry to D&D with all the 'classic' elements. BECMI too - if harder to get.

 

[Matthias]

Here is an update for any that might be interested.


The campaign I am running for my folks is pretty basic--there's a dragon raiding the local farms, and the PCs have to into the caves in the mountains to track it down and kill it (and run into traps and minor baddies along the way). It seemed fairly monotonous at times [hence this thread] but with the changes I made, the little players have gotten more interested.

Things I tried:

* Out-of-game 'wish lists' (my fiancee and the oldest son really seized on this one)

* Explaining the combat actions more fancifully (every important hit gets a graphic description)

* Hamming up the captured goblin prisoner the party took. Never intended as an NPC, this was one of those rare situations where a memorable character just sort of "happens" as a result of the interplay between players and DM. I borrowed heavily from the film version of Gollum, though the players thought the goblin's emergent personality was a lot like Dobby from Harry Potter--which was unnerving in its own way when, a couple days after, I saw Chamber of Secrets for the first time.

* My mountain dungeon (and all my dungeons, as a general rule) are plotted to a 5-ft precision, so there is never any question of how wide or long a given corridor or room is. I prefer to just play out all the battles on graphic paper maps passed around on a clipboard, but the players wanted to use their miniatures and a battle grid In the battle with the goblins & orcs, the oldest son had plotted out the "3D" map slightly different from what I had drawn on paper. I was about to correct him, but I realized part of his fun was setting up the battle lines and the walls, and while the room wasn't *exactly* what I had designed, it was better to let it be, and play out the encounter using the 3D version.

In summary, fun was had by all until everyone was too tired to take the game seriously. And you know when you've had a good session when the players still want to roleplay and talk to your NPC or plan for the next session even after everyone's pretty much ready to call it a night.

 

[Stormonu]

I've been playing off and on with my eldest son since he was 5 (he's now 10). My other son (who is now 7) is just starting to getting into the games as well.

One of the biggest things was throwing the rules out the window. The rules didn't really matter; what mattered was what they were doing, and that they described it (and that they were getting to push little toy figures around on cool-looking maps).

Any rules I did use were pretty much behind the screen; they winged it until I told them they needed to roll a dice and all they needed to know was how high they needed to get to succeed.

While they seemed to have the most fun under the Savage World rules (homebrew - he played a Tyres Haul; a flying dragonborn basically), I've used the 3E (boxed set - he played a human fighter), 3.5E (homebrew stuff - he played a human who turned into a "snake man") and 4E rules (homebrew & The Slaying Stone - he played a Minotaur paladin) with them, to various degrees - smoothing rules out where I saw things were slowing things down.