Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dread October" data-source="post: 3750705" data-attributes="member: 30006">Currently I'm 38 and for a while over the last 4 years I ran two groups. My Saturday group is all adults including some posters here (Eris404 and Kid Charlemange) but one day my downstairs neighbor knocked on my door. The neighbor has 3 boys and one had a birthday coming up. The parents asked if I'd run a game for the oldest kid, who at the time was a freshman in high school.I ran a biweekly game for that group (9 teens and 1 adult) for a bout 4 years, until they all went off to college.What I learned was that of the 9 kids, 3 of their parents ever bothered to meet me and actually have a conversation. I'm not including the family who lived in my house.The kids would generally be picked up by their parents and some of these parents couldn't be bothered to actually walk up and ring my doorbell. There were a lot of cell calls and running out to the curb.It was clear to me that most of the parents had enough confidence that I was ok based on my sharing a house with other parents they knew (and my being married proibably helped) but beyond that, the bulk of them never really wanted to get to know me if for any othere reason other than just knowing where their kids were on a friday nights.To reduce the creep factor, I did have a few rules:1. Keep it civil - Leave the High School social BS at High School. It took me a while to realize that all of these kids were not really friends with each other sta  school They only really had one personal contact in the group and could be pretty clique-ish.2. No swearing - At least when possible. If there was anyone in the room younger than them, I'd make sure to enforce it. One player had a 9 yo brother who liked to hang out too. 3. Earmuffs  - Anytime a story of a certain level of color had to be told, someopne had to say earmuffs just to give the appearance that they knew a 9-13 yo was in the room.4. Game time was consistant - Start at 7:00 and End at 10:30. The kids may not have wanted to go home and their parents may not have all cared but no one was gonna come back to me later and say I had teenagers at my house at all hours of the night.5.  No Booze or smoking - I don't smoke but I do drink. I don't drink with teenagers no matter how apathetic their parents. There may have been games where it took a vodka and tonic to deal with the hormones running rampant in the room. I'm no f'n saint.6. Run the game for the moms - This rule was for me. I needed to make sure that whatever went on in that game would have been ok if I were running the game for the moms instead of the kids. This meant low incidents to no incidents of a "Vile" nature. No graphic torture, etc.7. Be aware of the personalities of your players - Kids are crazy people. I had to know which players could handle things like character death and the loss of a favorite magic item.The bottom linbe is that it can be a really kick to run a game for the "next generation" of gamers out there but it will work out best if ground rules are set and kept to AND with some level of parental involvement. I couldn't have pulled it off without the support of the parents downstairs and perhaps one other set of parents who were appreciative.Now, all of those "kids" are off at college but a few are doing college locally and one has actually joined the "Adult" group.Good stuff...</blockquote>

Verification