Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 1881859" data-attributes="member: 99">OO, knowing how busy you are, I'm honored that you'd stop in to read this thread.  I saw your post in Faded Glory and I hope your wife is doing ok being on bedrest.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you guys.The "adventures" really started almost a year ago when I started telling her stories using these pewter figurines that I collected as a kid.  I had a fairy princess, a castle, a wizard, a dragon and so forth.  So I would tell her stories using these characters and places and they got more elaborate as I innovated (mostly out of boredom from telling the same story over and over).Eventually I started to add rudimentary tests in the story as teaching tools.  I would say "And a big snake jumped out of a cave and told Fairy Princess to STOP!  She has to pass his test before she can go on her journey to the castle.  She has to count to 10!"  And she would.  We worked on counting and the alphabet a lot with this sort of thing.Recently after my daughter went through a spate of watching Dora the Explorer videos, I noted how simple the setup was for Dora's adventures.  Basically there was some overarching goal ("Return Little Star to his place in the sky" or "Take the books back to the Library"), three places to go ("Bridge, Tree, Tall Mountain") and something to do at each stop.  One day after watching one of these videos, I asked her if she wanted to do an adventure of her own.  She jumped at the chance so I spent 30-45 minutes setting it up.  You can read about the results in the thread linked at the start of this one.Since then I've discovered that it really only takes me about 15 minutes to set one of these up.  Continuity and consistancy are less important to the average 3 year old than to most of my regular RPG players <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.  What is important is just a few things:1) Good Props - I've found that I have tons of stuff laying around the house that I can use as props for these adventures.  Stuffed animals make good NPC's and I have all kinds of little bottles, play jewelry, plastic easter eggs and so forth that I use all the time.  She loves this stuff.2) An area to travel in - On a rainy day we did an entire adventure in the house but I usually try to put our large yard (about an acre) to good use and have her hike around to find places and things.3) A simple goal, but not too simple - The goals I have her try to achieve as part of the adventure are very basic (usually "Go get this thing") but I also add in complications along the way like somebody won't give her the thing unless she does something for them and so forth.  Sometimes I have to remind her of the original goal and I find that the best way to keep it in her memory is to repeat it several times at the start.4) Help them out, but not too much - When she seems stumped, I ask her questions to try and get her back on track.  But I try to avoid simply giving her the answer and letting her give up.  If she gets whiny then I say, "You seem tired.  Maybe we should finish our adventure another day."  She almost always sucks it up and focuses on the task at hand.Hmm, looking back far too much of those suggestions look applicable to roleplaying in general.  Scary, huh? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification