This amuses me so much (probably because I am soooo sleepy) because in medicine, we are largely taught to ignore the anecdote in favor wof well-constructed studies. What we have here friends is a series of anecdotes, but it's teh best we've got. here's my addition to this growing body of literature.
One of the guys in our group (who actually DMs 90% of the time) has a daughetr who is 8. She's been watching bits and pieces of the various games that we play for longer than I have been with the group (over a year now). Now she is really getting the itch to play.
I ran a short game for this group over the month of October (more or less typical Forgotten Realms fair despite attempts to deviate from the usual tone of FR), I let her play an NPC during a large battle. She did a fine job of rolling the dice, role-playing, and making reasonably sound decisions. She was biased a bit in directing more of her ire at her father's character than at another NPC who really deserved it, but not terribly so. She also passed me notes for the sake of doing so because she had seen other player's pass me notes. All in all, it wasn't bad.
Work, sadly, is keeping me from gaming with the group on our usual Sunday nights, but we are going to use this as an opportunity to play a few Saturday sessions which includer her as a regular player, probably with her character as THE center of attention to help keep her focused.
I'll let you know how this goes, but for a group (largely in their 20s and 30s), I think this might be an ideal way to introduce a single younger player to the game without disrupting the regular (all adult) game. I'll let you know how it goes.
Chad
One of the guys in our group (who actually DMs 90% of the time) has a daughetr who is 8. She's been watching bits and pieces of the various games that we play for longer than I have been with the group (over a year now). Now she is really getting the itch to play.
I ran a short game for this group over the month of October (more or less typical Forgotten Realms fair despite attempts to deviate from the usual tone of FR), I let her play an NPC during a large battle. She did a fine job of rolling the dice, role-playing, and making reasonably sound decisions. She was biased a bit in directing more of her ire at her father's character than at another NPC who really deserved it, but not terribly so. She also passed me notes for the sake of doing so because she had seen other player's pass me notes. All in all, it wasn't bad.
Work, sadly, is keeping me from gaming with the group on our usual Sunday nights, but we are going to use this as an opportunity to play a few Saturday sessions which includer her as a regular player, probably with her character as THE center of attention to help keep her focused.
I'll let you know how this goes, but for a group (largely in their 20s and 30s), I think this might be an ideal way to introduce a single younger player to the game without disrupting the regular (all adult) game. I'll let you know how it goes.
Chad
