Roleplaying games con i bambini

[Meguey Baker]

So, as I am now a little shy about my Italian, and this is meant to be clear, I will write in English. Please respond in English or Italian, as you prefer.

Vincent and I have been making games and playing games with our children for 10 years. As I see it, the whole desire behind system and rules and mechanics is to structure the natural "let's pretend" that children everywhere create. As the child grows, the complexity of the stories grows, and the need for rules increases. My oldest son is currently playtesting his first game, Blasters For Hire. My youngest son is currently starting to discover GMing through telling me stories about my character (a girl named Penny) who fights dragons, or maybe befriends them, and there are occasionally challenges Penny must face. This is a very easy sort of game for me to play while I am working, so we are both happy.

For a year, I ran a gaming group at Sebastian's school, for children in the 6th grade (so ages 11 and 12). The game was Storming the Wizard's Tower, a game Vincent designed with that age-group in mind. I've run Psi-Run for about a dozen different school and library groups of teens. I've run the excellent and little-known game called Big Night for various groups of children, some of them as young as 3 years old. This, plus my own children, plus my own experience as a child starting to game, leads me to three insights.

-Children want actual meaningful situations and conflicts. They want to solve something, achieve something, discover something.

-Children will come up with far more interesting stuff that I will, if I can avoid putting them in a role-playing 'railroad'. "What do you do?" is a great question, especially if followed by "Then what happens?!?"

-If I assume a child is not mature enough to bring something thoughtful and creative to the table, I'm wrong.

So, a real-life example, from a recent game: it's the middle of October, and we're having a game day at the local store - JiffyCon Playdate.  My middle son Elliot, who is 11, is running Murderous Ghosts for Vincent. Elliot describes the sub-basement, the damp walls, the uneven floor. Vincent's going along, expecting to go easy on Elliot, since it's a horror game and Vincent knows all the mechanics and how to play them. Then Elliot describes the ghost - a large roundish white thing with little weird ears on top of it's head and stubby, useless looking hands. Elliot says "It's standing with it's back to you and it's licking the wall."

Vincent was freaked out for two days.

[Mauro]

-Children will come up with far more interesting stuff that I will, if I can avoid putting them in a role-playing 'railroad'. "What do you do?" is a great question, especially if followed by "Then what happens?!?"

So the child says both what he does and what happens after? Do you remember an actual play such this?

Murderous Ghosts: OK, now I'm curious to know what happened in that basement to have such a ghost.

[Meguey Baker]

Maruo, yes. In Big Night especially, but also occasionally in Psi-Run, the active player gets to say what happens after their character's action as well as before. In Big Night, when the dice go against the player, that player is the one to say how things go badly. This gives the child much greater ownership, and they don't wind up feeling like the GM (usually an adult) is just nailing them with the badness.

I particularly remember one little girl, maybe 8 years old, who had a bad roll. I looked at her and said "Oh no! Something goes terribly wrong! What happened??" She got a glint in her eye and told about her character winding up taped to a wall, unable to move [her character was a teddy bear]. I never would have thought of that, and if I had, I most likely wouldn't have said it, because it would seem a mean thing to say to a little girl.

In the next scene, another player got to try and free the bear, and I was the one to say how they succeeded.

In Psi-Run, there is a more formalized system as to who gets to describe what happens, based on the dice. Sometimes it is the GM, sometimes it is the player who rolled, sometimes it is the other players.

(I just found a link that is relevant to this conversation: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/rpg_teachkids.php
Apparently it's Teach Your Kids to Game week, with some deals on games that are good for kids.)