Yeah, I have playing RPGs with kids on my mind lately. I’m ready to move on to new things but here’s another post in the subject.
Last week I got a very interesting email from fellow Montreal reader and blogger Eric.
Turns out that after a 12 year break from DMing, Eric bought 4e and decided to DM for a group of 5 kids: 4 ten year old boys and an eight year old girl.
He found my site when Pierre from ZeStuff told him about me. he became an instant fan (thanks!) and sent me a request for tips about DMing kids new to RPGs (and 4e especially).
Here’s what I proposed (I’m also adding new tips as the come to me):
Keep rules to their simplest
For D&D 4e tell them to “roll a d20 and add the bonuses I’ll tell you about. Hit my secret magic number and you’ll succeed”
Explain moves and action during the first fight and be generous in adjudicating the rules. Kids are in discovery mode and should not be bothered with rules as such.
Forget about attacks of opportunity, completely. Unless a player thinks they could do one… then introduce the concept for PCs.
Don’t bothr with XPs and leveling up yet, at least not until you start a campaign with the same kids. And when you do, handle leveling up yourself unless the players show genuine interest influencing that aspect of the game.
Limit Powers
Limit abilities to a minimum. That means one at-will power and one Encounter power.
When everything is mastered, work new powers from game to game. Work learning the new powers into the story. The wizard finds a book that teaches the new spells, the fighters decides to try a move he saw in the training yards and it works, etc!
Narrative Control
Give kids control of the game. If they suppose that something will happen, MAKE IT SO!
Kid #1: I bet there’s a kobold waiting for us behind that door
DM: How did you guess? It’s so surprised that you found him out that he’s stunned for a few seconds, what do you do?
Short Attention spans…
are highly overrated. Unless stricken with ADHD, a 8-10 year old will focus on a game for long periods if given choices and things to do on a regular basis.
Thus, as a DM you need to keep away from the book at all times. If a player wants to do something and you are unsure how the rules address this DON’T open the book. Make a call that sounds fair and move on.
Players, especially kids, don’t know about your insecurities as a DM, don’t spend time explaining yourself. Just go where you think fun for the players lie and the kids tell you what they expect next.
Above all else, keep things moving!
Rule 42
In D&D 4e, page 42 has most everything you need to run a rules-light game. With the proper flavor, all DCs and damage (high and low) cover all situations you could meet.
A Boulder falls on a someone? Use High Damage and a Bonus to attack Reflex at Level +2.
A Dart trap fires over a wide area? Attack all creatures in a 5X5 square vs Reflex (Same as above) and deal the low amount of damage.
Heck I bet it’s possible to DM a full game using only character sheets and page 42. Give all my monsters a bonus to all d20s equal of the Moderate DC of the table -10 and give them 20+5 hp per levels. Make powers up on the fly!
In fact, in the hands of a skilled DM, I doubt adults would spot the difference.
(And therein lies the true strength of D&D 4e I think)
What about you ? Do you have other tips for Eric?
Have a good Week!
I have two ideas. First, make sure your first adventure heartily encourages the players to work out how to cooperate with each other. I’m thinking more on the order of an ancient door that requires people in different places doing different things and not so much the “throw so many monsters at the party they have to cooperate” thing.
Secondly, it seems to me that in a lot of games players are working on getting or using their one Cool Thing. To a large extent D&D 4e seems to try to give everyone their Cool Thing as a combat power but if your guys like to RP a bit more you might have an easier time of it if you make a list of Cool Things you’d have fun working with that wouldn’t be hard to drop into any sort of situation. Some examples:
A comical ninja squad that’s always -almost- effective.
A smart but non-talking horse who likes to casually nip in the britches people the character doesn’t like.
The character has noble ties that often impress the common folk.
The character is adored by an invisible faerie that occasionally looks in on him/her and plays pranks on those nearby. Usually helpful but -may- get the character in trouble.
A highly intelligent talking fat cat who dispenses advice in return for snacks. He’s a grumpy Gus and mainly helps the characters so his pet human will stop traipsing around dank dungeons and provide him somewhere warm and comfortable to sun himself.
These are just ideas and they’re only useful if you think you can come up with 5 of them you can easily, seamlessly work into your stories without them taking over. Some players won’t be as into these as others.
It occurs to me that you could convert several episodes of the Backyardigans into a exiciting and fun kid-friendly adventure, without much work. Or, at least, take pieces from them to come up with something a little more original.
A lot of the episodes have a formulaic quest model, that usually runs like this:
Introduce the characters and the setting
Introduce the goal of the quest
Set off to achieve the goal, encountering 2-4 obstacles or problems that must be solved.
Just before reaching the final objective, introduce one last hurdle that utilizes knowledge gained from the other obstacles, and then achieve the goal.
Snack Time!
Most of these steps are interspersed with songs, but the formula can work very well for a Kid-friendly adventure (or any adventure, really… )
I’d given up on D&D about 2 years ago and then “had” to run an impromptu game for a group of kids “trapped” inside during some bad weather. We had 1d6, some pencils, and some paper. With that we had fun for about four hours. It was awesome. I enjoyed every minute. I listened to what they had to say, and asked them what happened as often as I told them what was going on.
Since then, I’ve been giving more narrative control to the adults I play with, including kids in the play group, and trying to keep the rules simple. I’m due to DM some 4e stuff for the first time next month, and I’ll take your advice to heart for sure. Thanks!
Honestly, I would not bother with 4e at all. Or D&D for that matter. Its strength is entirely in the rules, which would likely be used little.
Like: Every character has a name, a class/profession, and some small number of superpowers (spells, pet dragons, whatever). Resolution: Roll d6. If using superpower, anything but 1 is success. If using class, 3+ are successes. If not using anything, 4+ are successes. Learn more superpowers or even gain a new class by suitable events in the fiction.
Give players as much narrative control as they want, especially after success, but describe things yourself if they don’t have a good idea.
Tommis last blog post..Efemeros
@Tommi:
I think your method is great for a short-term, or one shot game/campaign, but if you were planning to play with the same group for longer, and sort of introduce them to the game it seems like it might be easier to take 4e’s already defined rules, and trim it down to make it simpler, instead of creating your own rules.
And then, as the players get a little more comfortable with the basics, gradually introduce new rules.
Streamlined rules worked fine for my group of kids.
In fact, one of the kids was disappointed that there wasn’t more powers, rules and abilities (he’s into board games).
It seems that the rules wouldn’t have been much a problem… but I probably would have lost them the time it would have taken from setup to game play.
They were having more fun looking at the stats and comparing their pre-made characters to one another than they would have been listening to detailed explanations – they didn’t even ask questions about what numbers meant what.
(Or why I didn’t even use these numbers during the game, besides the ‘hit point’).
Eric Maziades last blog post..Kobold Hall for Kids Part 3 – Kobold Halls
Awesome blog, tho my daughter is only 3 atm. gives me a few ideas for when we will get her playing. 🙂
You can easily “reskin” the player powers to take on any fluff that the child prefers.
“For example, my youngest wants to summon fairies. Well, rather than coming up with a bunch of actual fairy summoning powers, I just describe all of her powers in those terms – with a fairy magically appearing and doing whatever.”
–A great suggestion I read over in the comments on http://www.onebadegg.com/egg/2009/03/kids-and-4e/
Thanks for the link. I’m working on a RPG for kids series and the first post will be about resources.