Role-playing games with family

At some point about two years ago I was looking for something fun to do with my young kids on a cold and rainy day that did not involve staring at a screen or whacking each other with foam light sabers until somebody got hurt. My taste in fun still ran towards the imaginative and creative, and board games and Legos were not doing it. But what if…? I looked on the internet to see if there were any roleplaying games for little ones. Surely somebody in my generation of gamers would have thought of something like that. And there it was! I discovered a game called Hero Kids. This sweet little ruleset with lovely predesigned characters and modules was just the thing for my children in their late single digits. And I could download it! We played only a couple of sessions, but it was worth it to me to spend that time printing and assembling little cut-out figures with tape so that the kids could envision their characters on the print-out boards. My kids got into it, though their ability to play was hindered by a real fear of in-game failure. They were learning to make decisions and take risks. They were also very excited, jumping up and acting out their roles bodily and spontaneously with no inhibitions. But we are busy people with many interests, and we had few occasions to play. That was fun, but I didn’t investigate role-playing games with my kids any further.

The second thing that got me thinking about role-playing games again was my discovery that the Fighting Fantasy Gamebook set Sorcery! had been released as a series of game apps. Those four books had a large impact on how I liked to imagine fantasy worlds when I was a kid. To me, those books, with art by John Blanche, exemplify the look and feel of old-school fantasy games. And there it was in beautiful app format. I put it on my phone and my kids’ iPads, too. My son loved it. Then I thought he might like the actual gamebooks: more paper books, less screen time. I looked around to buy them and discovered that there had been an entire Advanced Fighting Fantasy role-playing game, now in the second edition. I had never heard of it, as it was not a game that made inroads in the US in its first edition. What if my kids wanted to move on from Hero Kids to AFF2e? I bought my first game books in years. (I’ll write about AFF2e another time.) Determined to make the game useful beyond an enjoyable diversion, I designed a fantasy setting specifically to introduce language vocabulary to my kids. (I work in a field of education.) They would learn new words and use them interactively as all kids acquire language, but the idea was to do it through a story game. My wife, who also works in a field of education, thought this was pretty cool, which was encouraging.

Again, it worked. Both kids made characters with fresh creativity. I sketched a world and designed a dungeon. The kids finished it in three sessions, suffering injustice, facing fears, making decisions to survive and escape, choosing different paths. The idea to introduce vocabulary was eclipsed by the sheer fun we had. But again, we are busy people, and we did not play much more. Nevertheless, we all had the bug now.

A third thing came along, completely unexpectedly, a few months ago. My sister’s family and my family were getting together. My sister, who often played in one of my groups when I was young, asked me if I would run a role-playing game of some kind for both of our families together: her kids, my kids, and all the parents who wanted to join. Her kids had wanted to try a role-playing game and they knew their uncle knew how. Looking for a rules-light system I soon found Tiny Dungeon D6, 2^nd edition. It was completely perfect for my needs: a game easy for those with no experience and elegant in design for someone with jaded tastes. I paid for a download. I wrote an adventure and I pre-generated characters to distribute, let the players pick from among them, and we played. Everybody had a blast. My sister’s kids were talking about it for a long time afterwards. And I had that old feeling again.

Then the day came, recently, when my son came home from school talking about Dungeons & Dragons. Other boys were playing it during recess. He was fascinated. I asked him, “Which Dungeons & Dragons is this?” He had no idea. “Just Dungeons & Dragons,” he said with a shrug. “What’s on the cover?” “A giant,” he said. I had to do some research to figure it out. They were up to the fifth edition of D&D. Fifth edition? The last time I had played D&D, it was using the series of rules sets now called B/X with BECMI, and my buddy’s two characters went all the way up to Master level.

I asked him how the kids at his school played. He said it wasn’t anything like the games I ran for him and his sister. It was just basically a series of fights without setting or story, each new challenge consisting of a bigger monster. The player characters were jumping levels a few steps at a time. I told my son that as long as they are having fun, they’re playing the right way, but he told me he wanted more than arena fights, and that the kids playing in his school were already getting bored of it. He wondered if he could do better than the other young DM.

Did I want my son to get involved in D&D, the fantasy game that includes lots of rules stuff I dislike (hit points per level, uncontested combat rolls, clerics, watered-down Tolkien-style races, etc.)? I tried to see it his way. D&D is entirely fresh for him. He told me he wanted to spend a chunk of his savings on the D&D books. I dug my original Basic D&D book out of a storage box and showed him. “Do you want to try this? We already own it.” He told me that his friends would never take this seriously. Well, it was his money. He bought them and wanted me to teach him to play.

That’s what I’m doing. I’m back to D&D, but now, with my kids’ perspective, and my wife joining in as a newbie with her own character, it’s fresh and fun in an entirely new way.

As I looked for resources to run and teach my kids how to play role-playing games, I discovered a vast world of online materials and discussions. The most striking material is from the OSR, a movement that favors an “Old School Revival” in style of play. I had no idea that any of this had been going on, for more than a decade now, and I find it interesting enough that I’ll have to comment on it. In some ways, I find that OSR gaming represents what I remember from the same period, but in other ways, the OSR proponents are saying things about how gaming “used to be” that are not as true as they claim. More on that another time!