Gaming with Other Parents

If you are a parent of a kid who plays D&D or another role-playing game with friends, you may have a new play group to recruit right in front of you: the parents of the other kids. Here's how I got my current most regular current in-person gaming group, which has been going for well over a year now. Maybe you can do something similar. This post is about how I made it work.

First, I had some auspicious preconditions:

• Our kids already had a near-weekly game during the school year. The schedule was organized though a shared document to coordinate where and when the kids' game sessions would happen. Because my son was the kids' DM, his school-and-activity schedule was the reverse template for their game schedule over some years already, which meant the families were all used to hearing from us about availability.
• Most of the families of the gamer kids had volunteered to take turns hosting the kids' D&D game already over several years. This means we knew and trusted each other with each other's kids. We'd all taken turns feeding the kids or bringing food for a game, too.
• It also meant that all the parents already showed clear signs of approval of role-playing games. In fact, they all expressed the view that it was beneficial for their kids to socialize face to face with friends without a screen or a mediating app.
• There were no red flags about any of the parents I'd met. I had known some of them a little bit from the schools our kids shared for years, or just from chatting at drop-offs and pick-ups. They were all nice people of different backgrounds (different national origins, different kinds of jobs, education ranging from high school to PhD). Each of us is quirky as all people are.
• Not one of the other parents had ever played a role-playing game before. I think this was a good thing, as they had no clear expectations when I finally invited the parents to play a role-playing game with me.

To implement it, this is what I did.

1. Two simultaneous games in one time-slot. The parents were dropping their kids off for a game already almost every week, so why shouldn't they just stay and play, too, in a group separate from the kids? That was the basic pitch: a game for the parents while we waited for our kids to finish. Why should the kids have all the fun?

2. We needed two rooms. Luckily, we have enough space in our home for two simultaneous games in different rooms and we volunteered it. I'm not sure how I would have pulled it off if we still lived in one of the many smaller places we have lived in previously.

3. I invited all the parents to try an "adventure game" in an open and collective message. They could see each other responding, and that helped break the ice. Also, my wife wanted to play, so it was the two of us hosting a game as a couple, not just me. I think my wife's involvement helped to encourage the other moms, who have become the most regular and eager participants. We usually have more moms than dads playing.

4. No commitment required. I presented it basically as a party game that can end at any time or go on for multiple sessions. I stated explicitly that there was no commitment needed, no obligation to attend, no hard feelings if people didn't enjoy it, or, if people wanted to continue, there'd be no obligation to attend regularly. We would just see what happens. I must have said several times that it was an experiment. That was more than a year ago and we are still going.

5. "You can't lose in this game." I know role-playing games too well to have thought of this, but my wife advised me to say this to all the parents. I let them know beforehand loud and clear that you cannot lose the game. It's a collaborative not a competitive game. This turned out to make a big difference when recruiting people who had never played such a game.

6. I used very simple rules: my own rules based in large part on Ben Milton's Maze Rats, tweaked in ways I enjoy. This was essential to our success, because very few of these players even want to know rules at all. (Don't let anybody tell you that Maze Rats cannot sustain a long campaign. It absolutely can and it has. With my modifications, it worked just as well for me as any fantasy role-playing game I've ever played, including some of the most crazily complicated rules ever published.)

7. Super-easy character creation. I streamlined character creation to an extreme degree by creating about fifty character cards in advance with stats and gear, basically templates of the possible range of characters by starting profession or "failed career" along with an advantage that each character started with. Yes, this was "losers with leftover knick-knacks thrust into adventure." They drew two cards and picked one rather than rolling dice for stats. Once they'd picked their card, they provided a name, a description, a few personality traits (or rolled for them on charts I have), and that was all. It worked like a charm. We witnessed the rudimentary starting characters develop big personalities over time.

8. I used an instant-access genre: the fairy tale. To minimize setting explanation and lore dumping to almost zero, I relied on genre background that everybody knows. I said it was the same as any fairy tale they knew, except with a lot of really weird magic and bizarre monsters thrown in. The fairy-tale world theme has also guided me to a lot of world-building that went over well. Everybody immediately understood the arrogant knight, the heartbroken witch, the creepy little elf thief, the ferocious dragon, the bumbling yet menacing goblins, the mysterious caves, the tunnel behind the secret door in the castle. Everything that is hackneyed for experienced fantasy gamers was fresh and exhilarating for these players.

9. Embrace the silly and whimsical. I made the fantasy adventure game light-hearted and playful, but also quite lethal from the start, so a gruesome death would result in laughter, not hard feelings. I took inspiration from the earliest D&D and T&T games, where player characters could have goofy names and there was no expectation of a serious epic. The single biggest element that kept this group together through its first months was the constant laughter. The initial twinge of self-consciousness gave way to joy.

10. I set clear game goals. I told them explicitly how to get rewards in the form of points: face danger, make discoveries, get treasure. These three were reviewed at the end of every session. Soon they were trying to accomplish all of these things on purpose. I also made a list of things they might achieve in the setting and handed it out to them as a printout to peruse if they ever wanted to do so. It included rumored treasures or jobs that NPCs wanted to have done, and I stated explicit game-mechanical, player-facing rewards (like Luck Points) for fulfilling them. This was also a way to deliver setting lore in a way that made them pay attention.

11. No delays before excitement. As soon as they had characters, I threw them into a dangerous situation upon arrival in a new location, which was soon the basis for a hexcrawl.

12. Wide-open sandbox. There was one main dungeon of many interlocking layers and a big wilderness around it with many sites and people and creatures and things to interact with. Within a few weeks, they were making their own decisions about whether to go deeper in the dungeon or to go to a specific place on the map, which I slowly filled in for them as they explored each new hex. The setting was designed to provide clues about the mysterious past and lost treasures everywhere they went. They've filled whole booklets with notes as they piece together the story of the setting.

13. A large dose of randomness. To make it as unpredictable for me as possible, and to make it as much as possible about their choices and not any plan of mine, the players rolled for weather, for random encounters, and, where it made sense, for reaction rolls. I rarely knew in advance what they'd choose to do at the beginning of a session.

Some things I learned:

• First impressions matter at the start more than prior expectations. The players who are most devoted now, more than a year later, told me they were pretty leery about this whole thing before they started. They were immediately hooked by the immersion of the first session, the feeling of danger, a mysterious world to explore, the freedom to make decisions, the unpredictability of the dice--all the things that make these games fun. Get them to the action as soon as you can after they have characters.
• They would not keep coming back if they didn't enjoy it. Some of the parents were pretty shy at first, especially for the first few months. I thought maybe they were not having fun. Then I started to see how regularly they wanted to play. They were really into it, more than I had hoped.
• The so-called "West Marches" style works very well for busy parents. Basically, that means each session is an episode beginning at an established base and ending with a return to base, so you can have a different group of participants rotating in or out every week; no need to have exactly the same characters as last time. I'd take an e-mail poll about attendance in the days before each session, and if there weren't at least three players free and eager, we'd skip that week with no hard feelings. I have always added a note in my e-mail invitation saying, "We're all busy and there are no obligations." Usually, we've had four to five parents showing up to play per week, not counting my wife. Lately we have more parents showing up than the kids have for their game. One parent tried once early on and didn't like it, only to return many months later after she kept hearing how much fun we were having. Then there are parents who have hated to miss even one week. There has even been an understated competition to have the highest-level character in the game. (Only two of the original PCs remain in the game; everybody else has had at least one character die.) Three parents of the four most regular kids have never tried it and they clearly never will, looking at the rest of us parents like we are absolutely crazy when they show up to pick up their kids, but we still have one mom playing with us whenever she can make it even after her son left the kids' D&D group because of other activities. None of this would have worked if it was mandatory to have each player there each time.
• We can't meet every week, but as long as there is a calendar with plan to resume at a specific future time, it works out. We have averaged about one three-hour session every two weeks, varying with the pulse of our kids' school years.
• Everybody enjoys the collective escape. We are all middle-aged moms and dads, so we are dealing with childcare, elder care, job crises, family drama, medical problems, and the usual hurdles of life for people maxed out on responsibilities. At the start of the sessions, we check in with each other and we hear about upcoming surgeries or funerals or relatives struggling with addiction... and at some point, we say, "Okay, let's forget all about that stuff and have an imaginary adventure!" It's a healthy relief to shut off the outside world and get away.
• Never an obligation. The minute the game feels like a chore, we will have lost something. So far, so good! The same goes for providing food or snacks: nobody is obligated to bring anything, but we always have far too much to eat because people like bringing baked goods and other snacks.
• If you are a middle-aged married parent, you probably know how hard it can be to make new friends. Through this game, we all have more friends than we did before. This has been profoundly worth it. 

After all these months, many of the player characters are mighty heroes with potent magic. They are playing a leading role in managing the factions of the setting, and the whole setting is now responding to their choices and interventions. Although we started light-hearted with zero background lore, the players are now deeply invested in the game world, earnestly debating the fate of the realm. It evolved naturally. Basically, I've been living the fantasy role-playing game dream as I haven't since I was in college. Without my son's D&D game, I would not have been able to reach these players. It is just possible that when our kids head off to college, this gaming group of parents will outlive theirs.

I've heard a lot from older gamers returning to the hobby in middle age, but I haven't heard of others who had the experience of meeting other middle-aged gamers through their kids. Let me know if you have had a version of this.