So last night I decided to take the plunge and try to run an RPG for my two stepdaughters, aged 10 and 8.  Thursday nights have become game night for us, and usually we play board games like Risk or Stratego, that kind of thing.  The 10 year old is very smart and mature for her age, loves games, so she was my target audience.  I figured that if she enjoyed it then the chances of the whole family giving it a try was pretty good.  The 8 year old is still very young, but she has a *very* active imagination and I figured that she would get a kick out of playing an elf princess or something like that.  I gotta say that the results were very surprising and the evening turned out better than I thought it would.

First off, I have been planning this for a while and trying to choose a good game to play with them.  Something mechanically simple, but still flexible.  I had recently discovered The Fantasy Trip, and it seemed ideal.  There is a fan revival of the game by a company called Dark City Games and they have developed an even more streamlined version of the rules they are calling Legends of the Ancient World.  It isn’t perfect, but it fit the bill for my needs nicely, and I was planning to wing a lot of it anyway.  As for the adventure to use, I decided that I would make it simple and try to use a solitaire adventure also put out by Dark City Games called The Sorceror's Manor.  I am not a huge fan of solitaire adventures in general, but this one is very well done and I wanted to keep it simple for this first outing.  I added a karma point mechanism that I’ve used in many of my games where I gave them each three gold pirate coins that I get a my FLGS which they could turn in for a reroll  or to miraculously escape from danger.

We started by creating characters, which in Legends/TFT is pretty darned simple.  Choose race, choose to be a hero or wizard, determine Strength, Dexterity, and IQ, pick skills and spells, and pick your equipment.  For dealing with children who are expecting the fun to begin *now*, the blessing of a short character generation process are obvious.  The 10 year old was first.  She decided that she was going to be a human named “Erin” (her name) and at first wanted to be a wizard until I mentioned the possibility that she could be a thief, at which point she said definitively, “I’m a thief!”  She wanted to be smart and fast so we put her extra points into Dex and IQ.  She picked the skills Thief, Traps, and Sword.  She finished the character by choosing a short sword, some light armor, and a small shield.  

Her sister rejected the elf princess idea and decided that she was going to be a “human girl named Jessica” (that changed a few times during the game until she settled on Elizabeth, I think) and that she had orange and red hair.  Oh, and she was a wizard.  She settled on being average Strength and Dex, and above average IQ.  She picked Summon Wolf, Invisibility, and Magic Fist as her spells.  She finished by choosing a dagger, which turned out to be pretty deadly to the monsters as the night wore on.  I rounded out the party with an NPC fighter named ”Thonk”, who was not too bright but strong and good with a sword.  The name “Thonk” was good for giggles the whole night.

Getting started was a bit awkward because they didn’t quite know what to make of it yet, and the lack of a board threw them off (I promised to have a board and miniatures for the next game).  I described them as young heroes in a city whose good king had been killed by his evil brother and now everyone was scared.  Erin asked if her thief was kind of like Robin Hood, and I said yes, which seemed to please her.  I then introduced the beginning text of the adventure, which has the characters going to an abandoned sorceror’s mansion to find treasure.  God bless Erin, she actually asked me, “How does this help the city?”.  I promised that in later adventures we would do that, but for now she and her friends needed to make some money and this was the only opportunity they knew of.  

Once we started playing they really got into it!  They were defeating monsters left and right and screaming when I made my monster noises and when I quickly touched them on the top of their heads when a pair of giant spiders attacked them from the ceiling.  At one point I thought my game was doomed when one of them noticed that “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” was on and they both left the table to watch it.  I am no match for the allure of TV, so I just quietly watched the show with them for a while.  To my utter surprise, after about 10 minutes the 10 year old gets up, turns off the TV, and says “let’s get back to the game!”  I was on GM Cloud 9.  

We played until waaaay past their bedtime (my wife was cool about it) and they cleared out most of the mansion.  They decided to go back to town because both Erin the Thief and Thonk were in pretty bad shape (Erin had already spent her last gold coin to avoid death at the hands of some Serpent Men), but they had uncovered a few subplots and want to go back to the mansion to finish it off.  At one point Erin, exasperated, asks me, “Is there a monster in *every* room?!”.   I, of course, say, “Well, yeah!”  

Some of the notable quotes of the evening:

“Have a nice trip!  See you next fall!”  - Elizabeth the Wizard, tripping a cultist while invisible.  She repeated the joke over and over and over...

“You know we’re making fun of you, right?” - Erin to me, after her sister fakes a big scream

All in all, it was a fun time.  I think that they will want to play again, probably soon.  As a GM I have always been the victim of the kind of paralysis of my expectation that everything that I do has to be perfect.  I don’t run as many games as I should because of it.  I have noticed that I do better when I don’t plan anything and I just have fun with it.  The girls taught me something about gaming last night.  Just have fun with it!


TGA

That's very cute.  Game night is great.

Awww, that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Thanks, guys.  It was pretty cute, actually.  We have played a short session since (the younger one wasn't in the mood to play that night so Erin and I wrapped up some of the adventure's subplots), and I have bought some of the D&D pre-painted minis for them.  They proceeded to make up their own dueling game using the minis, so they are well on their way to becoming full-fledged gamers!  


TGA