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Sebastian, my 7yo, read the back of my big Pendragon book.  He explained it to me last night at dinner.  "It's like Universalis," he said, "only you have to have one character and it has to be a knight.  Also one person has to be the 'game master,' who tells what happens, and you tell how your knight responds.  Can we play it?"

Elliot, who's almost 4, said, "um, a grownup should be the game master." He has a great, matter-of-fact little voice and he nodded solemnly to let me know he'd been weighing it out.  "It should be you."

I about died of joy + cuteness.

But no way we're playing Pendragon, I mean come on.

"Tell you what," I said.  I took down the dice and scared up some 3x5 cards.  I've been toying with this mechanic in my head and this seemed like as good a time as any.  "You'll roll a bunch of d6s, like this many, depending on what your knight does.  I'll roll a d4, a d6 or a d8, depending on how serious a challenge it is.  Every die of yours that comes up less than or equal to - you know this symbol, less than or equal to?  Cool! - anyway if I roll a 3, all of your 1s, 2s and 3s are Hits.  Sound good?"

"Sure..." Sebastian said.

"Now if you get three or more Hits, that's 'you win victory.' If you get two Hits, that's 'you can buy victory.'  If you get one Hit, that's 'you can buy a reroll.'  If you get no Hits, that's 'you can double-buy a reroll.'  Sound good?"

"What's it mean, 'double-buy'?  Plus this is boring, can we just play already?"

"In a sec, in a sec, we have to make your knights."  And I was going - you think this is boring, you oughta see Pendragon!

I made a little character sheet on a 3x5 card: a name slot; two pairs of opposed personality traits a la Pendragon (Bold-Careful and Kind-Strong); a shield outline to draw in; two Stats (Hale and Alert) with checkboxes beside them for taking damage (that's the "buy" in the resolution mechanic); a very short list of skills (Sword, Shield, Travel, Lore, Hiding - and Shield is probably redundant, I should erase it).

"Do we have to be human knights, or can I be, you know, a knight from mythical times?"

"What do you have in mind?"

"Can I be a shapeshifter?  No actually, can I be a Grugach knight instead?"  (We've been reading the Black Cauldron, and I've told him a bit - as much as I know, really - about Alexander's source material and where his idea for Gurgi came from.)

"Sure!"  I said.

"Can I be a mermaid knight?" Elliot said.

"Well, if you're a mermaid knight, that means the game has to happen in the ocean.  Is that okay with you, Seb?"

"No, not really."

"Can you choose another kind of knight, Elbow?"

"Can I be a Woodland Hobbit knight?"

I was like - a Woodland Hobbit knight!  How cool is that!  So I said "of course!"

I'd already written "Shapeshifter" on Seb's sheet's skill list and added "Grugach" after it.  I wrote "Woodland Hobbit" on Elbow's, then "Invisibility" to match Seb's "Shapeshifter."  Undeveloped magical potential, I thought, and when Sebastian asked, that's what I told him: "shapeshifting is something Grugachs can learn to do, and turning invisible is something Woodland Hobbits can learn to do."  And he was like, "slick!  I can't wait!"

Then was the time to divvy dice.  I told Seb how, then asked Elliot questions and assigned his dice for him.  Here's how:
- Each of the personality pairs has to add up to 3.  Seb chose Bold 1-Careful 2 and Kind 2-Strong 1.
- The two Stats have to add up to 5.  Seb chose Hale 3 and Alert 2.
- Choose one of Sword, Shield, Travel and Lore to be your fave, it gets 3.  Choose one to be your least fave, it gets 1.  The others get 2.  Hiding gets the same as your Careful.  Grugach and Woodland Hobbit get 3 and Shapeshifting and Invisibility get 0.  Seb chose Lore 3 and I forget what else.

Sebastian named his knight Woodthorn.  Elliot named his knight Cauldron-born Woodthing.

Elliot drew a dragon on his shield, then circled everything on his sheet with blue marker.  Sebastian drew three green leaves on a brown field with green specks.  They both stuck the tips of their tongues out of the corner of their mouths while they were coloring their shields, which they learned from Meg.

And then ... we played.  Which good grief if it isn't going to take a whole nother post to tell!

You, my friend, are playing a slightly pervy version of Prince Valiant.

No lie.

Best,
Ron

edit: I invented Prince Valiant?  Sweet!  That makes me happy.

I took a sheet of paper and drew a little squiggly double line at the bottom left, for a road, with some loops around it for trees.  "You two are down here, on this road through the woods," I said.  "Now where are you going...?"

I wrote a list of ten random destination features on a 3x5 card and had each kid roll a d10.  "Fortress" and "cliff," I said.  In the top right of the map, separated from the road by vast blank whiteness, I drew a little fort on a cliff.  "Fort Grimm," I wrote.  "Now why do you have to get to Fort Grimm?  Do you have news they need, or are you carrying medicine, or what?"

"We're warning them of a battle!" Sebastian said.

"But not a bad battle," Elliot said.

"A bad battle!" Sebastian said.

Elliot looked worried.  Uh oh, a bad battle.  Those kids are so cool I can't even tell you.

So their knights made their way up the woodland road.  I rolled on my little table that they came to a town, so I had both kids make a Travel roll: Alert + Travel vs my d8.  Seb got one Hit and Elliot none, so I said, Donjon-style, "okay, Seb, tell me one fact about this town you're coming to."

"It's Laketown!" he said.

So I drew a little oval and some buildings and called it Laketown.  And that's how the game went.  Every time I couldn't think of something, I had them roll Travel or Lore and tell me one fact per Hit.  Turns out there was something in the lake smashing the Laketowners' boats, and since they have to cross the lake to continue on to Fort Grimm, they have to deal with the thing.  Seb contributed out of a roll that Bard of Laketown had seen its face and it was a troll's face, and before we knew it they'd found out (InSpectres-style) that it was a River Troll who'd been made enormous by a curse, and if it ever fails to smash a boat it'll revert to its normal River Troll size (about the same size as a Grugach or Woodland Hobbit.)

We called it a night with the two knights scheming how to make a boat the troll can't smash.

The resolution dice worked just fine.  When they wanted to accomplish something, I had them roll all their appropriate dice, including the personality dice when they did something Bold, Careful, Kind or Strong.  The roll told us whether they won outright, or had to choose: give up, or else buy victory or another chance.  Seb's knight Woodthorn, for instance, tried to shapeshift into a fish to get close to the giant troll, but only got one Hit - Sebastian went back and forth but finally decided to buy the reroll.  He marked one of his Hale boxes to show that he was tired (from now until he rests, whenever he rolls Hale, he swaps in a d8 for one of his d6s).  He won the reroll clean.

At the beginning of every session I'm going to have them add one die each to their character sheets, wherever they want it.  And you can bet that whoever cursed the River Troll will show up in person, sooner or later!  Elliot also wants a dragon, so we agreed that there's one in the Grimm Mountains somewhere.

An observation: Sebastian wants to envision a complete solution and enact it start to finish, instead of trying something and building on its success (or making the best of its failure).  It's really fun to watch his problem-solving muscles work, but the game doesn't reward extensive planning sessions.  I expect he'll get the hang of it, but if he starts to find it frustrating I'll have to reexamine the resolution mechanic.

Another: Collaborating genuinely across such age gaps isn't easy.  It's easiest for me, of course, what with the wisdom of maturity and all, plus the game's Techniques actively take power away from me and give it over to the kids.  It's very hard for Sebastian to collaborate with Elliot, because Elliot wants an airplane to land to take them across the lake and Sebastian's got a nice, strong vision - which, among other things, no airplanes.  To Elliot's credit, he suggests things without getting attached to them, so when Sebastian vetoes his airplane as setting-inconsistent he doesn't take it personally.  Sebastian's more frustrated by it than he is.

A third: Elliot wants to avoid in-character conflicts - he's only a teeny kid, after all - but Sebastian wants 'em and wants 'em to challenge him.  He wants something to be at stake and he wants his character to win, absolutely, but he doesn't want it to be a giveaway.  I think that's wicked cool.

-Vincent

QuoteSebastian, my 7yo, read the back of my big Pendragon book. He explained it to me last night at dinner. "It's like Universalis," he said, "only you have to have one character and it has to be a knight.

Pendragon is like Universalis, only with one character and a GM...

THAT my friend...is wicked cool :-)

Sounds great fun. Now where can I borrow some kids from? (Ooops, that sounds bad).

Simon

I've been roleplaying with my children (ages 5,4,2) using the Pool, which has been working quite well.  I've had to enforce a bit of "my guy-ism" to avoid the problem of the big sister dictating all the action.  ("No, Arianna.  You can't say what Isaac's guy is doing.")  But, in general, I've been trying to allow a large amount of freedom to my little players, and they have been doing quite well.  We also took a sheet of posterboard and drew our provisional map (including the blank areas that we will continue to fill in during play).  And, of course, we have some character sketches, including two of the monstrous, four-armed, fire-breathing Fiends.  For some reason, the children enjoy cutting off all the arms off a Fiend before they finish it in combat.  I'm not quite sure what to think about this....

In general, Vincent's observations sync with what I've seen, but I hope that, over time, the children will learn more advanced techniques (like the infamous Kubasik "trouble-magnet" PC).  For now, they are excited to be playing a game with me, and that's good enough for me.

Seth Ben-Ezra
Great Wolf

Quote from: lumpleyCollaborating genuinely across such age gaps isn't easy.  It's easiest for me, of course, what with the wisdom of maturity and all, plus the game's Techniques actively take power away from me and give it over to the kids.

Age gaps can be tough to handle (something I experienced with my niece and nephew, whether it's Shadows or Pokemon Monopoly), which makes an adult moderator nearly required. I'm glad to see your game giving power to the children; people (kids, especially) are imaginative by nature, and by forcing them to be active (rather than the traditional player character as reactive agent).

So what am I saying? Bravo. Oh, and the bad battle bit is priceless.

I enjoyed reading Vincent's experience, so I thought I'd share mine.  The other day, I ripped him off and had some fun doing it.  I used large chunks of Vincent's ideas, modified them to fit our situation and started playing a little game with my son, Garrett.  He's nine.  At 27 months, my daughter's not yet up to the challenge, so I had only one kid...but I'm thinking about arranging a game with a couple of G's friends.

We were in no way focussing on knights, so I generalized some stuff.  I also just changed some stuff for the fun of it.  I had two sets of opposed personality traits that each got three points spent, just like Vincent.  My pairs were: Daring & Trust and Caring & Just.  And then I set up four generic stats: physical, mental, spiritual, and social, that had ten points to allocate.  I figured that the nature of the game would be largely defined by how Garrett allocated those ten points.  I was right, so far.  He chose P4, M4, S1, S1.  And I used the skill system of one three, one one and the rest twos, for the skills: sword, bow, travel, lore, survival.  Garrett and I discussed the breadth of these skills and decided that the names were generalizations and that since most actions had to apply to one of these categories, we'd just figure it out as we went along, but e.g. a fistfight would use the sword skill.

The final difference is that I replaced Vincent's "undeveloped magical potential" with three "Magic Words."  These are words that the character might be able to use magically.  They might be the subject of some magical effect, or they might increase or decrease other magical effects.  If you picked the words fire and time then you might be able to generate magical energy for altering time by setting a forest fire and 'casting' near the blaze, or you might just use it to create a small fire...or whatever.  I tried to emphasize the multi-faceted role that the MWs played when discussing it with my son.  Also, I specified that it could be any word at all, but that the might be hard to apply.  Garrett chose Water, Jump and Life.

I also stole the list of place-words idea.  We each came up with a list of ten words that might have to do with places that our game could visit.  We ended up with a few adjectives and many nouns.  So I sorted them that way and we brainstormed a few to fill the list out to ten adjectives and 20 nouns.  I was a little dubious about a few of his words, but I took them and figured it would be our challenge to make them make sense.  We ended up with: A) orcish, evil, magic, misty, dark, haunted, holy, adventure(?), dangerous, high N) castle, fence, farm, plain, woods, cliff, fortress, town, lake, river, road, chasm, hills, crypt, animals, babies(?), mountain, bridge, pond, swamp.  The idea was that when needed, I'd use the chart as a random place/event generator.  But I was really dreading (in an amused way) an encounter titled, Adventure Babies!

And then we started much like Vincent describes.  I started a little road drawing on the lower left of a sheet of paper and we randomly generated a goal.  It turned out to be Misty Chasm.  (Sadly, I'm not sure how to draw a chasm.)  I asked Garrett why his character was going there and he said he had to deliver a letter.  (This has been a common starting point for our (typically systemless) RPGs over the past couple years.)  I asked, with eyebrows raised "you're delivering a letting to Misty Chasm?"  And with no delay, he informed me there was a town on the edge of the chasm and he was to deliver to the mayor.  So a few little house icons entered the map next to the chasm and we started.

The system of die mechanics was just lifted completely intact from Vincent's note.

But it was a slow start.  I gave him a travel roll, he got a bunch of hits, I asked him to narrate what his character found.  Blink.  Blink.  "Uh...a horrible smelling...misty fog..."  OK, does anything attack you out of the fog?  "No."  Does it make you sick?  "No."  OK, so I roll a d20 and a 20 means swamp, so I draw in the stinky mist swamp with a path leading out the other end.  So nothing happened and we moved on.

Actually, I left something out.  The very first thing the boy did was to try to jump all the way to the end.  Jump is one of his magic words, so I gave him two dice for daring and a die for Spiritual, and I rolled a d4.  He didn't get any ones, like I did, so he simply failed.  He asked what would have happened if he made it and when I told him he'd have delivered the letter, he was appalled.  I explained two things.  First, if that's not the kind of story you want to tell/play, then don't!  And second, that's not a big deal...we'd just start with a new sheet of paper and nothing really would have been lost.  I think the first point took only very slowly as we were playing later, but he accepted the second and we moved on.

He wanted to roll again, got only one hit, and told me that the road curved.  OK, I drew a ~90-degree bend to the left.  "Not that much!"  Sorry kid, you only got one hit :-)  I expected him to balk, but he thought that was really cool!

So he rolls again and gets no hits.  I roll Dark Mountain and draw it on the map with the road starting up the mountain.  I ask if he's being careful and he says "oh yeah!  I'm not letting any mountain trolls get the drop on me."  So of course, the mountain troll that came grumbling out of the cave at his approach was easy to spot.  I really expected him to try to kill it...he's a violent little cuss (a boy after my own heart...).  So he draws his sword and backs around it.  A roll with two hits allows him to buy a success so he endures some mental fatigue but avoids a confrontation.

Things are still going slowly.  He hasn't warmed up to narrating a story and I'm not sure how to engage him.  At this point I'm not really looking forward to just generating random locations for the next hour.  But it starts to get better.

I suggest that it's been all day and the sun is going down and he decides to press on.  OK, the stars and moon are providing some light, so that's fine.  He rolls again, gets a bunch of hits (maybe five) and describes the path going through some woods, and coming to a large clearing with a giant oak in the middle.  Hey...that's cool.  But wait.  He also hears tiny high-pitched laughing.  He can't find the source upon cursory examination, so he goes to sleep.  I narrate a surreal dream in which he's rowing a boat across a big lake and fish are jumping out parallel to his travel and fading into the water as soon as he tries to focus on them.  There was more, but basically I was trying to weird him out.  He wakes up to find sixtysix little laughing mice crawling all over his body.  Together we narrate him jumping up and sweeping them off and discovering that they follow him in a harmless swarm right up to the edge of the overhang of the Oak's foliage.  It was a nice period of interactive narration and I think the start of him getting into it.

He stopped the game at this point to ask for two rule changes.  The first is that he only gets to narrate one fact for every two hits on the travel roll.  It turns out that he most likes defining a little bit and making me surprise him within the context of his initial specifications.  OK, that's fine.  The other rule request, which I didn't like but which we resolved amicably, was that he could use his hits to roll on my table instead of making stuff up.  Once I figured out what he wanted, he was happy to just get to be the one to roll and interpret the results.  So we ended up with an alternative distribution of game-duties without changing the rules.

We had one more set of events before calling it a night.  G narrated a bend in the road again and rolled babies.  Babies!  I asked him why are there babies at this bend in the road.  I was stuck.  Again, without pause, "because there's a town here that's been sacked and the babies without families have been put outside to die.  Hot damn!  That's pretty gruesome.  So I asked him what he wanted to do about it.  "Nothing."  Nothing?  "Well, it's none of my business."  OK, but you notice that one of the crying babies...one who's next to two others that have already died of exposure looks just like Maddy (his eight-month old half sister).  So he stops and tries to soothe the baby...but he can't.  (Caring, Social, and Lore are all one and he gets no hits and doesn't want to waste his stats double-buying a reroll that will also fail.)  So he enters the town and kills four of the raiders that are hanging around hurting people and stealing stuff, in two seperate encounters.  One time, he attacks three of them, but from surprise, rolls very well and we take turns narating the battle blow by blow.  Even knowing that he's going to win, it was fun for both of us and I got to surprise him by killing one of the raiders with a peasant-driven pitch fork from behind.

And that's where we stopped.  He's still in town, there are more raiders than he can reasonably hope to cope with, there are dying babies out on the road, and he feels invested but desperate.  We've discussed it on three seperate to/from school car rides so far, but we were unable to get back to it last night.

Either with general players, or more specifically with kids, I'd be interested to hear experiences in increasing the comfort level with active narration.  I think out biggest hurdle was getting G into the driver's seat and I wonder if I fumbled it or if it just takes a bit of practice.  Maybe an hour (or whatever it was) is just a cheap investment to get going.

Thanks Vincent...maybe we'll have to give KPfS a try.  ;-)

Chris

Damn it, this thread make me want to hurry up and have children already.

I have a co-worker who tends to do this sort of thing with his sons, so I'll have to ask what system he uses. He's told me some really cute stories over lunch that sounded like a Gamist take on this stuff.

Chris!  Way cool.

Sebastian had trouble with more than 1 or 2 facts too.  I had his Lore rolls just max out at 3 facts, but even that was too many.  We ended up mostly collaborating on "his" facts, with me suggesting things and him having final say.  Making it 1 fact per 2 hits makes lots of sense to me.

I dig your magic words.  If in the future anybody plays a wizard, that's how I'll work it.

Here's my unasked-for suggestion for the stinky mist (or whatever): make it into a roll.  "Do you get out of the stinky mist safely?  Roll Physical + Travel, I'll roll a ... d6."  d6!  Pretty scary for stinky mist.  Wonder what's up?  If he wins victory, that's good and you can move on.  If he has to buy victory, figure out then what that means - is he gagging from the smell?  Is it making him sleepy?  Does he have to fight shadowy, misty forms?  And if he loses, same thing, but you'll be looking for a follow-up conflict - shadowy, misty forms push him back and back, how does he want to deal with them?  Or else he passes out and wakes up ... where?

In other words, even when the player's establishing facts, it's the GM's job to provide adversity.  Just be on constant lookout for something to be at stake, and when you spot something, pounce!

But whatever, I'm just blathering.  I think it's wicked cool that you played.  The resolution mechanics work pretty well, don't they?

With luck and not too much homework, we're going to play again tonight!

-Vincent

That's a neat little system you've got there Vincent. Might it be more logical to have fixed target numbers (or whatever you call them in a rollunder system), instead of an opposed die roll? IE, replace deefour with TN 2, deesix with TN 3, and deeeight with TN 4. It would make it easier for Joe Average to play with his kid (needing only deesixes for the wee laddies and lassies), and might knock half a second off of S&H time.

Of course, rolling dice is fun in and of itself. The progeny can't have all the fun, can they?

With luck and not too much homework, we're going to play again tonight!

Do tell. :^)
--Jeff

Jeff:

QuoteMight it be more logical to have fixed target numbers (or whatever you call them in a rollunder system), instead of an opposed die roll?

Yes, yes it might.

This is kind of dorky, but what I really want are three coins, an easy coin, a hard coin, and an in-between coin.  The easy coin would have 4 on one side and 5 on the other, the in-between coin would have 3 and 4, and the hard coin would have 2 and 3.  They could be green, yellow, red!  I'm'a make some for next time.

So yes, we played again.  Instead of preventing the enlarged River Troll from smashing a boat, thus breaking the spell, they lured it into shallow water, caught it in a net, and handed it over to the guards of Laketown.  They pressed on up the river and dealt with some shrunken Forest Trolls - down from ten feet tall to six inches tall - who'd taken over a ruined temple and were going to sacrifice a mouse on its altar.  The kids enjoyed it a lot - they went to bed crowing about how they'd rescued the mouse and talking like the trolls in miniature voices, "we eat squeaker! we eat squeaker and KILL squeaker!"  But it was a bit lackluster for me.  It didn't have the zing that a story oughta, even a story for kids.

I scanned our character sheets and some stuff:
http://www.septemberquestion.org/lumpley/goodknights.html

Before next time we play, I'm going to go over the scenario creation rules in Trollbabe again.  This game's missing something and it might be them.  (Or hey, maybe a conflict map like in that Robin Hood game...?  I'll report later.)

-Vincent

Wow, Vincent. I just want to echo all the "I wanna a kid now" sentiments above. So uhm, I wanna a kid now, too.

Not to reduce your 7yo to a statistic of sorts, but doesn't all this support the whole idea of Simulationism being a learned mode and that Gamism and Narrativism are more natural human inclinations.

Show a kid GURPS and he'll choke. Show him InSpectres and he'll get it right away.

:-)

- W.

Very cool, Vincent. Yes, it appears you have invented a pervy version of Prince Valiant (or Underworld; the coin mechanics are eeriely similar), but that is an immense compliment as far as I am concerned. I also concur with Ralph regarding Sebastian's "summary" of Pendragon... wicked cool. :)

And just to contribute a possible method of between-game improvement:
- Traits probably can't be raised (maybe: might have to think about that in terms of really long-running games), but the 'balance' between each pair can be altered at the end of stories (I could become less Bold in favor of more Careful, for example.)
- Skills and your 'career' rating can be raised like so: At the conclusion of a storyline check skills for improvement in whatever order you like by rolling Nd6 and having all the dice come up greater than or equal to N (where N = the current score).
   Example: I have a Sword skill of 4.  When checking for improvement, I must roll 4d6 and all four dice must come up equal to or greater than 4.  The theoretical, highly unlikely maximum for a skill is thereby set at '7'.
- (Optional) Stats can be raised by rolling for improvement as above, but the improvement check must succeed twice.

If any skill or stat improvement check succeeds, no more checks for improvement are allowed.  No more checks are allowed if all skills and stats have been checked and none improved.

(Optional) You do not have to check every skill -- if you've tried all the skills you think are appropriate for improvement from the last story and none improved, you are not 'forced' to check skills you do not think would or should improve.  Players who opt to stop checking for improvements before success might (for example) get one (and only one) additional try on a stat or skill they've already tried and failed to improve, or some other bennie from the GM.