[InSpectres] Demons in the Dinner Hall

[nyhteg]

There have been a couple of threads in recent memory about running games with/for kids so I thought this might be of interest to someone.

In a nutshell, I ran my second ever game of InSpectres this evening with two of my sons (ages 9 and 7) and it was pretty damn cool.
The previous game was played with my wife and a couple of our friends, all of us well into our mid 30s, and the constrasts were very interesting to observe.

The game with my boys was impressively standard InSpectres stuff and varied hardly at all from the 'grown-up' session.
In summary: Less swearing and dodgy sex references, similar amount of excessive violence, insanity and poop jokes.

I set them off with a 4 die franchise taking on an 8 die job.
This involved them following a strange smell into the kitchens of the local school, where they swiftly discovered that the dinner ladies were a cabal of vampires then set about slaying them with verve, imagination and slapstick comedy a-plenty.
The climax involved catapulting a large portion of highly spiced minced beef into the mouth of an enraged demon using a pair of underpants as the slingshot.

Quality.

They didn't *quite* get the Confessionals, but really enjoyed doing it anyway, and had no trouble whatsoever getting to grips with what was, now I come to think of it, their very first experience of formal roleplaying.
They really went to town on the Technology rolls, too, and came up with all manner of crazy kit at every opportunity, a lot of which even worked the way they'd meant them to.

Now comes the really interesting differences compared to the adults.

The key variation came at the end of the game.
You know that neat aspect of InSpectres which no-one really seems to do until they've played it a couple of times - the whole intra-office tensions, running the business, balancing the books, thing?

They did that straight away.

I go: "So, Joseph, you remember you're the boss of the Franchise. These dice are like your money for the job you just did. You can spend it on holidays to get better from all this damage you both took, or you can save it in the bank here or whatever you like..."
He goes "OK", heals himself, gives his brother like two measly dice to fix up half of his stress, then banks the rest.
Ben was immediately all "What?? You're joking! You get all healed and I'm half dead? You're an evil boss. Right, then! Next time you're surrounded by zombies you can just forget about getting any help from me..!"

How cool is that?

And it wasn't just bickering, they were still playing the game - the mild sense of sibling injustice was entirely real, I guess, but they both knew it was still pretend and took it with good grace.
But the main point is that the adults did not expose that aspect of the game at all in any sense whatsoever.
I think there's a clear Social Contract thing at play in there which might explain that.

And cool thing number two, which again they did with no prompting from me: They set up their own frickin' sequel!

Spontaneously, as we were packing up the dice and gasping in horror at how far past their bedtime it was, they said "so then a really stupid kid in the dinner hall picks up the dead demon's tooth, and his dad's a scientist, so he takes it home and he scans it and it turns into a giant tooth monster we can fight next time, yeah?"

Ah. Makes a father proud, I can tell you.

[Bryan Hansel]

Sounds like Joseph is going to grow up to be a strong business man and hard negotiator.  And it sounds like a really fun play session.  One of my nieces (9) took to the game quickly also, and my mom liked playing it.  Seems like a good intro to RPGing game.
When you say your kids didn't get the confessionals but they enjoyed them, what didn't they get?

[nyhteg]

With the Confessionals they understood the idea of being able to add things into the game in the middle of the action, but not the subtleties really of what that could and couldn't do with that.

They typically came up with either:

a) just normal actions they could have done in the ordinary course of roleplaying ("I want to do something really cool and here it is");
b) a little story about what they wanted someone else to do "I'm going to do this, then they do that which will mean all these other things happen too"; or
c) a mini-game of Fortunately/Unfortunately (eg: character A has just attacked a monster "Unfortunately, he steps on a banana skin and falls over...")

So generally it wasn't an in-character soundbite, but a player description of something they wanted to occur.

This was all a simple matter of me not taking the time to explain it well enough for them up front, of course, but the game didn't suffer from it particularly and we fine-tuned the process as we went.

In the last moments of the game, in fact, they used a confessional to self-generate a climactic final battle (by introducing an enraged, demon headmaster), which was no bad thing at all.

Gethyn