My wife and I occasionally (every couple months or so) baby-sit/host game night for the two sons of our friends; the kids’ ages are 9 and (just barely) 13.  We’ve been doing this for a couple years or so, and generally have a blast…we’ve played all sorts of board games from Cribbage to Pictionary to Turbo Cranium.  The last year or so, we’ve also mixed in a lot of the miniature games like Blood Bowl and Warhammer 40,000 (I have a lot of cool, painted miniatures, the kids see them and then want to know how to play and blam! They’re hooked).  However, the kids have never expressed interest in playing any RPGs, and I haven’t pushed anything on ‘em.

So this weekend, the older kid wanted to know if I owned “that game we saw people playing at the game shop” the last time we were playing WH40K.  We had gone to a hobby shop to use the big wargame tables and cool terrain, and there had been a gaming group playing D&D in the background.  Yes, I had the game, and showed it to them, but I had nothing prepared and I didn’t want to bore them explaining the entire RPG-thing PLUS all the rules (these are not kids known for their looong attention spans).  Instead I steered them towards a game I bought a year ago but had never yet played: InSpectres.  My (non-gamer) wife also played.

I re-familiarized myself with the instruction book while rattling off enough info for them to start thinking up character concepts.  When they asked, “Do we have to draw pictures of our characters?” I was able to buy more time by answering in the affirmative (brilliant stroke, that).

Then we got down to it…only a couple minutes after they’d reached the point of getting restless.

Cast of Characters:

Kid #1 (age 13) had “Ghost;” an ex-hitman, who talked kind of whispery like William Forsythe or Clint Eastwood.  His talent was “hitman.”  The group decided he would be the CEO.

Kid #2 (age 9) had “Professor Wonkapants;” an ex-bank robber.  His talent was “bank robber.” The group decided to make him the CFO.

My wife’s character was “Anita Awesome;” an ex rocket-scientist. Her talent was “contortionist.” She was the Chief of Operations.  She let the kids mostly lead the narrative.

The franchise was set in San Francisco (even though we all live in Seattle).  They decided they were an established organization but started with only ten dice, none of which were put into the Bank (they thought it was silly to risk losing dice, even for the ability to use them with every roll). They wanted to specialize in “demons.” 

One note: while I tried to explain the Confessional before-hand, no one made use of it during the game.  The kids don’t watch the kind of reality TV shows that use confessionals (they like American Idol, not Big Brother), and for first-time role players already dealing with foreign concepts (no board/miniatures!) this particular meta-device wasn’t useful.

I started the game as a reporter from Channel 87 “The Paranormal Network” interviewing the players as to how they got into this line of work, etc.  I was startled when they spontaneously decided that they’d been doing this kind of thing for 30, 25, and 15 years! Turns out the hitman was 60 (but in good shape), the professor was in his 50s (and bald), and the rocket scientist was 40ish.  I have never played a game with people who wanted to create “older” characters, so this was kind of interesting/surprising to me.

I rolled randomly for the kind of client: a nervous college student who’d seen mysterious lights in his frat house.  The lights were keeping the students awake and interfering with their studies (yeah, right), and they didn’t know what to do about it. 

The kids took the lead and immediately began grilling me (in the role of the college student)…apparently they figured there could be a reasonable explanation for the lights.  They also cast serious doubts on the veracity of the client (is he crazy? Is he just stupid?).  Eventually they decided he was telling the truth: he didn’t know what the lights were and had come to the InSpectres for help; they decided to check out the house.

Once there, their low Contact scores precluded getting useful information by interviewing the students (they had put most of their skill dice into Athletics and Technology in order to shoot guns and shoot hi-tech guns respectively).  However, as soon as they figured out they could compensate by inventing/pulling random hi-tech equipment, they went to town with their tech rolls!  A giant tarp-like cloth was pulled over the whole house to simulate night-time (to track the lights), special ghost-seeking laser-light contact lenses were dawned, solar-powered demon analyzers, and containment bubbles that “had no effect on human flesh” were discovered, and with these marvelous inventions they managed to start “piecing together” the mystery. Here’s what they “discovered:”

The lights had begun showing up after several sorority sisters had visited for an evening and brought a Ouija board to play. One of the students had been missing since the lights began. The lights only appeared in certain rooms and seemed to be beckoning folks to the basement.  A student had been possessed by a daemonic entity, and was now only semi-human…he was incorporeal but appeared as a “blue man” when looked at with the correct technology.  The lights were caused by the student’s ghostly cries for help. The demon needed to be separated from the student in order to bring the student back to the material world safe and sound.

Basically, as GM I was relegated to the role of simply arbitrating what skills people would roll for various tasks.  Because they continued to roll well, the players did most of the narration.  I didn’t try to rein in their imaginations, but just tried to coordinate all their ideas into a cohesive whole. My main contribution was at the end of the mission.

With just a couple franchise dice left, they horribly blew a role to use a machine that was supposed to suck the demon out of the kid into a huge bell-shaped chamber.  I ruled that the device separated the student and demon, but both were sucked into the bell jar, and both were now material…in other words, the student was in immanent danger of being eaten by a large blue demon.  However, with some quick thinking, some deft contortions (don’t ask), and some expert marksmanship, they were able to tranq the demon, rescue the kid, and capture the demon in a containment bubble.

The end result: the InSpectres accomplished their mission (got enough franchise dice), the players all had a blast, and the kids were absolutely sold…and I mean SOLD.  They insisted on playing a second mission Saturday evening, and then played two more missions Sunday morning both before breakfast.  The 13 year old wanted to try his hand at being the game moderator and I was happy to turn over the reins to him and put on a “player hat.”  The games ran just as good, and by the time we took them home, the 9 year old had declared InSpectres was his new favorite game, and wished that he could play it every weekend.  And maybe he will…the 13 year old called me later to get instructions on how to download the pdf!

Things I learned:

- InSpectres is just as fun and easy to run (and with as little prep-time) as advertised. Three “non-gamers” were able to get the hang of it almost immediately.
- The game can be pretty over-the-top fun (one mission involved rescuing a kidnapped Governor Schwartzenegger from another dimension, where he was being held by a demon that wanted his pet demon good luck charm back).
- The kids were exceptionally creative and inventive.  The 9-year old especially wanted to draw every invention he could come up with (he also drew the office/base of the franchise and several self-portraits); in the end, he never really used his “bank robber” skills
- Likewise, I was surprised that the kids displayed a fairly strong lack of bloodthirstiness.  They almost always attempted to knock-out, capture, or otherwise subdue their opponent, rather then kill him. The only things to die in our series was the giant mutant alligator in Mission 2 (it ate a rocket that otherwise would have blown up in the faces of the heroes) and an alien parasite in Mission 4 that had to be burned so it would not spread (and actually, I as a player initiated the whole burning concept).  Even the hitman would rather knock people out with a tranq gun, although he routinely threatened people with his guns rather then attempt Contact rolls.  This from the kid who was sniping people on his Xbox 360 with the latest version of Splinter Cell when I picked him up.
- The kids REALLY LIKED that their characters couldn’t die unless they wanted to.  I always felt in past games that the fear of death was necessary to heighten the tension of the experience.  These kids needed no such fear to be absolutely amped throughout each and every game.  At the very end of Mission 3, while escaping through a dimensional portal with the California governor, the Professor blew a roll at the GM suggested his leg got caught in the doorway and bitten off by the angry demon.  The 9 year old player felt this was perfectly fair and was enthused that he got to design (and draw) a new bionic leg for his character.  He and his GM brother worked out its moderate special abilities before the next mission…and even worked in complications/malfunctions for it during Mission 4.
- Stress Rolls were absolutely necessary for balancing the game and keeping the threat level amped.  Our franchise dice for the missions went: 15, 25, 30, and 35.  After each of the first three missions, we found the characters needing longer and longer vacation stints, but this was needed to a) reduce the franchise cards from helping complete the missions too fast, and b) keeping down the number of franchise dice getting added to the various cards. Plus we had a blast describing the gibbering wrecks our characters would morph into over the course of the game.  I set the tone in the first two missions by never calling for a Stress check except in the face of some supernatural horror, and keeping them all between one and three dice.  Even so, none of the agents ever scored a single Cool die until Mission 4 (and that was my character!), and often our characters would be running with several 0 stats by mission’s end.  However, we rarely exhausted all the dice in our cards, and never dipped into the Bank even once (though we did add dice to the Bank with after the initial start-up).

The boys would really like to play InSpectres again, but they also want to try several other RPGs, especially D&D, DeadLands, and Call of Cthulhu.  I am happy I was able to introduce some new players to the joy of role-playing but I’m nervous that any of these “cooler” games could possibly live up to expectations…they all seem so clunky and complicated compared to InSpectres!  I did try to explain the difference in play style (that there’s less player input, for example) but they still want to give these other games a try.  I’ve already decided I will pre-gen characters, based on their specifications, rather than wasting huge chunks of time with CharGen.  Also, I’ll go ahead and institute a “no player death” ground rule (maybe maiming at 0 hit points?) to keep character death off the board.  Any other suggestions for making clunking games with cool backgrounds fun?

By the way…did I mention this was the first RPG I’ve run/played in more than a year, and the first one I’ve run in real life (not on-line) since the year 2000 or so?  Thank you InSpectres!   And thanks to my wonderful players!

I don't have much more to add than that this helped inspire my purchase of Inspectres. I'd previously heard lots about it, but actual play writeups are really what get me excited about the game.

Heh heh. Yeah, I'm downloading the Startup Edition now, to see how it works out.

That was a great report. The bank robber is the CFO, heh.

Rock ON!

I'm so so curious about how you managed Stress rolls so that they didn't result in lots of Cool.  That was my serious issue the last time I ran, and you clearly had it under control.  Do you have a sense of the breakdown of how many 1s, how many 2s, how many 3s (relative to each other) you were demanding?

My experience: I've only run it the once. In that single three PC game, only one player got a single cool point, and I gave them a lot of Stress checks. (Not too many though, since they did end with a profit of 2-3 dice after the adventure was over and they'd bought back their stats).
I think just over half the checks I asked for were 2's, and most of the rest 1's - I only used 3's right at the very end. Most of the 1's came early on, so that if any players did get Cool, they'd get it then.

From the probabilities, I wouldn't have thought two many Cool points would occur. Has this happened often, Tony, or was it an isolated incident?

I would have liked a better guide in the rulebook to when to use Stress, though - something like Agon or PTA's budget for how many stress you can inflict.

Darren wrote: From the probabilities, I wouldn't have thought two many Cool points would occur. Has this happened often, Tony, or was it an isolated incident?

You're not the only one, Tony. I run into the same issue and as GM, try to compensate by simply piling on oodles of Stress, all the time.

Best, Ron

Tony -- sorry to take so long getting back to you, but I haven't been checking the Forge recently (been working on a couple RPG projects) and thought this thread had died!

With regard to the number of stress dice rolled...well, it's been more than two months since the game session, and we haven't seen the kids since (though we are seeing them tomorrow; perhaps we'll be on for another game of InSpectres!).  But if memory serves the ration of 1-2-3 dice stress rolls was about 20%-45%-35%.  We'd warm up with a couple 1 dice rolls just to start the chills, then move into 2-dicers as kind of "standard," then hit 3-dicers when they really upped the ante on their scary narration. 

Thing is, the kids rolled pretty lousy on their stress rolls. I mean, we called for rolls when they were already stressed out/scared. Then knowing that blowing the roll would cost 'em...well, it was like negative psychic reinforcement or something.  They'd just blow the rolls and get on bad streaks.  Oddly enough, when "rolling to succeed" in some task, they had much handier time...thus leading them to narrate more often in the game.

I've often found kids anticipation of events to be a powerful influence in determining event outcomes. I still remember putting a quarter in a gumball machine for an 7 year old girl and asking, "what color do you want?" She said, "Blue, please." I said okay, turned the crank...and out came a blue gumball.  My wife thought that was pretty crazy, but I find this kind of thing par for the course.

Anyway...that's just my experience.  If we played more, I'm sure they'd eventually earn some Cool dice.

This makes me want to try it for my 10 and 7 year old, plus maybe a few of their friends. Awesome post, Landon.

TonyLB wrote: I'm pretty sure that there's something funky in the mathematics (with one point of cool being way more powerful than just "take one less stress die before you roll") but as I'm the only one who's encountered it in practice, I basically figure I must have done somethin' wrong.

Hey folks,

This thread began back in April. Although every contribution has been a good post, it's also time to let the thread reside in its proper time-frame. So, no more posting to it, please.

Best, Ron