I'm running a game for 10 6th graders. Except I'm not. I'm teaching 10 6th graders how to run their own game.

Ok, start at the beginning. Our oldest son is in 6th grade, and the middle school has 45 minutes a day for extra-curricular classes, many run by community members. I'd had in mind that sooner or later Vincent or I would wind up running some sort of gaming club at Seb's school. A few weeks back, Seb met other kids interested in role-playing. Apparently now is the time.

I have 45 minutes, three times a week, and 10 kids who are all 11 or 12 years old. Could be insanity on my part. Could be chaos. Could be zero fun. At first, i thought about running D&D 4e, because that's what Seb and his 4 friends are playing at recess. I bought the book, got about 20 pages in, and said 'no way am I running this, especially for 10 kids, especially especially in 45 minute chunks that are more realistically 30 minute chunks. Now what?'

Now what indeed. What is quick to set up, runs smooth, delivers solid fun, and is good for kids? <a href="http://www.lumpley.com/storming/">Storming the Wizard's Tower, of course. Designed in part for those specs, even. Except what if they start with an indie game that's not even technically out yet, will that set them up poorly for finding games later? No, I don't think so. Plus, playing a game none of them know levels the field for the kids who have never played an RPG before.

What's my goal with this, anyway? I'm gaming plenty right now, so it's not for me. It's kinda for Seb, to give him time and space to play with his friends. And oh hey, it creates a group of kids who know how to play this game!

And then the real Good Idea(tm): I have 6 weeks for this. That's 18 sessions of 45 minutes. Less for half days and other weirdness. So call it 14 sessions. That's not enough time at all for me to run a game for a group that big. Right. So, teach them to run, so when I'm not here, they have a community of 10 kids who know how to play and how to run for each other. That's the new plan; teach them to play, teach them to run, give them a playable book at the end of the program. Now my goals are clear.

We did character creation on Tuesday. 10 kids, from all sides of the social culture of 6th grade, including two girls. About half have role-playing experience, another three or so have some theater experience, two have never done anything like this but it sounded fun. (They got to pick their top three classes. I'm got the list - this was the top pick for all but one of them). The character creation worked like a charm, even with a little muddling on my part at the beginning. Today I'm going to break them into three groups and each group will make a monster. On Tuesday, we fight monsters. I'll keep you posted.

This sounds like a great social experiment.

I'll be keeping an eye on this thread to see how it develops.

V

My "regular Job" is teaching middle school, and I have both used RPGing in the classroom, and after our chess club fell apart, I turned it into a game club and started it back up again (offering lots of table top wargames and RPGs).  -So, I bet we'll have a lot in common by the time your experience is done.  Just expect that as soon as these kids get going, the first thing they will want to do is kill each other and everything that moves...  Of course we were never so precocious when we were first role playing:-)

I would say 10 players will be tough.  I ran a super watered-down RPG in my English class a few years ago.  I limited it to a few characters ran in turn by several students each.  This seemed to work.  I used the game as a vessel to teach literary concepts such as plot, antagonists, foreshadowing, character development, etc.  The cool part was that every student had to make a "mini adventure" that took place on the stone age island we were playing on (this was a system I cooked up using a D6, "roll under your stat" sort of thing).  Though it was a nightmare trying to get the kids to put something together (I had provided them with a fill-in the blank, starter outline) they had SO MUCH FUN playing each other's games.

I too will be loooking to hear more about your undertaking!

Louis Hoefer
www.wholesumentertainment.com

Making monsters didn't go as well. Lots of me running from group to group trying to explain things, plus another girl joining so catching her up to speed. There's one more boy who wants to join, but that would be 12 kids, and reaaaaally pushing my limits of crowd control. I'm thinking I might do-overs on Tuesday, using an over-head projector to walk everyone through the process, then have the kids fight that monster in groups of three.

We've got 3 warriors, 4 scholars, 1 ranger and 1 treasure hunter. I'm going to have to make decent mixes of characters while keeping the player dynamics in mind - crazy.

One of the girls is a tiny little thing but tough-as-nails and wants everyone to know it. She also cheated her initial roles to get straight sixes. Being strong and powerful matters very much to her. I caught her on the last roll, Strength, and said "Keep the 3, Dani." I let her know I know she cheated, that's not really cool, or even really relevant in this game, because everyone has strengths. I also let it slide - I remember being 11 and wanting to be powerful, and I'm willing to bargain with her for that. She was so sad at the prospect of not being a warrior, I let her re-roll the Strength if she would re-roll another stat as well. She rolled a 5 for Strength and took the 2 in something else, and I think she got the point.

I should also say that despite the 'didn't go as well', all of them had usable monsters by the end of the session. A surprising number of the monsters involved Ice as an element. I'm going to have to finish up a few things, make sure all the monsters are clear, before we meet again.

This is great to read. Very inspiring.

You may want to consider going back and doing certain lessons/stages a second time. Maybe no immediately. For example, if monster creatiuon didn't quite turn out the way you wanted, do it again, but this time add a twist, such as … eh … I'm making this up, it may not be suitable … have everybody start making a monster, but half way through you have everyone switch creations, forcing them to finish each other's monsters. The point is, doing it again but a little differently may not only be necessary but also great fun.

The more I mull it over, the more I think that making one monster as a group on Tuesday might be the way to go.

Game points of interest:
Rolling a d6 and then translating that in to a different and sometimes higher number helped the players not get too bogged down in the 'is this a good roll' question. Examples - Dave rolled 5,4,2,4,1,6 and got to translate that into 5,5,4,5,3,6. Dom rolled 2,6,2,3,2,5 and translated that into 3,6,3,4,3,5. Alexis rolled 3,3,1,5,4,6 and translated that into 4,4,3,5,5,6. All the characters wind up on a fairly level playing field.

They *LOVED* picking stuff 'for free' from the lists - 3 each from the two lists for their character type, one from one of the other lists, one from any of the lists. One boy picked 'fine clothes' and a compass, one girl has spells like mad, and one boy asked if 'first hand account' meant that if they met a monster, he could use that to know how to fight it - which he can. The characters they made are ones I'd like to play!

They all got the 'leave open as many boxes as you have hit points' much faster than I did, so that was interesting.

Social points of interest:
Watching these kids make what they want out of the game is cool. There is no Archer type, but the boy who chose ranger wrote that on his sheet and took stuff that supports his concept. The girl who wants to play an elf went as far as she could toward that. The boy who has never spoken much at all is interacting with peers and making a power-warrior.

I suspect I'm going to re-up after the 6 weeks are finished.

Fighting monsters went spectacularly well! I checked over the monsters the kids had made, and 90% of them were legal and fine. I broke the class into groups of 3 and had them take on a monster drawn randomly by a kid not in the battle. Three PCs are pretty much going to eventually take out any 1 XP monster, but there were some close calls. There was a great dwarf warrior with a spiked club who battered one PC down to the ground and was moving in for the killing blow when the PC managed to get his sword up and gut the dwarf instead!

The dice mechanic is great: you roll for your stat (white dice), plus attack bonus (red dice), plus defense bonus (blue) and any special condition (green). Then you compare combinations:
My stat (white dice), plus attack bonus (red dice) vs Your stat (white dice), plus defense bonus (blue)
Your stat (white dice), plus attack bonus (red dice) vs my stat (white dice), plus defense bonus (blue)
Etc
Some kids got it right away, some got it by the end of Day Two of fighting monsters.

I'm not sure if I've got this straight.  Each group contains 3 kids, who each control one character, and they take turns hitting a monster controlled by no one?  They just roll the monster's dice every time they roll their own to see if they get hit back?  And every kid in the room is in one of these 3 groups?  And you just facilitate?

Oh! Good catch. I ran the monster, and the 3 kids who were 'on' fought that monster. The rest of the kids shadowed the 'on' group, figuring out what their dice would be, rolling, and tracking dice. I had the battle flow chart up on the over-head projector and a translucent red glass bead to mark where we were in the battle. After the first monster, when everyone had seen how it worked on the over-head, everyone one gathered around the table for the next two sets of 'on' kids and their monsters, so everyone could see the monsters dice. That was Tuesday.

On Thursday, we had some kids out sick, so we broke into two groups and Seb ran monsters for one group to practice on and I ran monsters for the other group.

Social notes:
There's a kid in the class, Laura, who is a bit difficult to control - she's boisterous and enthusiastic and highly imaginative, but has trouble modulating her energy. Some of the kids have difficulty dealing with her. I was running for her and 4 boys, and there were some heavy hits into the party. She was the only spell-caster, with healing spells. After the first monster, I suggested we split the group up, and two boys asked her to join them, since they were injured and she could heal them. I know it was in character, but even that much of seeing her as an asset rather than a distraction was good. They did a little town scene where she pulled off her spell and healed them, then they decided she should run a monster for them while I was running a monster for the other boys. I was pretty pleased by that.

After school on Friday, Dominic, one of the kids in the class, grabbed a neighbor kid who's not in the group and came by the house. They were looking for Seb, wondering if he could play with them. It wasn't a good time, but Dominic saying "You did say the class was so we could play on our own, so that's why I'm asking, and can we play next week?" was awesome.

The action is exciting enough that kids who aren't participating at that moment watch (and anticipate their turn) rather than wandering off?  Nice!  That sounds like my favorite videogame moments (I normally don't like VGs), where I'm cheering my buddies on as they pound each other in some fighting game.  I wonder if your kids have similar experiences that Wizard's Tower is tapping into...

Thanks for sharing this. Sounds like an astounding success to me.

Meguey wrote:
I know it was in character, but even that much of seeing her as an asset rather than a distraction was good.

Update:
A wonderful thing happened when I taught them town creation last week. Their minds unlocked from school completely.

I had each child make a town, which involves naming it, determining the geography of the town, what it produces and trades, who it's neighbors are, and how it's society functions. Some of the kids were off and running. Others, not so much.

-Dani, a girl who has lots of desire to be a badass character but not a lot of desire to do 'school stuff' like sitting and writing, asked if we got to kill monsters today, and then asked if she could just draw her town. "Sure!" I left her to draw, and went to help other kids. When I checked in with her later, she'd drawn a fairly standard fantasy map, complete with a key to where the weaponshops were, and the wizards, and so on and so on. But what stood out was all the spots marked 'wizard', and the line of islands that covered half the map. "Woah, Dani. It looks to me like your island townsfolk train wizards!" "Yeah! That's why there are so many of them here. And they have massive defenses around their islands..."

-David, who is so painfully shy he didn't speak to me for almost the whole of 2nd grade, couldn't think of anything. I asked him what sort of landscape he thought was cool. "Volcanoes." "Ok, cool. Do you want your town to live outside the volcano, or inside?" "Inside. They mine stuff." "What sort of stuff?" "Rubies. From in the volcano." I looked at him, all excitement. "David, that's awesome! Your town lives on a series of ledges inside a volcano and they haul rubies up out of it to trade? That's very cool." He smiled "Yeah, and diamonds, too." Then he started writing.

And when they got to the part about who their neighbors were, they looked at each other. And then we sketched the world on the white board. We've got mountains and canyons and two kinds of forests and swamps and islands and a volcano and a desert. I very nearly could have left the room at that point. They were all deeply engaged in imaginary space that they had made. It was fantastic.

On Friday, David volunteered to catch a new boy up to speed with character creation and monster making. The teacher had left the map on the board. We made monsters that somehow threatened our towns, and three kids volunteered to be the first GMs and run their towns. Tomorrow we play.

Right before Winter Break, I gave each of the 12 kids a bound copy of the manuscript. When we came back last week, I asked how many had looked at it over break - around 9 had. How many had read it? Around 5. Several had their copies with them, one girl (Dani) asked me a question about something before I even started. They had good feedback - areas where they wanted more clarity, a request for more art, praise for the writing style. It was good and useful info.

The best comment was "This doesn't tell you what to do, it tells you how to do it. Like, I could play this with some of my friends at home." I pretty much felt like I'd succeeded right there. Three boys wanted to make new characters, so they went off to photocopy the sheets. When they got back, we were in a conversation about what else could be done with this game. "What if the wizard was an alien? How about if we were all animals? Could we make it be in the dinosaur age?" Yes, yes, and yes.

Then I laid it out for them, what the next session would bring if I continued the group - more focus, more story-building, less smashing monsters non-stop. Two groups grabbed the idea.
Dylan, Spencer, Parker - First Contact, StWT set in space! They are all putting the lists and character types together, then Spencer and Parker will be the space marines with Dylan as the GM.
Josh, Seb, David, and Laurana - Harn, StWT set in the Artemis Fowl world of criminal masterminds and faeries. I'm not sure exactly who's GMing, but it should be good.

I've had to make a recommendation that some kids do other things for the next six week session - they are not jelling as a group, and they are too disruptive to the other groups. I might have a few new kids to integrate in on Thursday, but we'll see. I'm overall very pleased with how it's gone.

I just wanted to say this is an incredible story.

I'm very curious about what kind of kids have gotten involved in this, or how they were chosen? Are they from certain demographics? Certain social groups within the school?

At the tender age of 11/12, are any concerned about how doing this might affect their social standing or reputation?

It sounds really amazing, in any case, and I hope you will keep posting about this experience.