Category Archives: Commentary

Teach Your Kids to Game Week

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Teach Your Kids to Game

Teach your kids to game week started yesterday. By now you have surely seen posts from various blogs, social media networks, and forums mentioning this occasion. This is the second year for the event that was started by DriveThruRPG.com. DriveThru has a product page up with several options to help you get started with teaching your kids to game.

I am most familiar with Argyle and Crew written by Ben Gerber and published by Troll in the Corner. But there are several more options there, some free for download. The list also includes rpgKids which always seems to get positive comments on Twitter.

Kids and Gaming in Practice

My two kids both game and both started at an early age. Games can be anything from RPGs, to Uno, to Carcassonne, to Zombie Dice, and more. Given this is primarily an RPG blog, I will focus on on the RPG aspect of gaming.

My older son got his start with playing a loose form of D&D minis several years back. This quickly evolved into actual RPG gaming. His first experience was with the D&D 3.5 Starter Box which as a little hit or miss.

A little later I introduced him to my own simplified Pathfinder game. By simplified I mean I chose his feats and skills after asking him how he pictured his character. Using that feedback I helped build him a character to fit that image. This worked pretty well and the interest was sparked.

Eventually his sister became interested and we did the similar thing with her. She’d describe what kind of hero she wanted to play and I built it for her. We handled more of the dice rolls from her, but she had a good time playing.

Later on the Pathfinder Beginner Box was released and we switched from my heavily modified Pathfinder for kids rules and went to that product. We had great success with this and within a short period of time my son was running his own games for his sister and I (and doing a good job!).

From there my son has played a couple of different systems. Over Thanksgiving weekend I introduced him to larger group gaming with a Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG one-shot and this past weekend he helped me playtest a module I am working on. He is quite the budding gamer!

Benefits

If you are reading this blog you are most likely an RPG gamer. Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in our own gaming and forget to spread the hobby around a bit. You would be surprised at how young a kid can be and start to pick up the gaming bug. I’ve had my son playing since about the age of 5 or 6. His sister has been playing since just before she was 5 (admittedly, she does it more to be social than love for the game at the moment).

Gaming is a great way to be creative and to tear the kids away from the screentime of television or computers. It is sometimes a gateway to them wanting to learn more about areas of history or technology.

Beyond all of that, it is a wonderful way to spend time with your family. It is moments like these that will really count for your kids or even kids in your extended family. I know I am guilty of sometimes spending too much time writing or prepping for a campaign. Take a moment to breathe and share the gaming bug with your kids or your nieces and nephews. They will be moments they will always remember and it will help grow their world.

Kickstarter Musings

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Over at Tenkar’s Tavern, Erik has been keeping track of the timeliness of many of the Kickstarter projects he has backed. He puts each Kickstarter he has backed into one of three categories – significantly overdue, late and has shipped or looking like it is going to be late, and finally on-time. It is good to see someone keeping track of this and posting updates. I know at least one or two of the projects backed that we have in common have been more forthcoming with updates.

I am not going to try to replicate what Erik already has going on. For one, the number of projects I have backed is significantly smaller and he is doing a great job already.

I will post up some of my musings on Kickstarter though. I do think Kickstarter is a very useful tool. It allows people with ideas to present them to a much larger crowd and if folks agree, throw some money their way to make it happen. A great concept and one that does help get some great new content out there.

I think a lot of the smaller operations doing this bite off more than they can chew or fail to accommodate for unexpected success. A couple of things to remember for these smaller operations. This is your moment to shine. Depending on how you handle the delays and hurdles that come up as you attempt to get a product out the door are going to set an impression on a lot of people in a niche hobby.

Updates. Kickstarter provides you with a great way to keep people updated on progress. Use it. So you’ve missed your initial goal. That’s fine, it happens. A lot of people who back things on Kickstarter understand these are people dealing with production processes for the first time. We can be patient. But keep up informed! Tell us it took two weeks longer to get something done or something shipped to you. We’ll understand that.

Maybe you had a family medical emergency involving yourself or relative. Give your backers a heads up. It happens. You might be a one person operation. Just send your backers an update to let them know you have not forgotten them. It is important and will buy you more goodwill than hoping people won’t notice the delay.

How many updates are appropriate? For me if you are running behind on a delivery date, I think seeing a well-stated update every two weeks would be enough to keep me pretty patient. Enough should have happened in the period of two weeks that there should be some progress or reason as to why there wasn’t any progress made in a period of two weeks.

Keeping your backers updated is the single most important thing you can do in my opinion if you are running behind.

There are some things you shouldn’t do too. Or reasons that you are running behind that probably won’t buy a lot of good faith.

The biggest? Don’t start another project and announce it – whether you are kickstarting it or not. People will interpret that as a reason why things are delayed on the kickstarter. That may or may not be true of course, but that is what folks will think. Sure you might be waiting on someone to deliver something to you for you to wrap something up. And maybe you do have some time to get that other project rolling. But announcing that to the public is just going to generate ill-will.

Con crud. We see that one listed as an excuse in an update a lot. Unexpected sickness is a legit reason that something might be delayed. But we’ve all been gamers for a long time and many have attended our share of cons. Build that into your delivery date! Even if you do not pick up some sickness at the con, you know will come off that con-high and have a couple of days getting back in the groove. Remember that if you are planning your delivery date for your Kickstarter.

Set good expectations and keep people updated. These are the biggest things you can do to keep a reputation intact if you see yourself missing delivery dates.

I have a lot of patience with small operations, I really do. I want to see you succeed and I know you might be going through a steeper learning curve than you initially expected. Just keep communicating with us and eventually we will get our product we wanted and you’ll come out with reputation reasonably intact at the end.

OSR as a State of Mind

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The post below is written by Shortymonster, a guest blogger for The Iron Tavern.

Every RPG could be an OSR game, it’s all a state of mind.

I want to start by saying that I do not consider myself to be a part of the Old School Renaissance (OSR)  movement; when I came into gaming it was with such systems as Vampire: the Masquerade, Cyberpunk 2020, and a mate’s home-brew system heavily inspired by Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. All these were quite crunchy systems, and as a new gamer, I liked that. It was comforting to know that if I wanted to try something out that there was a rule to cover it, or at least a guideline to give the GM a position to adjudicate from. As time moved on and I grew as a player, there was always a room in my heart for games like this. I’m still using CP2020 as a system for my next campaign, and although the World of darkness has fallen out of my favour, I still like Gothic horror games with a bit of crunch, such as Unhallowed Metropolis.

What has changed however is that I’m spending more and more of my time as a GM to the point that I spend more time running games than playing in them. Quite often these days I feel the need to ignore rules in favour of maintaining the flow of the story. Some may think this might not be in the spirit of fair play to my players, but I promise one thing, if I drop a rule for them, that same rule drop applies to all the NPCs too, and vice versa. Often I’m not dropping a rule because it doesn’t work, or because leaving it in gets in the way of me telling the story I want to tell, but because it gets in the way of the free flow of play. This is something that should be just as much of a concern to me as it is to my players, but they should never have to deal with, in fact it should happen so seamlessly that they shouldn’t even notice it.

This to me is the essence of the OSR; finding a set of rules that allows – nay, encourages – the GM to make on the spot decisions about character and NPC actions without having to check through countless chapters and tables to get the answer from the rules. This doesn’t mean the rules should be ignored unilaterally, just that they can be put aside when they become an inconvenience. Quite often, they wouldn’t exist in the first place to slow things down, as the game designer could trust the GM to make the right calling. So, why don’t fans of OSR just run any game they choose like that?

If I didn’t like the combat resolution system in CP2020 I would ditch the needlessly complicated rules and come up with something that allowed faster resolution of a fight but didn’t get in the way of my players performing the actions they think they should be able to. And you know what, I don’t like it, so I did change it. My way is way quicker, easier to explain, and opens up combat for the players to take a bit more of the initiative with what they would like their characters to do. This seems to be in line with a lock of hacks I’ve read about, people taking a setting they like, and retro-cloning the rules the fir an easier or more comfortable play style.

To be fair, a lot of the adventures I run don’t have much in common with what most people think of when you mention OSR. As an example, I don’t do dungeon crawls. I find them a bit boring and they only exist for me as a way of having a laugh at the expense of the preconceptions of the genre. I will be running Something Went Wrong for instance, but not because I like dungeon crawls; because I love the multi GM aspect and the fact that it makes fun of the genre in a pleasingly light-hearted way. For the very same reason, I’m a big fan of the Munchkin card game.

So, to fans of OSR games, and I know there’s a load of you out there, I would like to say that I love what you do, and the effort you go to just to keep your ideal play style and rule sets going – when I see free RPGs out there in an OSR style, I grab them up quick and love reading them and thinking about what I could do with them – I think I’ll just keep playing whatever game I choose, and keep the OSR feel going by how I run the game, and how my group plays it. And a big thank you to folks of a like mind out there, who keep on hacking things to fit the way want to play; you’re saving me a ton of work.

Bio

Shortymonster is new to this blogging lark, but if you have enjoyed what you’ve just read, head on over to his own site and take a look at his thoughts on a variety of subjects across the spectrum of role playing games.