Welcome to the Gnomecast, the Gnome Stew’s tabletop gaming advice podcast. Here we talk with the other gnomes about gaming things to avoid becoming part of the stew. So I guess we’d better be good. This episode we have John, JT, Matt, & Ang talking about gaming with kids.
Gnomecast #19 — Gnomes, Kids, & RPGs
This post is brought to you by our wonderful patron Bob Quek, supporting us since September 2016! Thanks for helping us keep the stew fires going!
I’ve run one shots for kids a number of times, most recently at Ambercon in April. I used super-simple character creation rules (“Tell me one thing your character is a great at, two things she is good at, and one thing she is bad at.”) and just winged everything from there dicelessly. Worked very nicely, though I think things were helped along by having a couple of adults playing as well.
Right now I’m looking at GMing for my 8yo son and maybe a few of his friends. My instinct is that my preferred style of diceless game is not quite appropriate here… I think we need a random element so it’s not just Dad being arbitrarily nice or mean. On the other hand, I’d still like to keep the overall system extremely simple. But I’m still trying to suss out the best approach for this.
I’ve pondered Narrative Dice System (haven’t actually found rules for it) or FUDGE (first impression is seems a bit needlessly mathy). Toying with just saying “roll N d6s, every 5-6 is a success, the number of successes determines how well things go”, with the additional understanding that “0 successes rolled” may mean success but serious complications of some sort.