I talked to some kids about game narrative & taught them how to play D&D
Kids are great at RPGs
My friend Erik (no relation) teaches an enrichment course on game design to some 8-9 year olds in the Chicagoland area, and he asked me to drop into his class yesterday to talk about putting narrative into games as well as to run them through a narrative game scenario. And boy was that a blast.
First I talked a little about the relationship between story and games, a talk that I’ve pasted below. It’s pretty basic stuff, but fairly foundational, so I thought it was worth putting up here. Then, with the help of Erik and his TAs, the class (which was split into 3-4 tables) ran through a very abridged version of my “Temple of the King” adventure from Blackmore. I’ve used this before to introduce my friend’s 10-year-old to tabletop roleplaying, and it went super well. It’s a pretty simple adventure with a clear goal, lots of tropes, and plenty of room to bring imagination to bear. I’m happy to say the kids found this delightful, with a couple even saying it was the best game they’ve ever played (I mean, they’re going to have a new “best” in two weeks; that’s how being a kid works. But it was still sweet to hear.) I’ve attached the PDF of the abridged adventure here as well, in case anyone has a group of kids looking to play a TTRPG for about 90 minutes or so. That PDF also includes one page on tips for running a game for fresher GMs (since the TAs helping out had not played a TTRPG before, but they did a great job with it!).
First, a few notes on playing TTRPGs with kids:
I really like using Old-School Essentials as the game of choice for learning here. Though I like 5E just fine, I think it presents a little too much information for a fresh player to have a good time with, especially if you just want to impart the essence of tabletop roleplay. As such, all game mechanics in the adventure PDF are set in OSE terms.
I usually find it helpful to be super generous with kids and/or nerf more challenging gameplay elements. Yesterday, I halved the sahuagins’ hit points so they could possibly go down with one attack. We also house-ruled that all monster hits do only 1 hp damage, so no kids were taken out by a lucky shot (you don’t want them to feel bad about the whole thing). I’m also pretty generous with treasure and magic spells, because it’s fun for kids to engage with that stuff. Really the goal here is to make sure the kids feel like they’re being challenged in a way they can overcome, and also that they feel rewarded.
That said, kids are incredible at TTRPG adventuring, and this is another benefit of OSE over 5E as far as I’m concerned — with its more sparse framework, it encourages a bit more outside-the-box thinking. Kids will come up with the wildest solutions to problems that aren’t necessarily covered by skill lists, and sometimes if an idea is too good I won’t even make them roll for it because I want to see it happen. Yesterday, one of the kids used a fire attack on a sahuagin and I noted it smelled like salmon. Then (this is very morbid, I’m sorry, but 9 year olds love this stuff) the kids decided to try to feed the cooked fish to the other sahuagins’ pet shark, to give it a taste for its captors. I thought that was so clever and fun, why on earth would I want them to fail at that? They completed the scenario by convincing a trapped animal that its captors were bad. Hell yeah!
Narrative in Games (for the children)
Today we’re talking about game narrative, where “narrative” means “telling a story.”
Almost all games have a narrative, though some are more abstract and hard to pick out than others.
Key takeaway number one: In a well-designed game, the narrative should tell you something about how to play and how to win.
Some examples (suggested by the class):
Diplomacy: In a game themed around military conquest, you can be pretty sure that the main way you play will be by strategizing and engaging in conflict with everyone else around the table.
Monopoly: This game is about being the wealthiest property owner at the table, at the expense of everyone else. You can see this reflected in the strategy of the game, which involves ruthlessly placing expensive property after commonly landed-on spots (i.e. jail) in order to extract the most penalizing rent payments from the other players.
Wingspan: This game is about bird-watching, which is a peaceful activity. The theme tells you that the game should be relaxed and not very competitive, that every player pretty much does their own thing and is just trying to catalog the most birds for themselves.
Sorry: Though a very abstract game, Sorry – as you see in the title – is all about disappointment. That carries through to the frustrated way players are going to feel while playing. The game theme shows up mostly in the emotions it gives to the players, which they have to learn to push through to have a good time with it.
That leads us to key takeaway number two: The difference between writing a story normally and creating a game narrative is that in a game, the players bring the most important parts of the story themselves, just by the act of playing. The game designers’ job is to set the table for the players to create a memorable and unique story for themselves.
That being said, here are the areas game designers usually focus on when putting a narrative into their games. Not all elements will be relevant to all games, but they’re good to keep in mind:
The premise: what is true about the world in which your game takes place that allows players to understand what’s happening? This is often very simple. I.e. in Monopoly, the premise is “you’re a rich property owner and you want to get richer.” That one sentence says a lot.
The setting/location details: Basically, where is the game taking place? Again, this is often very simple. In Diplomacy, all you need here is to establish a map of World War I-era Europe.
Non-player characters (NPCs): If anyone who won’t be controlled by the players populates your world, you should figure out who they are and what they’re like. This is most often relevant in heavily narrative games like video games, but it can apply to tabletop as well.
Another way to put this – in school you might have studied the six reporters’ questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how. Game designers typically pre-load the who, what, where, when, and why. Players bring the all-important how.
Everything I’m saying applies to almost all tabletop game types, but it becomes most obvious in tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs), where the whole world literally centers on the actions of the players’ characters. The job of a tabletop RPG designer is to create a whole world full of possibility for the players to explore, and then let them bring their own goals, relationships, interests, and actions into it. You’ll see this in the adventure we’re playing today, “The Temple of the King,” which has one location and one ultimate objective, but will be played very differently by every table here, and at the end everyone will have had a very different experience of the game.
I love to hear that 8-9 year olds are learning game design!