Playing Storygames with Children
It's that time of year again for me--the semester turnaround. High school teachers reading this know well what that means. Marks are getting wrapped up and finalized. The next semester's classes are being planned. It's basically a mid-year reset, and a reprieve from what is the most stressful time of year--the semester's end.
I always find myself filled with optimism at this time of year. This is the year I'll actually be organised, I say--earnestly too! No irony to be found. Plans are made, assignments are drafted, and seating assignments are plotted. I look at my workdesk, and I see something which all of you should find familiar--pre-campaign prep.
I've never been more aware of the similarities between these two roles I play--teacher and game master--than I am this semester. Last month, I wrapped up a series of games I was running for a local game shop in collaboration with an educational non-profit. The goal of this series was to use TTRPGs to encourage literacy, and connect kids with authors in our local writing community. While I can't speak for how successful that side of the program was, I can reflect on the part I played in it--which included running over 15 games in the past year exclusively for children.
This is the first post in a series of what will probably be three. Here, I'm going to talk about my experience running Storygames for groups of random children.
So, how'd I get involved in this?
Look--I didn't seek this gig out. If you must know, I was actually at a metal show (shout out to Windrose) when I received the text from the owner of my local game store. It was about 10:45, and I was checking my phone to see if my girlfriend wanted me to get her a beer when I saw it:
Our GM for the kids game tomorrow can't make it. Can you fill in? I can pay $120.
I asked: "What kind of game is it? Do I need to prep?" You see, I was in no position to be able to prep for the next morning, and the night had barely began.
You can basically do whatever. A local author is giving a talk after, but so long as the kids make characters, it'll be good
Nice! I'd recently began experimenting with TTRPGs in my classroom. The previous week, I used James D'Amato's excellent game O Captain My Captain to launch my students on a creative character study, and it worked phenomenally. As it happened, one copy of the game (purchased from the English Department budget) was still in the trunk of my car. What luck, I thought. I'd wake up, get some coffee, and run a game of O Captain for some kids the next morning, and make enough money to pay for the beer I was going to drink tonight to boot! What could go wrong?
What could go wrong:
So, I rolled into the store at 11:30, a full hour before the kids were set to arrive and I was barely hungover. I had my copy of O Captain, a backup copy of The Quiet Year in case the kids didn't want to play a pirate game, and my notebook which I basically carry with me everywhere. It's a Leuchtturm A4+, if you were curious, and I take all my notes in there. Most notes are either my lesson planning notes, or my game prep notes.
Long have I held the opinion that teaching and running games are, essentially, the same skill. You prep a session, you run a session, you reflect on the session, and plan the next session in light of what happened before. You manage personalities, you foster creativity, and you hope to god that the people you're working for will understand the vision of the thing you are putting in front of them. And sometimes, the thing you prep just isn't the thing that makes it to the table--or desk as it may be.
I was greeted by the store's business manager--not the owner, who was the one who hired me for this gig. As is the case with these things, the business manager knows a lot more about what's happening than the owner does. That's not a slight to the owner or to this store, I love the guy! It's just the facts of the matter with any store. Immediately, she asks me if I got the prep notes the local author sent to me.
Prep notes? Ok, well let's take a look at them.
Reader--I could not, as promised, "basically do whatever".
You see, the author had a very specific writing task ready for these kids. And our session needed, yes--absolutely needed a scene in which the players fought a giant purple sand-worm while riding skateboards.
fuck
Tales of Improvisational Lesson Planning
Remember what I said earlier about how prepping a lesson and prepping an RPG session are basically the same thing? Well, improvising a lesson is just as difficult to do as it is to improvise an RPG session. Still half-hungover, and in mild shock from the news that I couldn't just simply play the boxed card game I had in my bag, my mind relied on the same process it does when my carefully planned lessons are thrown asunder my some bureaucratic mishap at school-- procedure.
In the same way that a good game has procedures to offload mental load, teaching has the same thing. That's the reason why your teachers had a specific way to signal for quiet, or to line up to go to the washroom, by the way. So that they don't have to think of anything to do.
I couldn't rely on OSR procedures here though, unless there's a seminal 'skateboarding to defeat a sand-worm' module I have somehow forgotten about. I can't keep up with all the Mothership stuff out there these days, so it's possible I have missed something. But no--instead, I had to reach into the Storygame tradition to dredge up enough tricks to get through the four hour long session I was utterly unprepared for.
The first thing I did was to do some collaborative worldbuilding. I'm a big fan of Carved from Brindlewood games, and so I prepped some paint the scene questions to flesh out our setting. I also did this liberally for almost every single location we cooked up that session, and it worked incredibly well. Immediately, I learned from the kids that we were students at a magical academy, and that they had a rival group of students. They were being sent on adventures as part of their classes. Perfect.
For rules, I stole the basic PBTA framework of stats and a 2D6 roll. I asked the kids to generally describe their characters and asked them which of the three stats I put on their sheets (Strength, Speed, and Cool), they were the best at, and the worst at. I assigned the best a +1, and the worst a -1. On my way over to the store, I happened to be listening to Friends at the Table play Austin Walker's new game Realis, and so I also used the sentence structure from that game to improvise abilities for the characters. Each character had a sentence about them that was "true", and which they could use to justify automatically succeeding on a task without having to roll. Again, it worked great.
So everything was great, you say?
Well, I thought everything was great. And I do think on paper things did go great! We told a humorous story, the kids made characters, a purple sand worm was fought on skateboards, and as an educator I think I did an admirable job of improvising a system to encourage kids to develop characterization, setting elements, and plot elements. Heck, we even did a debrief at the end of things before the author showed up where we put the story on a dang plot diagram.
And most importantly, the kids did have fun. They were laughing and engaging in the plot, and did actually learn things. These kids returned for multiple sessions after this one, and so I know for a fact that they did, in fact, remember some of the literary techniques we discussed while playing our story-game.
Following sessions also went great. I got formally hired on to the program, and we did play O Captain, and The Quiet Year, and even a kiddie version of Realis and Sleepaway.
But
In all these Storygame sessions, I heard one piece of feedback over and over again, echoing like a haunted refrain:
"But I just wanted to play D&D"
There it is--the elephant in the room. Of course--this is why the program existed in the first place after all. The kids watch Critical Roll and Dimension 20, and they want to play D&D just like the people they see on Twitch. And why wouldn't they! We all have seen these shows, and we know how cool they look.
And so, despite the learning and despite the fun the kids were having, I kept getting asked by both kids and parents "when are we going to play D&D?" To them, the games we were playing were a stepping stone to the "real thing." Which is disappointing, but still something I could work with. I don't have a grand thesis to tie to this aside from the observation I just made--no matter how fun or how educational or how engaging the Storygames were, the kids did not see it as a game. They saw it as telling a story first and formost.
A pivot
It was probably a good time to change gears too--after all, the same kids kept coming back week after week. You can only play The Quiet Year so many times with the same group before they realize the cards are the same, after all. And so it was time to pivot.
At the same time, disruption happened at work. My union went on strike, and so I was left with a month where I had basically nothing to do. I wanted to run an open table of some sort to fill the time I wasn't picketing, and simultaneously there was demand for a youth program to happen during school hours.
The time was right to make a kid oriented open table. But I wasn't going to play 5E, no matter how much the kids wanted it. I knew how that went from my time at my school's D&D club--maybe I'll write about that at some point.
Instead, I decided to try something different. Stay tuned for my next post in this series: Playing an Old School Hexcrawl with Children.