Episode 86 of The Gauntlet Podcast is here!

Episode 86 of The Gauntlet Podcast is here!

Episode 86 of The Gauntlet Podcast is here! In this one, Lowell Francis sits down with Will Patterson (who is impossible to tag) to discuss his experiences gaming with his kids. It’s a fascinating, deep conversation, and contains a lot of really practical advice for getting even very young kids into roleplaying games.

If anyone is interested in checking out Will’s game, World of Dreams, it is linked here: https://plus.google.com/100395114003715336076/posts/aLQYEtJntn5

Enjoy!

http://www.gauntlet-rpg.com/the-gauntlet-podcast/episode-86-gaming-with-kids

54 thoughts on “Episode 86 of The Gauntlet Podcast is here!”

  1. Also, I’m going to tag some RPG people I know have young kids. I’d be curious to get their thoughts on how they approach gaming with them. Becky Annison Joshua Fox Paul Czege Richard Rogers Oli Jeffery Isa Wills Eadwin Tomlinson Ray Otus (although his kids are older now) Timothy Bennett Johannes Oppermann

  2. Also, I’m going to tag some RPG people I know have young kids. I’d be curious to get their thoughts on how they approach gaming with them. Becky Annison Joshua Fox Paul Czege Richard Rogers Oli Jeffery Isa Wills Eadwin Tomlinson Ray Otus (although his kids are older now) Timothy Bennett Johannes Oppermann

  11. I started on mine when they were 4 and 8. We had some incredible games. I still have some actual play accounts of our 30+session game of Pokemon Adventures (a game I made based on Zak Arnst’s Shadows). I’m off to look for them now and revisit the past. 🙂

  12. I started on mine when they were 4 and 8. We had some incredible games. I still have some actual play accounts of our 30+session game of Pokemon Adventures (a game I made based on Zak Arnst’s Shadows). I’m off to look for them now and revisit the past. 🙂

  17. OK so 1st of all great episode. This one obviously sang strongly for me. I have a son of 9, a daughter of 6 and my girlfriend as twin girls aged 5.

    Ive played a bit of Hero Kidz with the four of them but it did not really grasp the attention of the twins. Its basically a striped down 3.5 dnd with cut-out figures and a grid map. So its more aimed at crunch gamers. I then tried free-form Star Wars in the car. That worked better but it was restrictive because we where using the car as a spaceship and they where all crew members.

    We finally switched to free-form fantasy and that is really going well. For now I narrate and ask a few question but essentially its a railroad. They succeed or fail at tasks based on their background and class. I only address them by character names and every NPC gets a name.

    I do ask questions about the world to them and integrate the answers.

    They really enjoy it and are constantly asking to play again. I always end a session on a cliffhanger and its funny to ear them all yell in disapointment. 🙂

    After listening to the podcast, Ive decided to bring a dice cup in the car to gradually integrate dices and the pbta mechanics in our sessions. Ill let you know all how this goes if you are interested.

    Happy gaming!

  18. OK so 1st of all great episode. This one obviously sang strongly for me. I have a son of 9, a daughter of 6 and my girlfriend as twin girls aged 5.

    Ive played a bit of Hero Kidz with the four of them but it did not really grasp the attention of the twins. Its basically a striped down 3.5 dnd with cut-out figures and a grid map. So its more aimed at crunch gamers. I then tried free-form Star Wars in the car. That worked better but it was restrictive because we where using the car as a spaceship and they where all crew members.

    We finally switched to free-form fantasy and that is really going well. For now I narrate and ask a few question but essentially its a railroad. They succeed or fail at tasks based on their background and class. I only address them by character names and every NPC gets a name.

    I do ask questions about the world to them and integrate the answers.

    They really enjoy it and are constantly asking to play again. I always end a session on a cliffhanger and its funny to ear them all yell in disapointment. 🙂

    After listening to the podcast, Ive decided to bring a dice cup in the car to gradually integrate dices and the pbta mechanics in our sessions. Ill let you know all how this goes if you are interested.

    Happy gaming!

  21. Boy-zilla only just turned one, so he’s a little too young at the moment. Though I have been regaling him with tall tales and daring adventures of Fillion Don Dillion, the gentleman thief.

  22. Boy-zilla only just turned one, so he’s a little too young at the moment. Though I have been regaling him with tall tales and daring adventures of Fillion Don Dillion, the gentleman thief.

  25. Our eldest is 3.5 years. I’ve tried some interactive storytelling with him, usually involving me occasionally asking him questions of various levels of specificity (mostly “what do you do” / “what did Elsa do then” sort of stuff). Occasionally I try something a bit more structured, but as you’ll see, there isn’t much point to doing so.

    I have had limited success. He frequently turns it around and makes me answer the questions instead. If I give him an answer he doesn’t like, he tells me no, that isn’t what happened. Sometimes he tells me what happened, sometimes he just makes me dance like a monkey, giving him answer after answer which he gleefully rejects.

    He also has a habit of suddenly interjecting in the middle of my answer with something completely different from (a) what I had in mind and (b) the existing track of the story. You know, we’re telling a variation on Hansel and Gretel and he suddenly says “and then the dinosaurs came and told the witch off!” or similar. Again, sort of making me dance like a monkey as I struggle to keep up with random twists and turns in the story.

    Once we’ve got through one session, he’ll want to hear the story we created again and again, usually pretty much exactly the way we told it previously, occasionally with further random variations.

    He loves these sessions, and demands them several times a day. He also likes to do a lot of pretend play that is highly directed by him, to the extent of telling me not only who I have to be, and what the situation is, but what specifically I should say and do. Needless to say I find them – while kind of charming – less enjoyable. I want to “say yes” but sometimes doing so is both confusing and exhausting!

    There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed in indie games design where players are encouraged to ask “loaded questions” which bake in some assumption. You know “why were you snorting cocaine off the president’s backside, anyway?” kind of thing. Thankfully I’ve never seen anyone actually do it; mostly people seem to ask questions that more logically follow from what went before, and are less designed to force you to write yourself into some pre-decided situation. But so far gaming with my son is a bit like gaming with someone who has really, really taken this advice to heart.

  26. Our eldest is 3.5 years. I’ve tried some interactive storytelling with him, usually involving me occasionally asking him questions of various levels of specificity (mostly “what do you do” / “what did Elsa do then” sort of stuff). Occasionally I try something a bit more structured, but as you’ll see, there isn’t much point to doing so.

    I have had limited success. He frequently turns it around and makes me answer the questions instead. If I give him an answer he doesn’t like, he tells me no, that isn’t what happened. Sometimes he tells me what happened, sometimes he just makes me dance like a monkey, giving him answer after answer which he gleefully rejects.

    He also has a habit of suddenly interjecting in the middle of my answer with something completely different from (a) what I had in mind and (b) the existing track of the story. You know, we’re telling a variation on Hansel and Gretel and he suddenly says “and then the dinosaurs came and told the witch off!” or similar. Again, sort of making me dance like a monkey as I struggle to keep up with random twists and turns in the story.

    Once we’ve got through one session, he’ll want to hear the story we created again and again, usually pretty much exactly the way we told it previously, occasionally with further random variations.

    He loves these sessions, and demands them several times a day. He also likes to do a lot of pretend play that is highly directed by him, to the extent of telling me not only who I have to be, and what the situation is, but what specifically I should say and do. Needless to say I find them – while kind of charming – less enjoyable. I want to “say yes” but sometimes doing so is both confusing and exhausting!

    There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed in indie games design where players are encouraged to ask “loaded questions” which bake in some assumption. You know “why were you snorting cocaine off the president’s backside, anyway?” kind of thing. Thankfully I’ve never seen anyone actually do it; mostly people seem to ask questions that more logically follow from what went before, and are less designed to force you to write yourself into some pre-decided situation. But so far gaming with my son is a bit like gaming with someone who has really, really taken this advice to heart.

  31. Saul Alexander Starting with the Sundered Land variant I described might work really well. I think it helps introduce the concept of avatar agency and you can quickly build on that with other games.

  32. Saul Alexander Starting with the Sundered Land variant I described might work really well. I think it helps introduce the concept of avatar agency and you can quickly build on that with other games.

  43. Just a fantastic episode. My oldest is 2 years 3 months so we are still around the pretending to be monsters/dogs/bears level but looking forward to something a little more advanced. Maybe I can start playing characters when he serves us ‘coffee’, get a budding little role player in no time.

  44. Just a fantastic episode. My oldest is 2 years 3 months so we are still around the pretending to be monsters/dogs/bears level but looking forward to something a little more advanced. Maybe I can start playing characters when he serves us ‘coffee’, get a budding little role player in no time.

  49. Great episode. My son is five-and-a-half. He’s brilliant in many ways. He could read when he was three. But my efforts to get him into RPG style roleplaying and storytelling haven’t had any of the success that Will has had with his boys.

    static.petersofkensington.com.au

    These robot storytelling cards were a huge failure–so much so that I’m convinced they’re poorly designed. You reveal them in a random order and try to tell a story from them. But I can barely do it myself. There’s no way my son could do it. Every time they just come up in an order that’s hard to make into a sensible flow of events. A few days ago we were at the library and he was playing with a girl who was maybe a year younger. She couldn’t read, but she put a Curious George book on the table in front of me, turned the pages, and told me a story that made sense of all the illustrations. That’s what convinced me the cards are a bad design. They seem like a clever idea, but they don’t work.

    Also, my son could never have done the kind of storytelling the girl did. He’s a kid who wants to know the right story, not create one. When I read to him I often change things in the sentences, and because he can read he catches the changes and says, “No daddy!” and tells me the right word. So he’s brilliant in that way, but not in a storytelling way. The best success was a couple of weeks ago I improvised a rambling, picaresque story about a couple of his tub toys while he was in the bath. I told about how they got on their bikes and went to visit him, and how they asked him where they should go on their bike ride. “Should we go to California, or to Florida?” I made him a part of the story, and prompted him for decisions he had to make as a character in it.

    But now all of Will’s stuff about playing on car rides has me thinking about how to adapt my Traverser mechanics into something I think he could play.

  50. Great episode. My son is five-and-a-half. He’s brilliant in many ways. He could read when he was three. But my efforts to get him into RPG style roleplaying and storytelling haven’t had any of the success that Will has had with his boys.

    static.petersofkensington.com.au

    These robot storytelling cards were a huge failure–so much so that I’m convinced they’re poorly designed. You reveal them in a random order and try to tell a story from them. But I can barely do it myself. There’s no way my son could do it. Every time they just come up in an order that’s hard to make into a sensible flow of events. A few days ago we were at the library and he was playing with a girl who was maybe a year younger. She couldn’t read, but she put a Curious George book on the table in front of me, turned the pages, and told me a story that made sense of all the illustrations. That’s what convinced me the cards are a bad design. They seem like a clever idea, but they don’t work.

    Also, my son could never have done the kind of storytelling the girl did. He’s a kid who wants to know the right story, not create one. When I read to him I often change things in the sentences, and because he can read he catches the changes and says, “No daddy!” and tells me the right word. So he’s brilliant in that way, but not in a storytelling way. The best success was a couple of weeks ago I improvised a rambling, picaresque story about a couple of his tub toys while he was in the bath. I told about how they got on their bikes and went to visit him, and how they asked him where they should go on their bike ride. “Should we go to California, or to Florida?” I made him a part of the story, and prompted him for decisions he had to make as a character in it.

    But now all of Will’s stuff about playing on car rides has me thinking about how to adapt my Traverser mechanics into something I think he could play.

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