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Currently deployed. Five months left. (just providing backstory)
Bought my three teenage girls the BB to get them introduced to Pathfinder so I can run a campaign for them when I get back.
The received the BB Friday, here is the email I received from my wife that reveals the events of Monday - they had a busy weekend so Monday is the first day they've actually stayed home.
The girls are supposed to be finishing a little touch-up painting in Bricky's room...instead they are sitting in the living room floor rolling dice and creating characters!
Painting can wait!
Almost brings a tear to my eye!
Cool :D :D
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:D
Way to overcome the range penalty on parenting!
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That's so very cool. I bought the BB a few months ago, and ran my 11-year old and a couple of his friends through a couple of adventures. This weekend he took the beginner box to his friend's house and invented a storyline off the cuff, ran 4 kids through it using the pre-gen characters. He even invented magic items on the fly, never having run a game before.
When I went to pick him up and saw he was DM'ing, he turned to me and said "I'm really good at this!" and his buddies all said "Yeah, he's awesome!"
I know just what you mean about making dad proud - it's a great feeling.
Good luck on the rest of the deployment, be safe.
So lots of cursing, mock insults, demands for more mountain dew, and threats that if their dice don't start behaving a d12 will be microwaved to punish the rest? At least that is what we sound like when we game. Then again, I'm pretty sure I sounded like that when I first played D&D 2.0 in middle school...
I've since been told that they left the BB all over the dining room table because "it was a good stopping point, we'll get back to it tomorrow."
I'm going to run them through RotRL when I get back. I've run Mutant and Mastermind games with them before, so they're no strangers to RPGs. I just prefer Pathfinder to M&M.
Don't get me wrong, I love M&M - just a fantasy setting geek at heart.
This is perhaps the coolest thing EVER. I'll likely be starting a family in the next year or two so perhaps it'll be another decade before I can enjoy pleasures like these...
....but I *HAVE* to ask...
--What steps have you taken or things you've done as a parent, do you think, that made your children... especially daughters, potentially receptive to gaming? There may be less of a stigma now that gaming is a LITTLE more mainstream, but even as a relatively cool bunch of kids my group only got into gaming by chance and took GREAT precautions to hide awareness of the practice. Not really primarily concerned with social stigma... but more with how have you engendered a value of such things, and how have you "Sold" gaming to/with your kids?
I would LOVE to introduce my own children to board gaming... but my real hope against hope is that I can both spend LOTS of time with them, entertain them, and instill values and impart lessons by way of our own little mythologies. Cultivating better decision making, an interest in other cultures and exotic things and art, a sense of capability and a cultivation of social acumen that comes with negotiation, planning, and diplomacy... not to mention other aspects that can advance one's life as awareness/appreciation of opportunity, organization and strategic thinking.
Y'all sound like the luckiest of the lucky. Bless you gaming parents -- and OP you be safe for yourself and those girls. Don't forget to take those 5 foot steps! ;D
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As a parent, all I've really done is go out of my way to play games with my kids without making a big deal of it.
When my eldest daughter was still baby, I'd sit her in a high chair next to my painting table while I worked on my wargames minis. As a toddler I let her bat around my (larger) dice and some of her first words were "Feeg-yures" and "Orcs" because I let her hang out with me when I was doing gaming-related things. Later on when she wanted to I taught her about Warhammer and Risk and other games, and there were many times I set up a game which was abandoned after the 2nd turn because of the limits of her attention span, but I always enjoyed her interest.
After her sister came along, at some point I got a copy of "Heroquest" which they both loved. Very simple game - easy rules. Later on I did free-form "D&D" type games where we rolled dice rather haphazardly while playing make-believe with minis and a battlemat.
My son, the youngest, really liked the minis as well. Also, by that time the older ones were on the computers playing minecraft etc.
If anything, I think the following things piqued their interest:
- Miniatures & Dice
- Fantasy Artwork
- Cool Maps and drawing on Battlemats with wet-erase markers
- Wargaming Terrain (Castles, Hills, Forests, etc)
- More Miniatures
- Imaginative board games (Risk, Robo-Rally, Smallworld, Starfarers of Catan, etc)
Also, in the case of pathfinder specifically: as long as they're quiet, I let my kids hang out and watch the adults play when we do it at my house. My oldest is the only one who ever stays the entire session, but they get a kick out of it.
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It sounds like Wolfsnap has been pretty thoughtful about all of this (as well as more deeply immersed in the gaming world than my life has led me to be), where I've been a bit more haphazard about exposing my kids to gaming.
I have two boys, 11 and 15. The older one played a few sessions of the BB, and really enjoyed conversing with the goblin chief and role-playing the hell out of it, and then seemed to lose interest - but I don't feel I'm the most engaging DM, and I can't entirely blame him. He prefers the visuals of a game like Skyrim over the mental pictures of a tabletop RPG.
My younger guy has a an all-encompassing imagination (at the end of first grade, he disclosed that he had spent the entire year as an elf, rather than a boy, as it made it more interesting), and I had a shelf full of D&D books, going back to first edition. He loved to read them, particularly the monster manuals and deities and demigods, and I talked with him about them a lot, told stories of encounters with some of the beasties therein, etc.
That got me excited about him gaming, and I tried him at a PF group for kids at a local gaming store. He was excited about it, but it turned out to be too chaotic for him to learn all the nuts and bolts of the full PF game in that context, so I got the beginnner box, and identified a friend of his who I thought would enjoy playing, and they've never looked back. I think having friends get involved, so it's not just something he's doing with dad, has been a way to help it stick, and a way for him to make more friends with similar interests.
Looking back at what I've written, my answer seems too specific for your question - so I'd add a few other ideas:
- reading lots of mythology - the D'Aulaires' books are awesome, and the Rick Riordan books do a good job of taking the seeds of myth and playing with them, which is so much of what gaming is about
- encouraging expression of imagination - when my son has an idea for a planet, or a story, or a race, or whatever, I ask questions about it, sometimes trying to build the logic or backstory, sometimes just seeing where he'll go with it
- having your kids know that you play, and love it - I have just gotten into a regular gaming group after some years of only occasional play, and my son always asks me to tell him what happened in the previous night's session, and he can definitely hear the enthusiasm as I tell him
Vicon - I think your summary of all the things you can learn from gaming is great - and I'd add that it really boosts your obscure vocabulary and can do wonders for math in your head.
Khel
Thanks a LOT, guys.
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One of my twins is running BB at the gaming club at lunch now, age 12! Rock-on, 2 girls in his group!
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--What steps have you taken or things you've done as a parent, do you think, that made your children... especially daughters, potentially receptive to gaming? ... but more with how have you engendered a value of such things, and how have you "Sold" gaming to/with your kids?
They have watched my gaming group and I play 3.5 for the last five years. They love it!
I started them out by just free-forming an adventure for them about four years ago. No dice, no character sheets, no 'rules'. I still have the notebook of the first adventure where they traveled to a demiplane of mist and defeated the Red Wizard, saving the realm from his tyranny. Lots of Star Wars and LotR themes and references (ya know, since the love both series of movies). That got them hooked.
Then we started with Mutants and Masterminds 3E - they joined the Teen Titans and (using an old DC Adventures module) stopped Darksied and his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from taking over the earth.
To sum it up, I started when my youngest was 8 and my oldest was 12 with a very simple, 'choose your own adventure' campaign. We just sat on the couch and talked about what happened.
I would LOVE to introduce my own children to board gaming... but my real hope against hope is that I can both spend LOTS of time with them, entertain them, and instill values and impart lessons by way of our own little mythologies.... not to mention other aspects that can advance one's life as awareness/appreciation of opportunity, organization and strategic thinking.
Here is a long-winded anecdote that is very important to my kids development and interests. When my oldest was about 18 months, I would come home after PT (8 am or so) and she would be infront of the TV watching Telletubbies or something like that. When I left for work, came home for lunch, left to go back to work and came home for dinner - my oldest was ... you guessed it ... watching TV. Some toddler show or whatever.
Didn't bother me for a few weeks as I had just bought a big-screen TV and was playing the hell out of my PlayStation One (that long ago) on it.
When I realized what was happening, I put the TV, PlayStation, and all the games in the paper and sold them the next day for less than half of what I paid for them.
Didn't own a television for three years, until my youngest daughter was more than a year old.
During those three years my wife and I played games with, read books to, and enjoyed music with our kids.
Without television as a distractor in those early years, I don't think they would be quite the same teenagers they are now.
Y'all sound like the luckiest of the lucky. Bless you gaming parents -- and OP you be safe for yourself and those girls. Don't forget to take those 5 foot steps! ;D
Thank you!
Out here though, sometimes it's those five-foot steps that getcha!
:-)
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My boy is 5 - he loves to 'play D&D' with me, but that actually comes down to just playing together toy-style with my figures, 99% of the time (I always lose) :). For a regular game attention span is the big issue. Lots of good ideas on this thread; I like the idea of 'freeforming' an adventure, I did a bit of that last year and I think that might work better than trying to use rules. He is not interested in the kind of 'newbie quest' adventures you get in Beginner Boxes sadly; he wants to be killing the dragon right away. :)
For the free form, I gave them choices of race and class. My (at the time) eight year old chose to be a half-elf rogue.
At one point, the party of adventurers was traveling late at night on a road and (gasp!) were ambushed by goblins. My eight year old's Rogue says "Oh goody, I was getting bored. Let's kill them all and loot the bodies!"
I guess she'd been paying closer attention to my gaming group than I thought.
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I love hearing about gaming families. Both my parents played D&D back in the day, but we never played an RPG together (we played plenty of board games, though). I played Alternity with my brothers growing up, and I currently GM for my wife XD
Can't wait to have a gaming kid, though!
OP You have it all wrong, they are going to run you through a campaign or two! :)
I introduced my 12yo to the BB, didn't take long until she was looking at the 'full version' and just wanting to get right into the broader game.
I had to live vicariously through a friend's kid whom I brought into 3.5 several years ago, then sat in on a few sessions with he and his friends, and he still plays to this day! I think between that and letting him join a "grown-up" campaign of ours for several months I've expanded his gaming horizons. I hope he'll find some kindred souls when he starts basic training in November.
My kid would never make it in the military, she refuses to swear.
OP You have it all wrong, they are going to run you through a campaign or two! :)
Now that would be truly awesome!
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My youngest turned 13 today and is on FB already. This is an excerpt of the BB game.
The mayor gave us 1,000 gp. and you'll be happy to know that!! I made sure we had a party fund.
Can't wait to get home and play!