I Want Candy.
You and Annabella Lwin
I'm not in a position to answer any of these either directly or specifically. I will only say I'm glad Annabella stopped shaving the sides of her head.
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The Taldan barbarian could not wait to get Great Cleave. :)
Sorry it has taken this long to say something, been real busy with work.
The boy is my son and he plays a a Taldan Fighter. GMs were flustered when they couldn't hit him with a 26 AC, then he would power attack and great cleave into foes with his trusty bastard sword, minimum damage was 12. Things died horribly.
It makes a father proud. Can't wait for the years to come. He wants to play a druid next.
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The Taldan barbarian could not wait to get Great Cleave. :)Sorry it has taken this long to say something, been real busy with work.
The boy is my son and he plays a a Taldan Fighter. GMs were flustered when they couldn't hit him with a 26 AC, then he would power attack and great cleave into foes with his trusty bastard sword, minimum damage was 12. Things died horribly.
It makes a father proud. Can't wait for the years to come. He wants to play a druid next.
That's awesome. A poppa darn proud of his up and coming geek son.
I may cry. ;-)
How did a thread about little cherubs go on to be about angels of another kind?At least you made it through 14 posts before things slid off topic. Besides, Lord Fyre distracted us with candy. Children likes candy!
Heh. When my daughter was three years old, we were playing Candy Land, and I started joking about what might happen to those gingerbread men in Candy Land. My daughter replied by saying what she would do if she were one of those gingerbread men in the situation I described. I replied with what would happen as a consequence. And as a result, she and I invented Candy Land: The RPG.
It was amazing! Not every three-year-old has the necessary cognitive skills to role play, but she had. We continued to play Candy Land: The RPG for YEARS! I could tell you a handful of AMAZING stories about what happened in some of those games.
(No, this is NOT a threadjack. This conversation is about apple cheeked cherubs, right?)
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Oh mistress of cookies; You were in a position, it seems, to have gained detailed knowledge of this: Was this a gaming family you witnessed at GenCon, participating in PFS? (One or more parent and child(ren)?)
They're a gaming family. He's the GM of our CoCT campaign and she's a companion in the group. They're excellent role-players. As for the young Taldan, well, let's just say you're definitely better off when you're in his party. It's a privilege to game with them.
Hi, the better half of said gaming family chiming in :). Our son has been watching us play D & D and other games since birth, so last year we started teaching him how to play. He loves playing and now that he is more comfortable with the rules is starting to make comments "in character" more... it is too cute! We are playing some more PFS scenarios this weekend and he can't wait to hit level 6.
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The Taldan barbarian could not wait to get Great Cleave. :)Sorry it has taken this long to say something, been real busy with work.
The boy is my son and he plays a a Taldan Fighter. GMs were flustered when they couldn't hit him with a 26 AC, then he would power attack and great cleave into foes with his trusty bastard sword, minimum damage was 12. Things died horribly.
It makes a father proud. Can't wait for the years to come. He wants to play a druid next.
That's awesome. A poppa darn proud of his up and coming geek son.
I may cry. ;-)
I am said fighter's mom and I was crying tears of joy when he started talking smack to an NPC before a fight at Gencon. It is too cute to watch him read a rule book and ask questions on the rules so he knows what he can do... watch out he wants to learn the rules for spells next.
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I am said fighter's mom and I was crying tears of joy when he started talking smack to an NPC before a fight at Gencon. It is too cute to watch him read a rule book and ask questions on the rules so he knows what he can do... watch out he wants to learn the rules for spells next.The Taldan barbarian could not wait to get Great Cleave. :)Sorry it has taken this long to say something, been real busy with work.
The boy is my son and he plays a a Taldan Fighter. GMs were flustered when they couldn't hit him with a 26 AC, then he would power attack and great cleave into foes with his trusty bastard sword, minimum damage was 12. Things died horribly.
It makes a father proud. Can't wait for the years to come. He wants to play a druid next.
That's awesome. A poppa darn proud of his up and coming geek son.
I may cry. ;-)
So, he was 7 when you started teaching him the rules? Wow.
I have gamed with a friends 10 year old daughter before (and she's quite good as well), but 7 is pretty amazing. It's awesome to see kids roleplay, they get so into it.
Wow. You guys are weening me away from the naughty side of this thread with all these great stories. My friend and I invented The Land of Thumping to keep my daughter away from the dice when she was still in diapers. It would send her squealing and running from the room, for a few minutes. And still she remembers and dreads the land of thumping...
Until my daughter was older and showed a renewed interest, I didn't teach her to play, having it stuck in my head that the game really required a certain age range. My demanding nephews and necessity taught me that a seven year old may actually be a better role-player than an eleven year old.
(No, this is NOT a threadjack. This conversation is about apple cheeked cherubs, right?)
Did someone call for me?
You're wanted in the Jack clubhouse. Someone has started posting rules everywhere...
Away I go!
*twirls moustache and leaps out a window*
Clearly, I'm in good company. Several of you participating in this thread know what it's like to RP with your children, so you should relate. And I did promise to tell a story on the subject. (Actually, it was more like a threat.)
I tried a couple of times to get my wife to play D&D with me. She tried it and complained that she didn't "get it." (Actually, she "got it" better than I did in some respects, but I guess she meant that she didn't like it. But that's another story.)
My daughter, still 3 years old, said that she wanted to play D&D. I was certain she was too young to grasp any gaming mechanics. (That part had to wait until she was 4, but that, too, is another story.) But I could relate to her a fantasy story, and she would decide what her character would do in it.
One day, she announced that she wanted to DM. (My wife happened to be in the room at the time.) My daughter then started me in a D&D adventure set in a city. I was just going down a road, and got attacked by a dumb, savage giant. After I defeated it, I tried to trace the path of destruction that should have been left in the giant's wake. I found no such destruction. No one in the city seemed to have any knowledge that there had ever been a giant in the city. I might have expected a big, gaping hole in the wall of the city to indicate where the giant had entered, but there was none.
Of course, I shouldn't expect that much verisimilitude from a 3-year-old, but this was too much. Why had she set the adventure in a city in the first place? I asked her "How could this giant have gotten past the city guard?"
My 3-year-old pondered the question for a moment, and then answered "He wore a disguise."
My wife, who supposedly didn't "get" RPGs, burst into laughter.
That's great!
Thanks.
So what about the rest of you? So many of you (Mairkurion, Lilith, Mijast727, deathboy, Aileen Wadhams, Wolfthulhu, and others) have mentioned young role-players in this thread. I know that Paris Crenshaw has told "Faery's Tale" stories on other threads. Does anyone else have tales to tell about children who were roped into this nutty hobby of ours?
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Well... that little Taldan Figher also has the best luck with dice i've seen.... fighting 2-3 scenarios with him, I have yet to seem him roll lower than 10 more than once per battle. Heck the first scenario he took out he enamy so fast that my ranger couldn't even FIRE for the first two battles, and only fired once, missing, in the next one.
So my daughter kept asking to play our newly invented game, Candy Land: The RPG, with me. We soon grew tired of having her play a gingerbread man, which was pretty powerless beyond using whatever equipment it carried. So she starts playing characters like Plumpy the Sugar Plum Troll (with regeneration), Mr Mint of the Peppermint Forest (handy with an axe, both for fighting and for cutting down trees and building things with them), Queen Frostine of the Ice Cream Sea (with a magic wand capable of both turning people invisible and enabling people to breathe underwater [undericecream?]), Gloppy of the Molasses Swamp (big and strong) and King Candy (with his authority.) And sometimes she still wanted to play a non-powered character, especially Princess Lolly of the Lollipop Woods (probably because of the "Princess" part.) She sometimes even liked to play a truly helpless character such as Grandma Nut, whose only power was a grandmother's charisma.
Similarly, I soon grew tired of re-using Lord Licorice and his chocolate bats as the villains all the time. So I threw at her some Fireball giants and Frostcone giants. Her characters uncovered the fact that the true masterminds behind these giants' attacks were the Dark Chocolate elves. Invading the said elves' underground lair, the PCs met some bubblegum-bears, and some ju-ju-fishlike humanoids.
And sometimes, she would want to GM. She would improvise descriptions of monsters, most of them unconvincing... but one major exception comes to mind. In one adventure, I came up to BBEG, who was a living lollipop. My daughter described him as having a face on the pop itself, with fully fleshed out arms and legs coming out of a thin lollipop stick. I don't know how exactly, but she managed to come up with a description for this monster that was surprisingly... macabre. Disturbing, in fact.
Anyway, I was coming up with as many candy-themed monsters as I could, whenever she wanted me to GM. She often liked me to use gummi bears. And once I stole, from Ghostbusters, the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. I was starting to run out of ideas for monsters.
When my daughter was 6 years old, she said she was ready to take on tougher challenges, like playing D&D with an actual, mapped out "dungeon" rather than having me improvise her characters' surroundings. Being short on time, I decided to get a map from the internet. So I happened to come across dragonsfoot.org, and found an adventure, called The Haunted Tower which someone wrote for his six-year-old daughter. I was intrigued. So I read it and found - I swear I'm not making this up - a Candy Cane Golem!
I have more tales to tell, if anyone's interested.
My oldest nephew was about ten at the time he caught the bug. He and his brothers came over for a sleep-over. The two young ones were about seven and eight. I had planned to run a quick game for the oldest, but the two little ones insisted that they wanted to play. So I figured I'd throw them in on the fly, quickly generating some PCs using software to speed things up, betting that they'd get bored or distracted and leave me and the oldest to continue his game.
The youngest made a grumpy, ugly dwarf (charisma dump) with maxed out ranks in gem crafting. Who got into character the most? The youngest! He was a greedy, gem-grubbing dwarf who got himself into trouble. An adult player may have balked at trying to barter for an exquisite gem he found with the charisma dump, but not Grumpy, who also had maxed out appraise. Nephew number 3 made his character come alive, and thus ended up driving the plot. While he had to be saved, he also ended up being vindicated and became the town jeweler. The grateful townspeople gave the jailed jeweler's shop to Grumpy, thus giving the group a base for adventuring in the area (they learned that traditional shops have living quarters above.) Both the younger players paid close attention to my narration, and made it a point of honor to keep their character sheets up-to-date, recording wounds as happily as treasure. The three of them kept me up to three am so they could finish the game.
Can't wait to run a converted Ravenloft adventure for them on Halloween.
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I'm interested as well. :)
All the candy-monster ideas reminds me of a silly kid game I had years ago using all the iconic mascots of food brands and other merchandise. The PCs would be hired by Burger King (or maybe King Vitaman), ruler of HamBurg to track down the lair of the Cookie Crook, head of the Thieves Guild. Along the way, they would run into friendly stuff like Keebler Elves and Lucky the Leprechaun or roving monsters like Gummi Bears, Jolly Green Giants, Pillsbury Doughboy golems, vampires like Count Chocula, etc.
Hey, remember those all cartoons where, when the shop closes at night, all the illustrations on the products come to life and get up to mad hi-jinks?
And, there was a calazone golem in one free Wotc adventure...
My oldest nephew was about ten at the time he caught the bug. He and his brothers came over for a sleep-over. The two young ones were about seven and eight. I had planned to run a quick game for the oldest, but the two little ones insisted that they wanted to play. So I figured I'd throw them in on the fly, quickly generating some PCs using software to speed things up, betting that they'd get bored or distracted and leave me and the oldest to continue his game.
The youngest made a grumpy, ugly dwarf (charisma dump) with maxed out ranks in gem crafting. Who got into character the most? The youngest! He was a greedy, gem-grubbing dwarf who got himself into trouble. An adult player may have balked at trying to barter for an exquisite gem he found with the charisma dump, but not Grumpy, who also had maxed out appraise. Nephew number 3 made his character come alive, and thus ended up driving the plot. While he had to be saved, he also ended up being vindicated and became the town jeweler. The grateful townspeople gave the jailed jeweler's shop to Grumpy, thus giving the group a base for adventuring in the area (they learned that traditional shops have living quarters above.) Both the younger players paid close attention to my narration, and made it a point of honor to keep their character sheets up-to-date, recording wounds as happily as treasure. The three of them kept me up to three am so they could finish the game.
Can't wait to run a converted Ravenloft adventure for them on Halloween.
Dang! Yours is the third story I remember on these boards about a 7-year-old playing 3.X. And I kept thinking that 3.X is too complicated for such a young child.
My daughter is now 7 1/2. She recently asked to play D&D for real, so I dug out my old Basic Set. She saw almost half of the rooms in Palace of the Silver Princess before she got bored. Now for our "quality time" she prefers that I read books to her or play board games with her.
And I don't blame her for getting bored with it, either. Basic clearly has its problems. Magic users never survive long enough to make it nearly to 2nd level, and are almost useless at 1st. And for ANYONE to get to 2nd level, you need to throw in a heap of treasure. (In fact, I threw in a few extra gratuitous treasures for this purpose, but she didn't find any of those, for various reasons.) Maybe 3.X is the answer.
This was not one of the stories I had planned to post, by the way.
Outside of D&D, one of my favorite RPG engines is MEGS, originally known as the DC Heroes Role-Playing Game by Mayfair Games. Simulating DC comic stories, of course, requires game designers to bend their rules over backwards trying to simulate that absurd logic so prevalent in comics.
For example, why is it that Batman always happens to have just the right gadget in his utility belt for whatever problem he's in? MEGS answered that question with Omni-Gadgets - one-use machines whose power the player can declare on use.
When I played MEGS, I paid little attention to gadgetry. (What fun is it to use a gadget to do something when you could instead have the power to do it with your own body? Who wants a flamethrower when you could shoot flames out of your own hands?) I kept gadgetry use to a minimum.
All this was the last thing on my mind when I played Candy Land: The RPG with my daughter, 4 years old at the time of this story. I was positive that she couldn't possibly master any actual gaming mechanics.
One day, when her character was stuck in an awkward situation, she said that her character should use a certain magic item, although neither of us had ever said the character had that item. I frowned and said "I'll allow it this time, but from now on, you need to declare what your characters carry when they set out. You can't just pull some new item out of thin air."
Yet over the next few days, I seriously thought about this point. The whole situation reminded me of Omni-Gadgets. What if I introduced a mechanic called "omni-items?" I explained the idea several times to my daughter, just to be sure, but I needn't have bothered. It was clear that she grasped the concept right from the start, and embraced it. From then on, whenever we played Candy Land: The RPG, when we made initial decisions like what characters we would use, we also decided how many omni-items those characters would get. I would give many for long adventures, fewer for short ones, and many to otherwise powerless characters.
<story about nephews>
Oh, and in case I didn't make it clear earlier, Mairkurion, that's a great story!
Oh no! It currently requires one to log in to Facebook to view. Could you can set it so that login isn't required? (I don't use Facebook, so I can't tell you specifically how to do that...)
I remember Elena. She kept following me from up ahead. Deviously hard to perceive, that tactic.
Oh no! It currently requires one to log in to Facebook to view. Could you can set it so that login isn't required? (I don't use Facebook, so I can't tell you specifically how to do that...)I remember Elena. She kept following me from up ahead. Deviously hard to perceive, that tactic.
Damn! Was she also doing that thing where she kept her back to you the whole time as she followed in front of you? Women are amazing! How do they do it????
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Damn! Was she also doing that thing where she kept her back to you the whole time as she followed in front of you? Women are amazing! How do they do it????Oh no! It currently requires one to log in to Facebook to view. Could you can set it so that login isn't required? (I don't use Facebook, so I can't tell you specifically how to do that...)I remember Elena. She kept following me from up ahead. Deviously hard to perceive, that tactic.
Don't forget the security guard she had to hide behind the whole time. Oddly enough, he always kept his eye on you...
Damn! Was she also doing that thing where she kept her back to you the whole time as she followed in front of you? Women are amazing! How do they do it????I remember Elena. She kept following me from up ahead. Deviously hard to perceive, that tactic.
I think their pineal glands are rounder and squishier than a man's and this gives them ESP like senses.
Don't forget the security guard she had to hide behind the whole time. Oddly enough, he always kept his eye on you...
Oh, I never stalk and I mean that sincelery.
Enough talk about celery. Back to candy! Candy is definitely more sinful than celery.
Enough talk about celery. Back to candy! Candy is definitely more sinful than celery.
Normally I would defer to a theologian on matters of assigning comparative value to sin, but you have never met a celery as wicked as mine. It was grown from a bad seed.
Is it awakened? A sentient sinful celery? Is it mobile? A non-stationary sentient sinful celery? From what sordid seed did this stalk spring?
Is it awakened? A sentient sinful celery? Is it mobile? A non-stationary sentient sinful celery? From what sordid seed did this stalk spring?
You nailed it. A crop from hell! Ambulatory, but unlike triffids, salt water just vexes them.
We were used to blasting away at mindless celery all these years... there were so many of them but they went down without much fuss. But since the radiation storms they've changed. They're becoming... smarter. They seem to watch what we do and adapt.
That's the last time I say God's green Earth. More like Satan's leafy inferno! To arms!
Bacon maidens?
I think you mean, Baconbit Mephits.
I think you mean, Baconbit Mephits.
No, that would be "Baconbit Kobolds."
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I think you mean, Baconbit Mephits.No, that would be "Baconbit Kobolds."
Kobolds are found in the gardening department. They are green with red eyes and not very tasty. :)
Unlike Bacon Maidens, which are a dream come true...
awawawawawa...:excessive drooling:
Kobolds are found in the gardening department. They are green with red eyes and not very tasty. :)I think you mean, Baconbit Mephits.No, that would be "Baconbit Kobolds."
Actually, they would help with the Zombie Control.
Unlike Bacon Maidens, which are a dream come true...
awawawawawa...:excessive drooling:
You know ...Unlike Bacon Maidens, which are a dream come true...
awawawawawa...:excessive drooling:
I was expecting Lord Fyre's link to lead to something more like this.
NO...BACON maidens...they look slim, but taste fat...wait a minute...
I'm not even going to tell you what marshmallows are made from.
The Produce Wars just got a whole lot puffier.
::Ogre sized marshmallow *battlenaut wearing armor sheets of reinforced graham cracker plating looks up at the moon a second before vomiting a torrent of scalding hot chocolate onto a platoon of screaming soldiers. "Wan't S'more?!" he chides in a voice so deep and rumbling it challenges the thunder of battle itself.
*My lawyer warned me to say, "Not to be confused with the Stay Puft fella from the Ghostbusters IP."