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Yesterday, my 12-year-old son GMed for the first time, and he did a great job of it!
That's the TL;DR version of the story. The full version I wanted to write is loaded with side-points, but that's the main thing I wanted to convey.
Some of you may remember my boasting of my son's role-playing exploits. After my other players quit, I started my son - 4 years old at the time - playing BECMI. I mentioned it in this thread. As usual when I play an RPG one-on-one, I let the player create and play a couple of PCs, while I played a couple of "GMPCs" to make a full party.
The story continued with...
My 6-year-old played Pathfinder
...and...
In that last thread, I mentioned that I didn't believe my father had much love for the game, and that the real reason he played was that he wanted to spend quality time with his grandson.
Sometimes, my son would dream of GMing, and would start reading a module or start designing his own adventure. But he would soon lose interest.
In this thread...
...I related that I decided to switch back to D&D 3.0, and started a 3.0 campaign, set in Varisia, again with my father and my son as players. I mentioned the following:
The grass is often greener on the other side, and I often feel conscious of the relative merits of 3.5 and PF, but all in all, I still feel I like 3.0 the best. My son made it clear he prefers Pathfinder, and he once made arguments about why we should switch back to it by pointing out some of its merits at some length. I responded "I know that PF has some advantages, but I'm sticking with 3.0." He wasn't terribly happy with me for a while after that, but we continued playing all the same.
Thinking back on that conversation now, I think I also said something like "Yes, PFRPG has its advantages, and if you ever run a Pathfinder campaign, I'll be happy to play in it."
Another aspect of that campaign I mentioned at the time was my father's part in it. With my son and me, my father experienced (hah!) levels 1 through 10. Considering his limited enthusiasm for the game, I would have considered it a great achievement if my father had played a third as much as he had.
Since I last posted in that thread, we finished Chadranther's Bane, and I prepared the beginning of another adventure... which may never get played. My father is moving away, so it's just me and my son again. Furthermore, my son - 12 years old by now - was getting bored with the Varisian campaign. And he still felt no interest in reading modules. So he started writing up his own first-level PFRPG adventure, set in Cheliax, and ran his first session yesterday.
And what a job he did of it! He wrote up sophisticated descriptions which surprised me. And he kept the action moving, and he had to improvise when I didn't cooperate with being railroaded. He performed admirably throughout.
It was quite an experience for me in other ways too. I'm not accustomed to playing without GMing. Oh, I've played in PBPs. I've played computer RPGs. Sometimes - particularly with my children when they were very young - we would free-form role play, with a GM telling stories while the player made choices for one of the characters... but with no rulebooks, stat blocks, maps, or dice. But as for actual, face-to-face, table-top RPGs with a real system, I didn't play without GMing in over 30 years, until yesterday! Just sitting on the wrong side of the GM screen seemed a novelty!
This campaign marks another first as well. Until now, I've never played nor created a monk character. (As a GM, I sometimes statted out a monster with a level or four [or eight] of monk, but always as an adversary for the party to fight, and never a "pure" monk without monster HDs. I once grabbed stats for a monk from the NPC Codex, but the PCs never encountered that character.) Monks just didn't appeal to me. But lately, after seeing the Karate Kid movies, I've been dreaming of playing a PC who's part Daniel LaRusso, part Tanis Half-Elven. Now I'm doing it! (I got lucky and rolled very high ability scores. Now if I could only get high attack rolls! I didn't made a decent attack roll - and consequently never scored a hit - throughout the whole first session! Well, at least I TOOK a lot of hits, thus protecting other party-members from getting wounded themselves.)
And as far as I can tell, my son has every intention of continuing the adventure next week. The saga continues...
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My son saw the above post, and he commented on part of it:
And he still felt no interest in reading modules. So he started writing up his own first-level PFRPG adventure...
He told me "I don't object to reading modules. It's just that if I run an adventure you've read, you might remember parts of it."
Yesterday, my 12-year-old son GMed for the first time, and he did a great job of it!
That's the TL;DR version of the story. The full version I wanted to write is loaded with side-points, but that's the main thing I wanted to convey.
Some of you may remember my boasting of my son's role-playing exploits. After my other players quit, I started my son - 4 years old at the time - playing BECMI. I mentioned it in this thread. As usual when I play an RPG one-on-one, I let the player create and play a couple of PCs, while I played a couple of "GMPCs" to make a full party.
The story continued with...
My 6-year-old played Pathfinder
...and...
In that last thread, I mentioned that I didn't believe my father had much love for the game, and that the real reason he played was that he wanted to spend quality time with his grandson.
Sometimes, my son would dream of GMing, and would start reading a module or start designing his own adventure. But he would soon lose interest.
In this thread...
...I related that I decided to switch back to D&D 3.0, and started a 3.0 campaign, set in Varisia, again with my father and my son as players. I mentioned the following:
The grass is often greener on the other side, and I often feel conscious of the relative merits of 3.5 and PF, but all in all, I still feel I like 3.0 the best. My son made it clear he prefers Pathfinder, and he once made arguments about why we should switch back to it by pointing out some of its merits at some length. I responded "I know that PF has some advantages, but I'm sticking with 3.0." He wasn't terribly happy with me for a while after...
Sounds great! Do you know if he is looking for friends to play too? I'm 14 and I have played with my brother since I was around 7 or 8 (I think). Last year I asked a bunch of my friends if they wanted to play and I expected no one to say yes but it turns out that a bunch did. Some of them had even played D&D before. Now we all play together and we get more kids from school that want to play all the time. Me and my brother GM Pathfinder, my friend GMs 5E and my other friend doesn't like to GM but he has 4E (which I hate). This is such a great story. I wish my parents would play.
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Do you know if he is looking for friends to play too?
I suggested it, but he seems a bit ashamed of his role-playing habit.
But if he gets comfortable GMing, who knows what he might do in the future?
