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dmsden · 1 year

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Communication - Why is it so important?

Hullo, Gentle Readers! This week's Question from a Denizen comes to us from another shy, Anonymous reader. They say, "I enjoyed the write up on fizzle, it really captures your experience with my favourite trick: talking to each other. Do you have more stories about a time when you and others have different POV on the same session?"

I have to be honest...I can't think of many times where I felt the need to check in or apologize after a session and then found that my players and I were in disagreement. I think this recent fizzle was a situation of me being tired and not feeling great about the game. I reached out to apologize and got reassured that other folks had enjoyed themselves.

I thought instead I would talk a little bit about one of my favorite pieces of advice, why I think it's important, and when I think you should follow it. Everyone who reads this blog for more than a couple of articles will have seen my mantra of "Talk to your players." I say it all the time, because I really feel it resolves 99% of problems in a game. So with that said, why do I think it's so important?

So here's the thing...yes, D&D and other TTRPGs are games, but, at their core, they're relationships. Joining a game is essentially a social contract: I will meet with you, abide by the rules of the game, respect the GM, and we'll tell amazing stories together. This is a relationship, and one that hopefully connects socially in other ways as well. I'm friends with all my players, and, even when I invite new players into a game whom I haven't met before, I often become good friends with them over time. TTRPGs are an intensely social activity. And in any kind of social activity or relationship, communication is absolutely essential.

Now I'm not just talking about the communication around the table, although that's obviously important, too. It's not like the game would work if people wouldn't talk or couldn't understand each other. I'm talking about clear and honest communication where people talk outside the game, discuss how things are going, offer feedback, and the like.

Now, I'm not advocating for having a sit down discussion with your players for every session (although for a starting DM, that could be quite useful). I'm just talking about an occasional casual check-in. Ask your players how they're enjoying the game. Do they like where the story is going? Are there any NPCs they'd like to see more of? Is there anything from their backstory they're wanting to play up more or less? Are there any plot threads they want to make sure don't disappear or that they would like to go away?

A key time to talk to your players, of course, is during a Session Zero, but all the things you discuss at a Session Zero can come up down the road. Maybe someone would like to introduce new safety tools at the table that they were unaware of when the campaign started. Maybe there's some plot element that they hadn't considered for their character that they'd like to add, which requires a tweak to their backstory. Maybe they've realized they've never fought a beholder in D&D, and they want to ask you to add one to your campaign.

Another use of communication is to give feedback to a player on behavior you want to encourage or discourage. You might give someone Inspiration after a session, because after thinking about it, you realized just how great something they did was. Alternately, you might want to ask a player to change behavior in some way, such as not challenging your decisions during game play, not bullying another player, or looking up information they shouldn't have access to during the session.

You may also want to discuss plot with a player. Maybe you have an upcoming plot that they would tie into very naturally, but it would require a minor tweak to their backstory. Maybe you want to make sure they get a cool magic-item soon, and you'd like to know what the player might want. Maybe you want to do a story involving the PC's family, but you don't have a lot of details, so you might need to pick their brains.

If you notice a player seems uncomfortable with something, but they don't comment or invoke a safety tool, you could approach them outside the game and just check in and make sure they're okay. It could be that they're just roleplaying, or that they didn't feel comfortable interrupting the game to voice a concern. If you don't want to call them out specifically, you can send an email to everyone inviting them to reach out to you privately if they have anything they want to talk about.

I hope every DM makes it a habit to talk to their players. Until we chat again, keep those dice a-rolling.

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vishers · 4 years

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So You Want to Play TTRPGs With Your Littles?

A friend of mine who knows I've stoically soldiered on trying to play TTRPGs with my littles (4 of them so far, ages 6, 8, 10, and 11) recently asked me if I had any advice on how to play with his kids who are really interested in the hobby. Rather than answer directly, I figured I'd write up my thoughts in a post.

Caveat Emptor. I would call introducing this hobby to my kids a moderate success. Some sessions still end up with someone in tears (occasionally me). Every session has heated arguments. One of the kids always tries to kill one of the other player characters at which point I have to remind them that nothing happens in the game till the GM says it does. You would not believe what a rules lawyer an 11 year old can be. All that said, we keep wanting to play, so something good's gotta be happening. YMMV.

My tips for running the game for littles in roughly priority order:

Be an arbitrator

Your kids, if they're anything like mine, are going to have immense difficulty staying calm while one of them declares their wish to smash the altar that they were just intending to pray at. Resolving these conflicts is in large part going to fall to you.

Understand what they're there for

Your kids are likely to want very different things out of the game and out of the session. Developing a sense of what they're looking for at any given time (because they probably can't or won't tell you directly) will pay dividends later.

Stick with maturity cohorts

Even if it means playing one on one, even if it means getting creative with scheduling, even it means running 3 games simultaneously, try to stick with maturity cohorts. This is really a follow on to point 2 but I think it's important to call out all on its own because I find that maturity cohorts tend to be there for roughly similar things.

Keep everything as snappy as you can

My kids will play the game for a long time (longer than me!) but each thing they do generally has to be short, even combat. They're especially intolerant of long action queues or lengthy conversations between other players.

Be silly

Kids love a good laugh. Err on the side of silliness. Use funny voices. Screw up your face into funny shapes. Make outrageous things happen.

Be serious

Be prepared to tone the silliness back though at your kid's signals. I think kids are looking at this as an opportunity to play at a more serious world. If the session is just as silly as their silliest pretend games then it robs them of a chance to do that.

Challenge them without making them lose

Part of why we all play TTPRGs is because of how real it can feel. In the words of Morpheus, your mind makes it real. But this can also be a really intense experience for kids who aren't steeped in gaming yet and don't understand that they'll love their next character just as much as this one and that it's not really them dying. You should bend over backwards to make it feel like a challenge without beating them.

Play to the rules based on their desire

You'll probably find that each of your kids has different expectations of how rules-driven your game will be. This is OK. Be prepared to either stick with those maturity cohorts or to arbitrate between those who want to play fast and loose with the rules and those that don't.

Be an arbitrator

Hopefully when playing with adults this is largely not an issue, but I have found that with kids they cannot be relied upon to work things out on their own. I have had things nearly devolve into a fist fight beneath my table before. Instead, I try to remind the kids that nothing in the game happens until the GM says it does and try to keep them mostly talking to me rather than each other. I also have to work extra hard to make sure everyone is getting a turn to speak and shine. The simple tactic of going around the table one at a time and asking each player what they want to do and reminding anyone who's bothered by it that it hasn't actually happened yet seems to defuse most situations.

Understand what your kids are there for

I've prioritized story telling as much as I can as a parent, so I figured my kids would naturally be primed to explore a free form fantasy world and would be interested in participating in creating that story. What I found when I got into it though surprised me.

For most of my kids so far it's very important to them that the illusion that they're exploring something real is maintained. What that means is that transparent invitations to 'join in on the story telling' that some adults (and probably other kids) would relish were, shall we say, poorly received. They wanted me to show them a world with characters that they could believe in and events that they couldn't control. They were extremely sensitive to me making it obvious that I was making things up on the spot so the amount of 'DM magic' that I need to deploy can be pretty tiresome. I can't let them see how hard I'm working behind the screen.

The other thing I was surprised by was how diverse their desires for a given session can be, even down to the child. One will want some deep social interaction while another just wants combat. The next session the tables can flip. This combined with the vastly different maturity levels I'm targeting (see further on), many times from adults all the way down to a 6 year old, and you can see how it's pretty difficult to keep everyone happy all the time. For what it's worth, I think of this more as a good thing and an opportunity to practice social generosity but especially for the younger kids (though I'll be honest even sometimes for the adults) this can get pretty exhausting. The challenge here is compound by the fact that I can't generally just ask them what they want. This is partly because it breaks the aforementioned illusion that they're not overly participatory in what's happening but also simply because they're kids and they don't always know what they want or how to express it.

In short, it's really challenging to give everyone what they're looking for even for well behaved adults. Throw the attention spans and emotional generosity of your average child into the mix and you get a real challenge.

Stick with maturity cohorts, even if that means playing one on one

My most successful sessions so far have been with 2 to 4 players max with everyone being in roughly the same maturity cohort. The roughest sessions by far have been the ones with 7 players (6, 8, 10, 11 + 3 adults) of wildly different maturity levels. Generally speaking the game gets so big because no one wants to be left out but there just isn't a way to please all those maturity levels at once.

Instead, schedule your sessions after the younger kids are in bed. Offer to play with the younger kids one to one during a nap time or during a time when the older kids are already doing something else. Don't be afraid of playing with low DM:Player ratios. The kids will love the attention anyway and it lets you fine tune what you're doing to exactly what they want to be doing and they can act all the time rather than getting stuck behind a long queue.

Keep everything as snappy as you can

My kids will play the game for 4 and 1/2 hours or more if I let them. But oddly enough they seem to get bored of everything but combat relatively quickly. Even combat in a large group can get boring for them if it's taking many minutes between each of their turns. They especially seem to get bored of social interaction very quickly. This is less true for my 10 and 11 year old than it is for my 6 and 8 year old but it's still true even for them. They get bored even more quickly when someone else is doing the talking, and for better or worse they aren't very good just yet at conversing as a group. I take full responsibility.

Be prepared at all times to apply that DM Magic and make things wrap up and move along as soon as it looks like everyone's ready for it to move on.

Be silly

Be prepared to mug it up with the best of them. Use silly voices. Make silly poop jokes. Make outrageous things happen to characters in the game. Stand up and act it out. Encourage them to do so. The more engaging you are in this way the more fun they'll be having. This requires a bit of comedic timing on your part. You don't want to make everyone laugh during the deadly serious encounter with the barbaric mayor who has kidnapped the miller and her family. But you I have definitely found that the side to err on is the one of over the top humor.

Be serious

On the flip side, too much humor has definitely ruined a session or two. This gets back to that illusion of reality that's so important to my kids. Initially I ran a really silly game (in No Thank You, Evil!) and my older kids especially rejected it. I don't know if that's just the effect of the kind of stories I've raised them on or whether this is universal but I think they're looking for an opportunity to act more mature or live in a more mature situation than they normally do. They want higher stakes.

Challenge them without making them lose

Kids not already steeped in game culture have a really difficult time losing or dying. I think TTRPGs make this even worse because the feeling is so personal. You feel like you are in danger when your character is facing off against the evil Goblin Shaman. Because of this, I try very hard to push my kids right to the brink of death in a big fight but generally only knock out the older ones. This can be quite a challenge while still preserving verisimilitude but it beats beating them any day. I think adults would see through this faster but my kids at least haven't complained about it yet.

I will say that the handful of times I've let one of their characters go down it's required a major intervention afterwards. Tears have been shed.

Bend around your kids expectations of the rules

I was very surprised to discover that my kids are mostly very into the rules. They want to feel like only certain things are possible. They want to understand what their options are. My older ones especially have chowed the Player's Handbook down to pulp and are very willing to call me out when I do something counter to it. On the other hand, this is an opportunity to remind them that this game is our game, and that ultimately I'm the one defining the rules of this universe. Making sure they understand that our goal is to have fun and play out dramatic events instead of slavishly following specific rules has helped a lot.

But my younger ones don't know all the rules. I find that one of the constant arbitrations I'm performing is an older child telling me that the younger child didn't have that item or wasn't close enough in combat or that there isn't any way for them anyway to back flip off the ceiling and land on the orc's head. I have to do substantial work to help the older ones understand that this is part of the fun for the younger ones and that really they were standing right next to the orc anyway so it doesn't matter that they wanted to say that they flipped off the ceiling because they're still able to hit the guy.

Conclusion

I hope some of that was helpful. I'm a new DM and a new player so obviously take everything I say with a huge grain of salt. Always remember that your game and your table are yours first. If you like this hobby do what makes it work for you and yours, not what people on the internet or the book that you bought say. I think TTPRGs are amazing and I wish I'd found them earlier. I hope to be playing them with my kids and friends for many years to come.

#ttrpg #d&d #no thank you evil!#kids #role playing games #rpgs

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