GMing for Children #2: Making Choice Matter

(This post is part of a series on GMing for children, drawing on the experience/lessons I’ve gained through 7+ years working professionally at a business that runs RPGs for children and young people. For the introductory post that talks about my background and my aims with this series, look here).

So last time we talked about how to help kids to grasp and get a fix on the economy of abstract resources (HP, spell slots, actions per turn, what have you) that are highly prominent in most roleplaying games.

Today, I want to talk about how to help them make meaningful choices, and how that intersects with agency.

Let’s start by laying out some things that I’m going to assume are true: players making choices is a key part of roleplaying games; choices should have consequences that follow on, and not just the illusion of choice, and choices made with no clues to what those consequences might be aren’t actually meaningful.

The wording of the last is important: “what those consequences might be”.

As my friend Ash said recently while playing Darkest Dungeon: even if the clues are arbitrary and don’t really correspond to the consequences, that still feels better than being asked to choose entirely at randomly.

But I digress: how does all this relate to children?

To reiterate the core theme of last time, children are natural roleplayers and can be wonderful to GM for but it is important to recognise they are children. Their capacities and skills differ from adults, often in ways that make playing an RPG (which assumes certain baselines of ability) more complex.

Children have issues with making choices, often for exactly the same reason they have trouble with resource management.

Abstract thought isn’t real yet to them, and weighing the cost/benefit of two choices is tricky because everything involved is abstract and intangible. None of the things that distinguish the two choices are physical or graspable: the differences cannot be seen, or felt, or interacted with.

Comparing two similar options and choosing between them, particularly when mathematical probability/optimisation gets involved, is a huge struggle for children.

Speaking from experience, they hate wasted time. That thing in games like Torchbearer and Burning Wheel where certain choices in a Conflict just mean your action is neutralised?

Kids will fucking riot.

And just in general, present them with too many and too complex choices and they get disengaged, they get bored, they get frustrated. Often, they pick at random and then feel betrayed by the outcome (because they didn’t really grasp the associated consequences, even if you explicitly identified them).

Now, what can we do about this? There are a number of strategies, depending on what you like best.

I’m going to stay focused, and talk about just two: streamlining choice, and incomparables.

So, streamlining.

Anyone who has ever played Dungeons & Dragons, how many options do you have in any given round? Between the various questions of what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, the order of your actions, the question of positioning, the length of a spell-list, the length of the skill list, and so on, there is a near-infinite combination of things to choose between.

Now, some of these choices are clearly sub-optimal (though maybe not-so-clearly to a seven year old) but that still leaves a large array of options that have to be compared to find the best choice.

This is too much choice and too much demand for abstract reasoning for a seven year old.

Way too much.

And especially when the added burden of learning how to roleplay in a structured manner and learning the game rules is already in place.

Build to slightly more complexity by all means, but keep it simple to start with.

Two options, maybe three. Give them a couple of tools with which to solve their problems – a combat option, a tricky or sneaky option, a diplomatic option – and then let them learn to use them. Streamline their options and make them distinct and non-overlapping, so that they have only a few valid choices to navigate.

Give them a few meaningful choices rather than subjecting them to death by a tiny thousand decisions.

The other strategy comes down to this idea of meaningful alternatives, and it’s about the power of (mathematical) incomparables.

Don’t ask a child to compare 2d6 damage and 1d12 damage, don’t ask them to compare risk-reward rations, don’t ask them to compare a lower chance to hit with more damage and a higher chance to hit with less.

Give them choices that can’t be compared based on mathematical advantage or probability.

Give them distinct choices between genuinely alternate possibilities that don’t need to be compared in those terms. Make the choice between them a narrative choice, a character choice, rather than a question of optimal tactics and play.

Do they help the stranger or run away? Do they focus on offence or focus on defence? Do they kill the bandits with fire spells or make them all fall asleep?

And to return to the point from before: let them know what the likely consequences are.

Let them choose between the two distinct options with a sense of what will happen if they do. Let them choose, meaningfully. Not between two mathematical equations but between two likely outcomes, so they can decide which one is more desirable to them.

And of course, there’s an important coda to all this: make sure to leave space for them to come up with alternative choices of their own.

That’s one of the most key elements of making sure that players have agency: give them some authorship powers of their own. But that’s starting to touch on questions of pre-planning vs. improvisation and the dreaded GM railroad, and that’s a subject for another blog.

So, there it is:

Kids don’t like option paralysis, they don’t like wasted time / trap choices, and they don’t do well with choice that involves probability and maths-based tactical analysis.

Instead, pare down the options you offer, and give distinct choices, and prepare to be surprised.

Of Children, Dungeon World, and Playing Fair

This blog has been fairly quiet of late, because for the last month and a half or so the only RPG-related stuff I’ve been doing has been at work (or working on a game for an upcoming convention, but I'll talk about that later). 

And I always feel weird posting about my work, for several reasons.

It feels too much like boasting, for one – I’m sure there’s any number of amazing designers and GMs who would kill to have a job that’s RPG-adjacent. Then there’s always the imposter syndrome, the fear that talking about my work is either boring to everyone else or that I’m not qualified to draw anything out of my experiences at work.

And always, of course, is there’s the privacy concern: for me, and more importantly for the kids.

But after thinking (and blogging) for a while I think I’ve found a line I’m comfortable with in terms of privacy. And the last frantic fortnight of GMing 10-hour days has spawned all kinds of thoughts I think are interesting enough to share.

While I work on the more theory-heavy stuff (including the next installments of my series on GMing for Children), there’s a quick story I want to tell.

***

So, for the last fortnight the kids and I spent our lunchtimes playing Dungeon World.

The actual programs we run are played using a custom system that combines LARP combat, improvisational theatre, and tabletop gaming, but starting in the first week I found the kids begging me to run freeform Dungeon World instead of taking a break from gaming.

No dice, no character sheets, nothing but our imaginations and my best memory of the mechanics.

And even though these kids are doing a lot of roleplaying, both within each day and over the course of the fortnight for those who are regulars, they were still hungry and keen for it every day.

And so, we played Dungeon World.

It started with one of the older kids, who’s most invested in systems and the mechanics of RPGs. We’ve been chatting about Powered by the Apocalypse games for a while, and he’s even tried writing his own.

He was telling me about a recent failure running Dungeon World for his friends as I diagnosed his issues (he was running just with the free sheets from the website, without reading the GMing chapter of DW or Apocalypse World), and to prove a point I started GMing it for him.

Incredibly free, incredibly casual: making decisions about stats and equipment as they became relevant and just having a conversation in the most Powered by the Apocalypse way possible.

It took us five minutes before a single move was even made (which served to prove my initial point).

By then, though, we’d attracted a crowd. Other kids were piping in with their desire to play, and soon where we’d had a single character we had a party. Over the course of the fortnight, numbers swelled until I had to limit the numbers of characters in the party and kids had to work together to play people.

The point of this story, though, the part of it that’s interesting, is the mechanics.

As I mentioned above, we were playing freeform. We only had the mechanics and sheets in my memory, and so we ended up playing in some ways the purest form of DW: players simply describing actions, with me activating moves when their triggers came up.

But we didn’t have any dice.

Whenever a roll needed to be made, I simply told the kids their modifiers and asked the player/s to tell me what they rolled. It was the usual 2d6 + MOD, but all the randomization and math was going on in their heads.

One might expect that there was a string of 10+s, that failures vanished as they learned the thresholds.

I’ll be honest: at first, I had the same fear. When we talk about children and RPGs, the discussion is always framed by unstated assumptions about maturity and fairness: the belief that children will have issues with consequences, or with failures, or with randomness giving rise to differences in reward and difficulty.

And yet the failures never disappeared. The partial successes never disappeared.

From start to finish, the statistical probability was pretty much the same as on a set of dice (perhaps slightly skewed towards success, but then I was more generous with bonuses). In fact, if anything there was an increase over time in their willingness to embrace danger or failure.

All of this surprised me.

I’ve been GMing for children for a decade now, seven of those years professionally, and still, I was surprised: by their ability to play fair without an external arbiter; by their willingness to embrace failure and consequence; by their openness to pushing towards difficulty as an interesting and desirable outcome.

And I think, as I work on more articles on GMing for children, that all this is very important to remember both for me and for my readers.

Playing fair and embracing failure aren’t limited to adults.

And children are often far more capable than you give them credit for.

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If you'd like to support me to keep creating material like this and working on other RPG/game-design projects, check out my Patreon to help me do more cool stuff and get access to monthly Q&As, early-access playtesting of my story games, or a place on the credits list for any game I make).

GMing for Children #1: Abstract Resources & Tangible Objects

The first time I picked up a set of dice and rolled up a character, I was 9 years old. The first time I got a taste of GMing I was 13.

For the last 7 and something years, since the age of 16, I’ve been employed as a professional GM for children and young people at a business that uses roleplaying to teach history, teamwork, problem-solving, and empathy.

Suffice then to say that I have some experience GMing for children.

How to introduce kids to RPGs is a perennial topic in the hobby, but it seems to be one that’s picked up traffic in recent years.

The original generation/s of roleplayers are now of an age to have children, and for those children to be old enough to read, and do addition and subtraction, and hold a conversation, and possess all those basic human skills necessary for roleplaying.

And so, of course, there is now a generation of kids being introduced to roleplaying by their parents.

Children are natural roleplayers already: they take on other roles and characters as easily as they breathe, they have a near limitless capacity for invention, their imaginations are boundless and creative beyond many artists and authors I know.

But while they have a natural inclination towards roleplaying, they are still children.

Certain aspects and demands of roleplaying games are difficult for them; certain skills required of players rely on patience and focus they may not yet have.

In order for kids to have the best possible experience as they’re introduced to roleplaying games, it helps to adjust some techniques and reassess some assumptions. That way the GM knows what to expect, and the players aren’t confronted by demands for which they aren’t yet developmentally prepared.

One of the major issues I’ve noticed over the years is children struggling with the abstractness of RPGs.

There is a lot of resource management in most RPGs, from the near-ubiquitous concept of hit points/health/similar equivalents, to the concept of spell slots or abilities limited per day in D&D (due to its popularity, the most common RPG used to introduce kids to gaming).

And these resources, in the default form of most games, are entirely abstract.

They are written down, tracked only in numbers and in the head of the player, and their proportional relationship – that hit was half of my HP, using a spell is a third of my resources – is intangible.

Children, particularly those between 7 and 10 (the main demographic I GM for) don’t do well with abstractness and intangible numbers.

They happily take hit after hit during fights, but are visibly shocked when eventually they look down and see they’ve only got 5 hit points left. They conserve all their spells slots through the day just in case and never end up spending them, or else blow them all on the first dice-roll of the day despite being warned they won’t get to rest and get them back.

The grasp on these numbers – of hit points, of spell slots, of limited-use abilities – necessary to manage them effectively eludes children, because in a very literal way these numbers aren’t real to them.

They can’t see them, they can’t count them as real things, they can’t touch them or feel them.

And so, I’ve found, the answer is to turn abstract resources into tangible objects.

Give them something that they can touch, and count in a way that’s sensory and meaningful. Give them something that they can visually identify is only half of what they started with, or a third, or a quarter, or only one left. Give them something that lets them understand the gravity of using a limited resource, or lets them feel the impact of losing an amount of hit points.

Give them coloured toothpicks for hit points that they have to snap as they lose them.

Give them spell-tokens, shiny and magical-feeling, that they must expend to use their arcane powers.

Give them cards for limited-use abilities, and better yet put the rules on them in child-friendly form.

You could even go so far as to make specific tokens for each type of thing they can do in a combat (a Movement, an Action, a Reaction) and reissue them at the start of each new round.

(There are already some games for adults that do this transformation of abstract resource into tangible objects brilliantly: filling in the Harm clock in Apocalypse World, turning a dice from side to side to track increasing insanity in Cthulhu Dark, using poker chips to track Trust tokens in the Mountain Witch, everything about the resolution mechanics in Dread and Ten Candles. Look to these games for inspiration.)

Make resources tangible. Make them meaningful.

Make them visceral, if you’d like and you think it will enhance the experience.

(The toothpick idea above is one attempt to do just that.)

Kids are more than capable of giving you some of the greatest RPG experiences of your life, and it’s an incredibly rewarding feeling to watch them create their first characters and let their imaginations flourish and run wild.

All you have to do is rethink some assumptions, give them a hand, and watch them fly.

(Find this post useful/interesting? Enjoy the content I'm putting out on this blog? 

If you'd like to support me to keep creating material like this and working on other RPG/game-design projects, check out my Patreon to help me do more cool stuff and get access to monthly Q&As, early-access playtesting of my story games, or a place on the credits list for any game I make).