I've mentioned elsewhere on this site that I'm a teacher and that I run the Dungeons & Dragons Club at school. Additionally, my school offers a program where the last week of school is a made into a variety of projects--mine has always been to play Dungeons & Dragons. It's a cool way to reach the students on a different level as well as to get a lot of solid gaming time in--the project week added up to 20 hours of game time in one week! And with all of this experience, I can tell you confidently that kids play in ways that are both similar to and different from the ways we learn to play it as adults. I'll consider both as I reflect on the lessons I've learned as a GM who's running a game for children.
It's worth noting before we get started that there's a general timeline that most kids go through with tabletop games. Before 10, most kids like a whimsical story-based game--the imagination is more accessible than the rules for most kids, so this is where the emphasis is placed. Between 10 and 15 or so, the rules become more accessible, and the excitement of combat becomes more the emphasis. After 15, kids tend to start developing personal styles, placing emphasis on whatever elements of the game appeal most to them. I've generally played with kids at the middle school age, so they've wanted mostly combat. Which leads me to my first lesson:
Moreso with kids than adults, you need to compromise. Now, I've written elsewhere that there are things you shouldn't compromise on, your personal style as a GM most of all. But deliberately not giving child players of a tabletop game what they want has a different has a different impact: they haven't developed a complete sense of what the game(s) is (are), so you're their entire introduction to tabletop games, so a bad introduction could turn them off the game(s) altogether. And that's a heavy weight to carry, I'll admit, but that doesn't change the situation. When I play with kids who have never played before, I ask more questions than normal about what they want and expect. "On a scale from one to ten, how much fighting do you want? On the same scale, how much story? How much goofing around? What kinds of enemies do you want to fight? What kind of treasure do you want to discover? Do you want to be powerful heroes who can solve any problem, or heroes going up against things that challenge you?" All of these questions can help you tailor the game to what they want, and knowing that the game can be changed to fit their interests will carry them far in the tabletop world.
One lesson I have especially struggled with has been adjusting my expectations and patience for rules-related misunderstandings. Veteran players and GMs know that having a beginning player at the table can slow things down; oftentimes with kids, everyone is a beginning player. That means that the slowdown is exacerbated by a factor of as many players as there are. Reading this, you might be thinking, "They're kids! Of course they don't know every rule." And I agree. What I'm talking about, though, is different. Playing an entire combat-heavy adventure and still not knowing how to roll an attack at the end is the kind of thing that happens often with kids and much less often with adults. But the flipside is very nice: playing tabletop games with kids makes me more patient with my beginning adult players, and I actually end up feeling grateful for my adult players. On this note, most kids are pretty curious by nature--when they don't understand a rule, it's a good idea to entirely explain the rule as well as all related rules. Being especially clear about how the many rules of games are connected is important so that a child can really grasp why things are the way they are, and grasping that is a step towards being a regular tabletop game player.
One surprising lesson I seem to keep learning is that while many details about GMing change when you're playing a tabletop game with children, but the complexity of the story doesn't have to change. A specific example from the recent week-long D&D stint at school: I offered three base stories for my players--a combat-heavy dungeon crawl fighting magically-changing monsters, a story-heavy quest to enlist gods to help end a blight on the greatest forest, and a mixed story about breaking out of prison. To my dismay (but not surprise), the story-heavy campaign was not selected by anyone. But it ended up that one small group wanted the prison break concept more than the forest blight concept but still wanted a story-heavy game. And as we together developed a story out of the prison break concept, I noticed that I would veer away from complicated ideas like having people locked up for silly charges or corrupt guards working with prisoners--but when I'd include some tiny detail in that direction (like the guards' sadistic glee at making them fight animals in the cell as a punishment), they'd light up. Getting really into colorful details about the prison and the people in it was what ended up making the campaign more fun and memorable. And I was playing with 7th graders! They surprised me by enjoying a more mature approach to the story, and while they also littered their campaign with absolute silliness, the darkness also played an important role in their enjoyment of the campaign.
Speaking of silliness, expect to lean into it. I have played tabletop games with about a hundred different kids in my career as a GM, and I've yet to find one who doesn't enjoy using tabletop games' ability to generate silliness. It's not just that kids want to be silly--it's specifically that tabletop games allow us to use our imagination, and one of the easiest and most fun ways to use our imaginations is to be silly. An example might help illustrate what I mean: I ran three campaigns in five-minute shifts for a week, and all three campaigns tried to do the same exact thing--tame an animal they were meant to fight. Now, in real life, if a bear came lumbering up to you in the wild and starting biting your arm, your first thought would likely not be, "I want it to be my friend." But the open possibilities of tabletop games meant that the characters could roll a Handle Animal check (we were playing D&D 5E) to befriend the animals they were fighting (bears, mountain lions, and hyenas, depending on the campaign), and while I could have said, "The DC for a hostile creature is so high that none of you could ever meet it," I could also have said, "Alright, roll for Handle Animal . . . you just barely rolled high enough. He's your friend now." And I went with the second option in literally every case. It's way more fun for a kid playing D&D to charm a creature and have a pet than it is to vanquish a nameless beast in combat. It's silly, but silly is what we're going for. And that translates to most campaigns--you can get a lot out of a bit of silliness.
I've written before about the importance of fudging rolls, and this is especially true of playing with kids. Let's address this with an example of something that went wrong with my week of GMing for kids: in one of the dungeon crawl campaigns, I wasn't tracking player HP very closely, and an attack an enemy creature made perma-killed one of the kid's characters. He was distraught. He had fought for days only to die in the final battle, and his friends weren't being very supportive. If I had been paying better attention, I would have fudged the numbers on the damage and kept him in the fight. But it was too late. I thought quickly and took action. I had another enemy unleash vicious attacks on two other low-health player characters, perma-killing them both (one through a roll I fudged upwards to hit and do enough damage). With other characters down, the first kid whose character died wasn't alone. Then, I initiated phase two: the boss, a wizard with a time control amulet, reversed time to the beginning of the fight, looking for a "fair challenge." The party got another chance to fight more strategically, and when they overcame the wizard, there was no sense that they had accomplished anything less by needing another try. They were just excited to succeed. And I think that came out right in the end, but only because I was willing to massively fudge an entire encounter to keep people happy.
This leads me to my final point: fun matters. I've written before about how fun is the most important thing in a tabletop game, and this is especially true of playing with kids. As someone who unabashedly calls roleplaying the height of tabletop gaming, I often aspire to impress my players with subtle characterization, interesting details, and complicated plots. But a child won't congratulate you on your careful portrayal of an NPC, nor will they remark about the moral ambiguity of your writing. That's the kind of thing that only comes from like-minded adults. What a child will appreciate--and what basically any player will appreciate is something that's fun. I've written ten one-shots based on movies (the first being Cats, which I'm going to discuss). The Cats one-shot is structured around two basic ideas: the players must use their wits and their cats' skills to pass through five houses, each guarded by another cat, and those cats sing songs I wrote for the one-shot when they appear. The house cat puzzles are silly and open-ended, and the songs are ridiculous and meant to get the players to laugh at/with the GM. Running it was probably the most pure fun I've ever GMed. There was no room for roleplaying--not of any serious kind, anyway. It was just pure chaos and silliness. And my players from that one-shot still talk about it; even with adults, fun is the only guaranteed way to reach everyone at the table.
One last note: when you GM for other adults, you are not quite one of them (you are the GM, after all), but you're still a part of the group. When you GM for kids, on the other hand, you are simply not one of them at all. When I play tabletop games with friends, I sense that I am part of the group but filling an important role to help give my players a good game session. But with kids, you are 100% filling that GM role, and you won't be part of the group. This is important to know going in. I recommend thinking about how your role is to provide a good time in a service-like role before going into playing with kids. (This may in part be due to the fact that the kids see me as a teacher, which makes me very different from a peer, but I think it's generally true.) In any case, remembering that you as GM are going to be on the outside will help you to reach them and still understand your role in the game.
There you have it--a reflection on GMing for children and the ways these thoughts can help you with your game. Here's something to reflect on: many of us start tabletop games at sensitive ages. I was sixteen when I started with D&D. I had a kind, patient, and funny DM who nurtured me as a player, and I know I wouldn't be the GM I am today without him. He knew every lesson on this list, at least unconsciously, and it made me a passionate player and GM. Wouldn't you like to know that you did the same for someone else (or many someone elses)?
That's all for now. Coming soon: how to know what class to play, religious beliefs by cultural group in my homebrew setting, and a dark time-loop adventure in an original system. Until next time, happy gaming!
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