Into the depths

I've been a gamer for over fifteen years now. Yes, a decade and a half. I've had tons of friends join up to play crazy campaigns of D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, spending hours upon hours chugging mountain dew and nearly inhaling pizza. I was younger, and had plenty of free time to spend with friends... but as time waned on, that ran out, along with friends whom I'd still want to play with.

Within the last few years I married my beautiful wife, and along with that I adopted three step-kids. I thought before that I didn't have time to spend with friends, but now? When you have to be papa, that *kills* your free time. "No more D&D, at least until the youngest is gone," I had told myself.

But then things churned around in my head. This was a game, and well, kids play games. Why couldn't I run something with the rugrats? The idea was simple, get them adhered to the rules, and run what's familiar to them.

Alas, that was a lot harder than I had expected. Getting them to pay attention to a turn based game was a task I had to be creative in. I started them all on Fate Core, and used what my daughters had aplenty: My Little Pony figurines. You think your player wanting to be a drow was bad? Try all three of your kids wanting to be Twilight Sparkle.

The session went well, but it seemed short lived. I had difficulty wrapping my head around Fate's aspect system, let alone its smaller plus-and-minus rolls. If I had trouble with it, my kids wouldn't have a chance in hell. So the novel of character sheets I printed went into the waste bucket, and I gave up hope.

Eventually my RPG itch started irking me once more, and I wanted to run a game online for friends, the new D&D edition. We all know how planning goes, right? Everyone says they'll be there at your kegger, and the snack bowls are filled... then you get called with doctor's appointments, work, and parental duties. I was never able to coordinate a proper time to run a game, thus throwing the hopeful towel at the wall and kicking the puppy across the room. That yelp still rings in my ears.

My middle child, who we'll call Risk for sake of character identity, had saw all the work I planned and all the dice I had sprawled out across the table. Risk remembered "the Pony game" and wondered if this was anything like that- so I did what any other hopeless man would and ran a game with a nine year old girl. The session went quite well, enough to where the five year old heard all the giggling across the room and begged to join in. I couldn't ignore the requests too long, and had to manage not one but two character sheets.

The thing with 5th Edition D&D is that there's a good amount of reading on it. The system isn't as bad as 3.5, let alone Pathfinder, but to ask a kindergartner to find her proficiency bonus is a long walk to the park. Character creation took a long while too, but what limited my party the most was the skills and DCs. Time after time I'd ask them to make skill checks, then would have to work quick arithmetic to calculate *their* bonus. Its troublesome enough having to manage all my NPCs and the plot, and when a player has difficulty finding out if they made their roll... well, you get the idea.

I had to find an alternative. I don't really know how I came across it, but somehow I came across the OSR scene. The purist in me hurled chunks at the print quality of older D&D books, let alone the organization of the content within. However, my youth reminded me of playing Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment, and it shoved me into full retro-grognard mode. Second edition was what the old Infinity Engine used, and it wasn't a huge jump to adjust to what was in First edition.

Greedy research dropped Lamentations of the Flame Princess in my lap, a well-crafted retroclone. My empty pockets grasped the free, artless PDF they hosted on their website, and I inhaled page after page. I was able to spare a few coins, and got ahold of Death Frost Doom... and could only wait for the weekend to kill PCs.

The session went quite well, though I had to work on garnering a way to explain the saves and stats- but it was MUCH easier to explain what each thing went. OSR characters could easily fit on an index card; the less academic work for anyone with a third grade reading level, let alone someone who could barely recognize numbers, the better. The use of adopting OSR's "rulings not rules" stance works quite well when working with children.

My only real problem is... the only thing my kids want to do to NPCs is "hit them in the crotch."

I don't have the heart to raise the difficulty for them. They're having too much fun.