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Black Armada is a website about roleplaying and board gaming run by Rabalias and Frax. Between us we have over 50 years’ experience of playing and GMing. That means we really like it, and we really like talking about it too.

You’ll find gaming tips, discussion articles, reviews and free games and game modules here, together with a significant quantity of random game-related bibble. We welcome comment and discussion so please feel free to contribute.

You can find Rabalias and Frax on Google Plus far too often.

How I run investigation games (part 1: prep)

A really juicy mystery, with the cool feeling of piecing together clues and coming to the correct conclusion, is one of my favourite things in roleplaying. It’s also something that I feel isn’t well delivered by existing RPG systems. Here I’m going to talk about my approach to building a mystery and enabling real investigation.

This isn’t the first time I’ve explored this terrain. Back in 2013 I talked about how mysteries are like stones falling into a pool, creating ripples. And I went on to talk about how investigation isn’t just about clue detection, but about deduction and reaching conclusions. But I stopped short of talking about how to construct a satisfying mystery, which is what I want to do now.

Just for the moment, let’s assume I have an ok system that will cover the business of discovering clues, and an ok premise that make sure the players want to investigate this mystery. I may come back to these later, but let’s imagine they’re solved problems for the purposes of this article. Let’s also assume I’m running something that has a substantial investigative focus, so there’s more than just one simple mystery to solve.

I then create my mystery in a number of fairly discrete steps:

  • Decide what the fundamental driver of the mystery is. Something like “There’s a cult trying to summon a demon through a series of ceremonial sacrifices”, or “House Rukh are planning to assassinate the governor and take over the planetary government”
  • Generate from this driver a series of events. These can be past events which the players are (presumably) going to be investigating, or future events which the players are (presumably) going to be trying to avert.
  • For each past event, I generate a footprint, that is, a set of clues which are out there waiting to be discovered by the players.
  • The footprint breaks down into physical clues and witnesses, which are obviously investigated in different ways. Each of these is amenable to assigning a location and/or time. I’m also thinking about the ways in which the players might discover the clues, though I’m leaving myself open to other ways as well.
  • For future events, I generate a timing and/or trigger, some consequences, and (in case the players don’t find out about it until after it happens) a footprint, exactly as for a past event.

For instance, let’s look at the cult example:

  • For events, I decide that the cult has already sacrificed two victims. One of them was pursued through a particular district in the city in the night, and then murdered in a junkyard. The other was killed previously and more quietly, in their apartment.
  • The pursuit generated some witnesses along the route it followed – people who heard screams for help and some who looked out of their windows to see a group of figures pursuing the victim.
  • Both the murders generate a corpse, some messy bloodstains, perhaps a footprint. They also include the identity of the corpse – for the junkyard murder that may not be obvious, while the apartment victim (if the players discover it) is in their apartment so probably can easily be ID’d.
  • The junkyard murder will be reported, which is the trigger for the players’ investigation. The apartment murder will likely lie fallow for a while, but might show up later.
  • I also create three future events: a near miss where someone is cornered by the cult and nearly killed, but escapes by jumping out of a window; and a murder that involves an initial kidnapping and the victim being brought to a specific site for the final sacrifice. Perhaps the near-miss will report in to the authorities and the players can find out about it that way. Perhaps the kidnapping will be reported, perhaps not.
  • At this stage I might also add in some kind of link between the various murders, be it geographical (the locations form a shape on the map, with the final sacrifice in the middle) or social (the victims are all highly religious people, say), or whatever.
  • If the final sacrifice is completed then the demon will be summoned and a whole new set of events will be generated after that (but I don’t bother thinking about that right now, because I’m expecting that the players will stop the sacrifice happening and/or kill the demon after it’s summoned.

Once I’ve planned all this out, I’ll review what I’ve got to make sure there’s enough there to give the players a fighting chance of cracking the mystery, but not so much that they’ll solve it in five seconds flat. I can add or remove witnesses and clues until I think I have got that right. Of course, my future events ensure that, no matter what happens, the players will have something to do. If time passes and they haven’t made progress, the next event happens.

I’ll then break the information down into a number of components I can use:

  • A timeline of events
  • A list of locations with clues that can be found there
  • A list of characters with motivations, information they might have and any key abilities

Once I’ve got all that in place, the game more-or-less runs itself. The players move from location to location as prompted by clues and/or a future event becoming a present event. Perhaps they discover clues which help them to get ahead of the timeline, perhaps the timeline runs ahead of them and they’re forced to confront a scary situation unprepared.

I’ll talk in a future article about how I use this prep in practice.

This article is supported through the Black Armada Patreon.

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How I curate my ideas

It is fashionable in game design circles to say that an idea is worth zero dollars. This is meant as a rebuttal to people who try to sell you their brilliant idea for a game. Which, fine – those people can’t really sell you an idea anyway, so that is indeed worth zero dollars. But that doesn’t mean ideas are worthless. On the contrary, an otherwise well-implemented game that lacks interesting ideas probably won’t get very far.

The thing is, ideas are ephemeral. Until you write them down, they’re just this slippery thing in your head. You can come up with dozens of them in a day – on the toilet, in the shower, while you’re trying to get to sleep. But most of them are lost.

In fact, they’re worse than that in many ways, because while you’re busy losing them, they distract you. They stop you sleeping because your brain won’t stop thinking about them. They stop you implementing your current project because you get excited about a different one. This is not good.

And you really don’t want to be at the mercy of your ideas. That way lies a trail of unfinished projects, each abandoned in favour of the latest shiny th- SQUIRREL!

So it is important to curate your ideas. To find a way to capture them before you forget them, and get them out of your head so they don’t distract you. And this, it turns out, is fairly simple: you just write them down.

Here’s what I do:

  • I write a simple one or two sentence summary of any idea that captures my attention for more than a few minutes and add it to my ideas list. In my case that’s a sticky on my laptop, but a notebook would be just as good.
  • I subdivide my ideas list. At the top are things I’m working on now. Then there’s the things that are next in line to work on. I break them down into small games and long games, and non-game things like articles or events.
  • I keep it updated, moving stuff in and out of each category. If it becomes clear I’m not going to finish something (at least not now) then it goes into the back burner section. Abandoned but not forgotten.
  • Because I know what I’m meant to be working on now, and I know I’m not losing the other ideas, I can focus on my top priorities. I’ve always got an idea of what I want to work on next, so if I have to take a break from my current projects (e.g. because they’re out for playtesting) then I can pick up something new right away. My subdivisions enable me to easily choose something small that I can do in a spare day, or something longer, as appropriate.
  • I take breaks from working on active projects to review the list and see what looks good. What has sustained my interest and what now seems less brilliant than it initially did. Which ideas might need to be merged or dropped. So the list isn’t just a dumping ground, it’s a breeding ground for my next project.

Sometimes, an idea is so compelling that even with the above discipline I can’t get it out of my head, I write a concept document. This is a half-page document where I write down:

  • The elevator pitch
  • My design goals – the things I’d want to achieve through it
  • A short summary of how I think I might implement those goals right now.

That goes in a dedicated folder of ideas, where I can easily pull it out again if I need it. Again: I’m getting it out of my head, and written down, but I’m limiting its ability to dominate my creativity and draw me away from what I’m meant to be prioritising.

Of course, sometimes having written a concept document, it’s not enough. I want to flesh out the ideas. I’m struck by passion for this new idea! That’s ok. Sometimes I give myself permission to do this. I might even end up writing the game. But for the most part, the structured process above ensures I retain sustained attention to my current project. I get to keep all the ideas that constantly fly into and out of my brain without letting myself chase those ideas fruitlessly.

How do you manage your ideas? Let me know your top tips!

Designer diary: Last Fleet

I’ve been getting quite a bit of feedback on my current WIP, Last Fleet. In case you’ve missed hearing about it, the game is about the last surviving members of the human race, fleeing across space from an implacable inhuman adversary. The players are brave pilots, officers, politicians and journalists, struggling to keep the fleet – and themselves – in one piece, under immense pressure.

As you might gather from the above, a key theme in Last Fleet is pressure. The core mechanics revolve around gaining and losing Pressure, which acts like hit points and mission/team pool all rolled into one. Crucially, players can gain +1 to any roll, after rolling the dice, by marking 1 Pressure. This means players tend to push their Pressure up of their own accord. Your Pressure track has room for five marks, after which you have to mark and perform a Breaking Point action whereby you do something risky or irrational. Eventually when you’ve marked them all, the (presumably) last Breaking Point action is to die.

Side note: if this sounds quite a bit like Night Witches system of Marks, that’s no coincidence. I’ve drawn inspiration from that. And as you’ll see, I think the lessons from playtesting are pushing the design to being more similar to Night Witches than it currently is.

A significant issue in playtesting has been getting the balance right between being under too much pressure versus not enough. There are lots of variables which can affect this:

  • How often the players make actions that allow them to erase Pressure (social stuff, mostly);
  • How much space the GM gives them to do that;
  • How much the players have to roll the dice;
  • How serious are the consequences the GM puts on the line;
  • How much players work together to min-max their rolls and apply maximum bonuses from assists; and (not forgetting)
  • How well the players roll.

So the system puts the players under pressure, but getting it at the exact right level to avoid either crushing them or leaving them feeling totally relaxed, seems to be a bit of an art. But I’m currently feeling that the system itself makes it too easy to reduce Pressure, while leaving the consequences of bad rolls insufficiently terrifying to prompt the players to increase their own Pressure all that much.

So where is that leading me to? Three (or maybe four) things:

  • I’m toughening up the consequences of bad rolls, including on a 7-9, to increase the stakes of failure. In turn that should mean players wanting to spend more Pressure.
  • I may reduce the overall statline of starting characters, which currently start with +2/+1/+0/+0/-1.
  • I’m reducing how much Pressure is erased when Pressure-reducing moves are taken.
  • I said maybe four. I’m considering whether players trust each other too much. The initial relationships set up tend to push things towards distrust and conflict, but I’m not sure if I’ve taken it far enough. Something to think about.

What’s interesting is that the stories people are coming back with from playtesting sound like exactly the sort of play I want to see – so while people may not feel sufficiently pressured, the game is fundamentally working ok. It needs tuning, perhaps even some significant redesign of individual components, but the overall shape of the design seems right.

If you’re interested in Last Fleet, get in touch! I’ll be doing more playtesting later in the year and I’m always keen to have more playtesters.

Is it ok to fudge rolls?

I was bodding about on Twitter recently and I came across this:

Reading through the comments I saw a lot of pushback against point 2. People saying “But it sucks if some random roll means I get killed by an orc in the first encounter.” “Some players don’t like it when they die, it isn’t fun.” “It’s ok if I got the threat level wrong, so I’m just correcting my mistake.” “You shouldn’t have rolled the dice if you weren’t ready for that outcome.” And so on. This got me thinking about why people fudge dice rolls at all.

Now as I see it, the answer is pretty straightforward. People fudge dice rolls because their chosen game isn’t giving them sufficient discretion in decision-making. They rolled the dice, and what they rolled means they are forced to either implement a fictional outcome they didn’t want, or fudge the roll.

When this happens, it is probably because the game is premised on a simple linear process:

Someone makes an attack -> roll dice -> inflict damage (or not)

See how that works? As soon as the GM picks up the dice, they’re committing to possibly inflicting damage on you. Maybe it will kill you. But that’s all that can happen. They can’t knock you out, they can’t take your stuff and leave you tied up. They can’t leave you beaten but humiliated. And that’s just thinking about possibilities relating to us fighting. We haven’t even got started on how they can’t reveal a terrible secret that will leave you crushed and sobbing, or have a totally different threat raise its head.

My point is, I think a lot of people are playing games with what you might call ballistic mechanics. You get to choose whether to pull the trigger (i.e. roll the dice) but once you’ve done that, you have no choice in where the bullet hits (i.e. what the outcome of the dice roll is). You can solve the problem by cheating – by ignoring the die roll – or by using a system that fires smart missiles instead of dumb bullets.

There’s plenty of games out there which continue to give you choices after you’ve rolled the dice. A failure doesn’t have to imply a mechanically fixed outcome. If you’re reading this and wondering what games I mean, one good avenue to google is Powered by the Apocalypse or Forged in the Dark, both of which give real, hard consequences to dice rolls – but in a way that gives you interesting choices rather than automatic pre-defined outcomes.

Even D&D (which I assume is what we’re all thinking about here) doesn’t need to be implemented like that. I mean, come on. It isn’t like you haven’t used house rules or not-technically-RAW “roll a d20 and I’ll tell you what happens” for umpteen other things. So why be a stickler about the attack roll? Why not say that on a hit, the orc disarms you, then headbutts you into unconsciousness. You wake up in chains. Hard consequences that generate more fun, instead of snuffing out interesting possibilities.

So if I’m so keen on interesting outcomes, why not just fudge the roll and do it that way? Well, like the Tweet said, this is about social contract. If you’re playing in a group where the expectation is that successful attack rolls lead to hit point loss and hit point loss leads to death, then you’re playing with fire if you don’t enforce that. You’re essentially saying “your choices were meaningless; you thought you were risking death to achieve your goals; you thought there was a point to me rolling these dice; but you weren’t and there isn’t. You might as well stop recording your hit points and stop rolling the dice because the real decision-maker is me, the GM, and I’ll ignore the dice when it suits me.” The whole point of systems with dice rolls is to create risk and drama and make choices meaningful.

The same applies to games where hit point loss and death aren’t automatic consequences of a roll, by the way. Just because I can opt to have you KO’d and captured by the orc instead of killed, doesn’t mean its all just arbitrary GM fiat. I have to abide by the fact that the dice were rolled, so something bad happens. I can’t just shrug my shoulders and say “nothing happens”. If I do that, I’m equally guilty of denying you the fruits of your decisions as the GM who refuses to inflict those hit points because they think it wouldn’t be fun.

But I think that a lot of groups in their heart of hearts don’t want a social contract like the one we see in D&D, RAW. Dying at an arbitrary moment because of bad dice rolls is not everyone’s idea of fun. I think that’s why we see so much fudging going on – because people don’t actually like what the rules tell them they must do. The point is, you’re breaking the social contract if people thought hit point loss and death was a possibility but it actually never was; but you can have a different social contract if you want. You have to ask yourself in advance whether you want arbitrary death or not. You have to talk to your group about how you play the game, and get their consent.

“Hey, I’d like to play some D&D, but I’m not really into the whole ‘one bad roll and you die’ thing, so I’m using a different set of rules. Ok?”

If you do that, then you’ll get the outcome you wanted – you remove arbitrary “un-fun” death from your game. But you get it without having to cheat people out of meaningful choice, and waste time rolling dice when you have no intention of enforcing the results of your rolls. Everyone can engage with the encounters you present, knowing what’s on the table and what isn’t.

48 hours left to back Bite Me! on Kickstarter

We have been running a Kickstarter for Bite Me! – a game of werewolf pack dynamics here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/blackarmada/bite-me-a-game-of-werewolf-pack-dynamics and we are down to the last 48 hours.

Vincent Sammy is illustrating the game … gorgeous.

As you know I love Werewolves and werewolf packs especially and this is a labour of love which I’ve talked about before on the blog.  I wanted a game which combined all the tropes of Werewolves like control, domination and hyper-violence and used that to fuel messy relationships and explore pack dynamics.  This is that game.

The campaign is funded and we have hit the first stretch goal but I really would love to get to the stretch goals by Whitney Delaglio, Kelley Armstrong and Paul Czege if we can.

If you’ve backed or shared already then thank you so much and if you have been thinking about it then there is 48 hours to make your move!

Reflections on play: Pasion de las Pasiones

I was recently lucky enough to get to play Pasion de las Pasiones by Brandon Leon-Gambetta. Pasion is a (currently ashcan-only) PBTA game based on telenovelas. If you haven’t come across telenovelas, my totally uninformed layperson’s summary is: overwrought, over-the-top Latin American soap operas. Now you might be thinking “why would I play a game about that when I know nothing about telenovelas”, and that is what I thought too. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Pasion is brilliantly designed to reinforce the themes of a telenovela even for a complete novice to the genre. The core mechanics and the playbooks point you in the right direction, probably more effectively than any other game I’ve seen. You cannot really go wrong simply noticing the things that will give you a mechanical benefit and doing them – and if you do, you’ll naturally get both a fun experience and an on-genre experience.

Before I talk any more about how it does this, let’s just look at some things that happened in our game to give you an idea what I’m talking about:

  • Ernesto, the eyepatch-wearing drugs kingpin, fed his lover Maria’s sister to a pair of jaguars for refusing to do his bidding.
  • Ernestino, Ernesto’s twin brother who everyone thought was dead, makes love to Marcela (who is under the impression she is making love to Ernesto) against a marble statue of aphrodite.
  • In a single scene, Maria reveals that she has been posing as a nun to sooth the pain of a wealthy landowner (and inveigle herself into the landowner’s inheritance), and then agrees to run off with Ernesto, ripping off her habit to reveal a slinky dress underneath.
  • The police descend on the (deceased) landowner’s mansion at the reading of her will, to try and wipe out Ernesto’s drug empire, forcing Ernestino and Marcela to smash through window to a waiting limousine, while Ernesto and Maria shoot their way to Ernesto’s helicopter.

In other words, think of a Western soap opera, then imagine that all concerns about suspension of disbelief and overacting have been not merely removed, but destroyed with a flamethrower, and you get some idea of what you’re in for.

So how does Pasion do it? Start with the playbooks. Each one has a set of props which you can choose from to help add flavour to your character. This simple decision makes it easy to see what the character is about. My character Ernesto was essentially built from those props: an eyepatch, a scarily large knife and a huge mansion. More standard for PBTA are the moves and the relationships – though these are very good, and further reinforce the character type and the themes of the game. Most fun of all is your character’s question; as long as you can answer yes to it, you get +1 to all your rolls. Examples are “are you taking control of this situation?” and “are you the centre of attention?”. Wonderful stuff.

Then there’s the basic moves, which are glorious in at least two ways. The first is the obvious, usual way that a well-crafted PBTA game does it, which is simply to point each move at the things you want the game to be about, in this case things like declaring your love for someone, accusing someone of lying, processing your feelings out loud and other such excellent stuff. But the one I’d like to dwell on is the way that stats work in Pasion. The way it works is: there aren’t any. Instead, each move has two questions attached. For each one you can answer yes to, you get +1 to the roll (plus of course your playbook question, which can add a further +1). The questions are things like “are you doing this for love?”, “are you doing this for vengeance?”, and suchlike. So not only are the moves themselves pointing you at the right sort of drama, you’re incentivised each and every roll to conduct that drama, and even shape your character’s motivations, in an in-genre way.

I’ll also mention flashbacks – only briefly, because we didn’t actually use them all that much, though I think they have a lot of potential. Pasion has a flashback move similar to what’s used in Leverage and Blades in the Dark. You can use it, just like in those games, to retroactively declare you have stuff set up to be prepared for whatever situation you’re in. But more interestingly, you can use it to reveal secrets about other characters, and have it be true, right in the middle of a scene. I wish I’d noticed this mechanic earlier on in the game because I’m sure this would be a lot of fun.

Finally there’s a wonderful little mechanic reminiscent of World-Wide Wrestling where – during other characters’ scenes – you get to play the audience watching the show at home, and during your own scenes you earn XP from their reactions. It’s a lot of fun.

I was super-impressed with Pasion de las Pasiones. If soap opera drama on steroids appeals to you then I’d seriously recommend it. You can buy it here.

The League Presents – Actual Play with a difference

We’ve started a new Actual Play podcast where game designers play each other’s games! This is the first series: we’re playing Bite Me!, our game of werewolf pack dynamics that’s currently on Kickstarter.

The game is being GM’d by me (Josh), with an august group of designer-players including Becky Annison (the designer of Bite Me!), Grant Howitt, Jay Iles and Chris Longhurst. I’m really happy with how it’s turned out – feral werewolf action and intense relationships, just like the game intends.

Here’s the episode blurb:

A werewolf pack in suburban England walks a razor-thin line between the hunters of the city and the things that live in the forest. It’s a tough life, but made a lot harder when your pack alpha is bleeding out on your kitchen table…

Note: we went through game setup in a bonus episode. It’s not needed to enjoy this, but check it out if you want to hear more about Bite Me!

Listen to the first episode above, and back the Kickstarter campaign here.

By the way, the podcast is being created under the auspices of the UK Indie RPG League, a band of game designers who are sharing our knowledge, supporting each other and attending conventions as a group. Watch out for future episodes, where you’ll hear the hottest new and pre-release indie games being played by their designers.

Flotsam is available for pre-order

If you missed the Flotsam: Adrift Amongst the Stars Kickstarter, you can now get in on the action by Pre-ordering on Backerkit.

Flotsam: Adrift Amongst the Stars is a roleplaying game about outcasts, renegades and misfits living in the belly of a space station, in the shadow of a more prosperous society. You play through their everyday lives, interpersonal relationships and small-scale drama in the Below, a dangerous world where poverty, social strife and gang conflict sit side-by-side with alien technology and supernatural weirdness.

Imagine the Belters of the Expanse watching as Earth and Mars shape their lives, the civilians in Battlestar Galactica living with the decisions made by the military and the folk of Downbelow in Babylon 5, abandoned to destitution and squalor by those who built the station. This game is about characters like that.

The game is GMless and diceless, with rules that point your characters at each other and bring their relationships into sharp focus. They help you create a rich setting, flawed characters, and charged relationships which develop over time. You’ll watch your characters evolve and change before your eyes. It’s really cool.

Pre-order Flotsam Now



Bite Me! is coming to Kickstarter – Get on the Mailing List Here!

The Bite Me! Kickstarter is getting closer and closer, practically snapping at our heels over here at Black Armada.

Bite Me! is a Powered by the Apocalypse Game of werewolf packs and it is a full throated emotional howl into these cold Winter nights.

If you want to know the instant the kickstarter emerges naked and bloody into the world then sign up to our mailing list here:

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Roleplaying with my kid

I’ve started the inevitable experiments that all roleplaying parents must at some point attempt: roleplaying with my children. Specifically, my son R, who is five years old. It’s been pretty interesting.

I started out very informally with R – just telling him a story and testing out various interactive approaches. Describing a situation and asking him what he does, or telling a story but asking him to contribute details about the background or what happens next, were the two main ones. This was when he was quite young, and what I quickly discovered was that he LOVES having me make up a story (instead of reading him one from a book) and he LOVES to make me dance to his tune by telling me what the story should be about, or suddenly taking control of the story and then handing it back to me, or demanding that I insert some detail or direction that he’s decided on.  It was fun for him, but kind of exhausting for me, like those scenes in Whose Line is it Anyway? where the audience shout stuff out for the actors to respond to.

The most common of these is the “Hansel and Gretel” story, in which R lives with his friends Hansel and Gretel somewhere (a house, a village, a town), near some scary place (a forest, a cave, a mountain) where a bad thing (witch, vampire, dinosaurs) lives. The details vary, but always, their parents tell them they must never go to the scary place, because they might get got by the bad thing. Gretel always suggests that they should go to the scary place, and is told off by R who is a good boy. Gretel always steals away in the night, while everyone else is asleep, to the scary place, and R and his family always rescue him (Gretel is a he in these stories, confusingly). R loves this repetition, and gleefully demands these stories at all times of day and night. If I’m honest, they have become a bit boring for me. I wanted to get him into imaginative experiences that would be enjoyable for both of us, but he didn’t seem to be ready yet.

More recently, I’ve tried actual published games with him. The first of these, maybe six months ago, was a game specifically designed for parents to play with their children, Amazing Tales by Martin Lloyd. This is a very stripped-down roleplaying game with ultra-simple mechanics, an approach to running the game that encourages a degree of creative involvement from your child while retaining a basic GM/player setup, and lots of helpful setting material for several kid-friendly settings you can pick up and use. What was interesting about the experience is that R liked it, but wanted to take more creative control than the game was offering him, and HATED having the risk of failure from rolling the dice. Even quite soft failure was very stressful for him, and he’d insist on negating anything short of perfect success. So I tried something different: I let him GM.

Amazing Tales is so simple that it seemed like letting R GM would be a real possibility. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but wanted to try, because so far he seemed to mostly enjoy having direct input on the direction of a story, or inserting stuff into the game that would traditionally be the preserve of the GM. So we created a character for me, and off we went. R took to it like a duck to water, setting up a scenario for my pirate (buried treasure), and introducing dangers (a rival pirate captain). But once again, he seemed very uncomfortable with failure. I would suggest when to roll the dice, but if I failed he would immediately narrate an overwhelming success.

Still – the experience was better than previously, since he didn’t become upset or stressed, so I persisted, and gently reminded him that the game ought to be a bit difficult for my character, and that when I failed, bad stuff ought to happen. I told him not to worry, that this would be fun for me. I would always get out of it in the end. Gradually, he started to get comfortable with this, and we had a pretty cool scenario where my pirate captain rescued one of his friends from a red coat fortress, and even charmed one of the other prisoners into joining his crew. We were really getting somewhere.

Just this week I thought I’d try something different: Dungeon World. I liked Amazing Tales (and so does R) but I wanted something a bit meatier to get my teeth into, and I wanted to see if he could cope with it. Of course, DW is more complicated and I couldn’t see him GMing it, so we switched roles again and created him a character. We got off to a flying start with his character dropped straight into a tense situation. I asked him questions, and he gave dynamite answers – it was really going well. But interestingly, he continued to want to insert stuff into the story; while fighting my serpentine river monster, I mentioned it had a paralysing venom, and nearby he could see two people who it had already paralysed and dragged to its nest for food. Without missing a beat he said “it’s my father and sister”. Which is fine – but rather outside the way DW is supposed to be played. And again, though he rolled pretty well in this session, his levels of tension around the snake monster suggested to me that failure might not be something he’d cope well with. Overall it was a fun experience, but didn’t feel like we were really playing Dungeon World.

I asked him which game he preferred, and the answer was very clear: he liked Amazing Tales better. I suspect this is because he was allowed to GM (he desperately wanted to GM Dungeon World too), and therefore have the control and creative input he wanted. So we’ll definitely be playing more AT. Something else I want to try soon is to try running a game with another player. It should be interesting to see how that plays out – and no doubt I’ll be trying more games with him in future.

What have your experiences been running RPGs with kids? Has anyone else found that they want more control and creative input than a the player role traditionally allows?