Teach Your Kids to Game Week

I'm coming out of the geek closet. I'm a gamer. I don't mean video games. I'm talking table top role playing. I own over 100 dice with a number of sides different from 6!

So there's this thing called Teach Your Kids to Game Week that happens every year. Well, at least for the past 2. It's going on right now. And I decided to blog about what I'm doing in honor of the event.

I've ran a few one-shot games with my 2 kids in the past. A couple of generic fantasy games and some Star Wars based stuff. But ideally a gaming group should have more than 2 players if you hope to sustain a cohesive campaign.

We home school. So I thought it could be cool to get a group of home schooling kids together for a regularly scheduled game. If you find the idea of educational benefits of gaming with kids a bit hard to swallow, the Lewisville (TX, not KY) Public Library has an active program with a website offering several links worth checking out. Or read 5 Reasons to Play D&D which apply just as well to any other role playing game.

D&D is a specific system and kinda the flagship of the hobby so it gets used in a generic sense to refer to table top role playing as a whole. For what it's worth, Savage Worlds is my system of choice because it gives me enough options to run an interesting game without forcing me into a ton of prep work or leaving me feeling like I'm simulating a video game.

My wife has the social connections with the local home schoolers so we put out the call. I ended up with 8 players, counting my own 2 kids, tweens and early teens. We meet every other Friday from 1pm to 4pm. Norma and the other moms knit and drink tea during that time. We had our 4th session last Friday (November 30th) and I think we're finding our groove.

I hope to write up session reports for the 4 sessions we've had so far, although by the time I get that done we'll probably have our 5th session in the bag too. Before any of that I'll write up a few posts about:

• System Changes — Making the already "Fast! Furious! Fun!" Savage Worlds system more palatable for young players
  
• Creating Races & Characters — I wanted easy to find character art so I went with Humans and 3 flavors each of Elves and Dwarves. Then I made several pre-generated characters.
  
• Loot — Pretty much everything is a type of treasure, including XP and Bennies (I'll explain what those are when it matters). I bought various beads from Fire Mountain Gems to represent the various types of treasure.
  
• Accessories — I use a Chessex Battlemat and minis from whatever sources I can find with an eye towards budget.
  
• Adventures — I'm using a mix of One Sheets, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Dungeon Delve with no sweeping Save the World metaplot
  

Stay tuned.