Joseph Erwin – Freelance Dungeon Master

Join in the Adventures!

More Roleplaying with Middle-Schoolers

It’s always wonderful to see what young players come up with.

As I often find, first characters are usually based on favorite characters from other properties. Typically they have little more than the serial numbers filed off, and then they’re off on adventures. I myself and almost all of my gaming friends have been guilty of this, and I consider it to be one of the Great Unspoken Traditions of tabletop gaming.

His name is… Enzio Bowditore.

This year, running adventures in the same world as last year for the Middle School kids has yielded some fascinating results. Perhaps most fascinating for me was the fact that no less than two different kids made their new characters be directly descended from their previous character, and another player is simply playing their old character again.

I love the fact that several players feel the desire to make a connection with the old adventures. It shows a great deal of narrative sense, as well as a desire to create a unique play space.

It has created a really fun way to do world-building with the students. Most of the major world elements that we’re playing with this year are things which were established last year (e.g. the Wizard’s Tower being crushed by a leviathan body, a major trans-planar corporation running most of the world’s technology, etc.). Now, we have begun to jump off of that, and make new stories using the old ones.

As the year winds on, and I find myself needing to run three separate groups in order to fit everyone, I look forward to seeing what new and interesting worlds we create together! With the old Plot Points mechanic (lifted from FATE Core and Cortex Classic), anything is possible…

“Alright, you can spend a plot point to have a giant frog..”

Published by Joe Erwin

I am an independent creator and GM with a deep love of storytelling and adventure! I desire most to share these things with others, and I hope to do that through my work and my writing.

3 thoughts on “More Roleplaying with Middle-Schoolers

  1. Young or old, I always find it fun to see what players come up with for their characters. When you have a steady stream of recognizable character “types” and then someone pops up out of the blue with something completely original, it can be very rewarding.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: