Fan Writer Hugo comments and ballot

Fan Writer is sort of like Related Work but worse, being a person award and thus fuzzier of boundary. I don't nominate in either but I guess I feel entitled to vote in any category I'm willing to consider seriously? Anyways, I read through the packet and have come up with a ranking. ( Read more... )

baby's first RPG

My sister gave us "No Thank You, Evil" for Christmas, a kid-friendly roleplaying system and setting, and Q was curious about it, so this afternoon I had the kids build characters and ran them through the intro adventure. They mostly enjoyed it - Junie seemed kind of shocked when she took a point of damage, and I accidentally made Q cry when I thought one of his ideas for something he wanted to have and do was a little too overpowered to pull out of nowhere, but overall I thought it went pretty well. They have requested further adventures, I've gotten some good feedback about what they particularly liked, and I think by the end they were feeling a little more comfortable with the basic RPG mechanics, like the idea of success or failure depending on die rolls and spending points to do things.

I was caught off guard by how uncomfortable with the idea of combat they were... Junie didn't want to fight at all (so I managed to pull off a reasonably successful "trying to talk to things that don't speak your language" side of the encounter for her); Q was excited to be a FIGHTER with a SWORD but when it actually came to swinging the sword *at* somebody (some bird-witch things), first he just wanted to swing it near them to startle them, then when he actually swung it at one of them and did some damage he found that upsetting and didn't want to do it again. This was fascinating to me as a) I'm honestly so used to fantasy violence being part of the tabletop experience that I hadn't really questioned that we might engage in some and b) Q in particular spends approximately 80% of his waking hours walking around the house with a plastic sword making swordfight noises. But, like, I can definitely work with this, I just need to think about ways to describe combat-like action in ways that don't imply hurting, maybe. Give him some good non-living things to chop through with the sword and combat that's about wrestling/holding something back while the sorceress solves magic puzzles. I'm apparently writing them the rest of a campaign rather than using the other scenarios that came in the box... the intro adventure had them inside a giant stone dragon's head and Q was dismayed we didn't go into the rest of the dragon, nor did we find out why the birdwitches wanted the McGuffin, so it practically writes itself. I'll have to decide if I want to use any of the manual's critters... this was actually my first time both running a prewritten adventure, and running something in an established system at all, so I guess it was a big day of RPG firsts all around.

(I think my ultimate goal here is to get the kids to the point where they could handle turn-taking/adverse outcomes/etc enough to play with grownups and *finally run the Avatar game I started writing many years ago* as a joint kids-adults activity... of course I was envisioning it to have a lot more combat than the kids might be comfortable with, but maybe I could set things up so that the adults were doing combat and the kids were doing non-combat stuff? Anyways, that's getting ahead of myself, right now I have to map a dragon.)

(But, seriously, eeeeee!? Not to toot my own horn here but I've always thought that what I really needed to get from being a decent GM to a really good GM was just more hours of practice... in-house guinea pigs who want me to practice on them sounds like just the thing. Muahahah.)