If a pre-schooler can run it...
First TTRPG game run by my kid
Yesterday, I played one of the best ttrpg game of my life.
I'll say right away that a lot of this impression comes from the fact that it was a game run - for the first time in his life - by my almost seven-year-old son, so my feelings were definitely influenced by our bond, parental love, and the fact that I'm raising him, so he often does cool things the way I would do them (which is the cool way). But, having said that, I can also roughly separate these layers of being biased towards my own child from what was objectively really good - and Tadeusz run (for me and my wife) a session that would have been great even if it hadn't been led by a six- but sixteen-year-old.
First he suggested that - taking advantage of the fact that all three of us were at home - we play an RPG. At first he wanted to do it "as usual", i.e. - spread out a book with battle maps for playing D&D with miniatures, put various toys representing "his characters" on it, and let Magda and I come up with our characters.
That's why I was a little surprised, but also happy, when he agreed without hesitation to my proposal that maybe this time he would be the GM and we would play our characters. He only said that he needed my maps - main fuel for his imagination. He really liked the island from Dark of the Hot Springs Island, and it's no wonder - something is happening on every hex, the characters are cartoonish and funny, it's basically a ready-made module in itself.
And that's all he needed to lead a session for 2-3 hours. We decided that our heroes are castaways who have to somehow get off the island. Looking at the map, Tadeusz came up with the factions living on the island on the fly - the city gnomes, the evil sirens, the dragonfolk from the volcano and the trolls of the northern coast - and locations where the castaways could go for help, information, and treasures. We were given quests, we had to overcome the difficulties of traveling in the jungle, sneak up on artifacts and fight when we didn't succeed in sneaking. The trolls were given the framework of their own language, which they used when they didn't understand the concepts of the castaways' language - kima is “ship”, imak is “inventor”, if anyone is curious - the dragonfolk could conjure lava, and the gnome guide spoke a different voice than the troll sentry. We even had an immersion moment when my wizard was sneaking in at night to steal a magic stone from dragonfolk, and the GM told me to follow him to the bathroom, without turning on the light, grabbed a flashlight, illuminated his face and said that SUDDENLY I see dragonfolk in front of me! As if I REALLY sneaked in there!
The six-year-old GM not only came up with subsequent plot elements, but did it coherently, and what was most striking - in accordance with the "structure" of a typical ttrpg adventure game. We had played "real" RPGs before - Tadzio had played one-shots of Winter's Daughter, a scenario from the LEGO D&D set and another improvised one-shot that I don't remember well - but until now I thought that by RPG he meant primarily a common make-believe using "adult"-looking maps. It turned out that he understood very well "what you do" when running an RPG, and it came easily to him (even if we guided him a few times by asking what a place looked like, or what the dragon king fought with during the duel for freedom). No prep, no rules "supporting the genre" (it was enough that we had a d6 that looked appropriately atmospheric), no unnecessary wondering “does system supports what the game is about”.
My conclusions:
1) if a preschooler, even a creative, confident, and talented one like my firstborn, is able to lead a session without prep, improvising, and to have fun doing it, then ANYONE can do it,
2) adventure/OSR RPG (understood as exploring space, looking for adventures and treasures in it, scheming within the framework of fiction outside the character sheet) proves itself again as a natural, almost reflexive approach to role-playing games, this time not only on the side of the players, but also the GM. Sure, you can add various story-gamey structures to it and play with them - but, in my opinion, this is the foundation of role-playing games, their starting point and the lowest common denominator,
3) with children you really don't have to play "childish" stories, we weren't on any strawberry island and didn't have to look for our friends, just learn how the magic ball works by looking for clues next to the devil's statue. When a knight lost a fight with a big crocodile, it simply swallowed it, and bye-bye - the knight is eaten, no soft play,
4) a good map is enough for an entire module and material for a long game.
And I was really proud when the GM commented my proposal to make climbing rocks easier by attaching a rope to an arrow that we shoot upwards with "weeeeeell, that's a really cool idea", and gave us an easier climbing test.
P.S. The session ended with a mysterious smile from the GM, who announced "to be continued".