09 December 2010

Traveller: the infection

Recently I’ve been occasionally hosting my role-playing gaming group again. The kids are now old enough that they are really paying attention to the game now.

Sunday, after Saturday’s game, Grace (8yo) took at stab at improv’ing a Star Wars game for her brother. No rules, per se. Just imitating what she’d seen us doing.

I printed out a copy of Starter Traveller for Jake (10yo). Space, military, and the phrase “create starships” immediately got his attention. Both kids made characters. (And neither failed a survival roll!) Jake then had me walk him through world generation to give his character a home world. He’s mapping it.

(By the way, Far Future has made Starter Traveller free from DriveThruRPG and RPGNow until the end of the year!)

This week, Jake’s been taking the books to school with him. All his friends have made characters. Last night he made up a planetary system and some NPCs and took his first stab at referee’ing an actual game today. Apparently it went well, and his friends are asking where they can get their own copies of the game. Tonight, after homework and bath, we reviewed space combat since it had come up today and he’d had to improvise because he hadn’t read the rules.

One of the things I’m very impressed about is the way he seems to natural see the rules as tools to use when it suits him and to ignore when they don’t. (Or to gloss over for now and learn later.) He went ahead and improvised space combat until he could look at it later. Even as we were going over the space combat rules, he was deciding how he was going to house rule it. “I’m going to simplify this bit.” & “We’ll ignore that for now.”

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