Gaming With Babies (No, Really): Toddler Games

Last time I left out a very important group of games I have been playing: those with my son! So this week I want to do a few short reviews of some of the games my wife and I have tried with him.

Toddler Games

Matching games

The premise of these games is quite simple. You lay down a bunch of the tiles or cards and then take turns flipping over pairs of them. If the pairs match you take them off the board and get another turn.

From an educational standpoint, the game teaches pattern matching (the thing machines are rapidly making us obsolete for). For an adult the challenge of remembering the card position makes this game more interesting than some others (see below) even if you let your child win most of the time.

These games are quick, cheap and come in a lot of varieties. All in all a good buy for playing with kids. The first one we got includes the option of matching animals to what they eat for an extra layer of complexity.

Unfortunately Sebastian isn’t good at taking turns yet, though hopefully another game (again see below) might help him with that.

Count Your Chickens

Another educational game (a theme for game for young children) this one teaches counting (and more pattern matching I guess). In Count Your Chickens, you take turns spinning a spinner and moving your token forward to the next image that matches the one spun. You count the steps to that space and pick up that many baby chickens. If you get the fox however you don’t move and one of your chickens gets removed. The goal is to gather 40 chickens between all the players.

The game is cute and cooperative which is nice. But it has the same problem as Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders in that it's essentially random. There is no skill involved and for me at least no challenge. I need at least some challenge to hold my interest.

Go Away Monster!

I found out about this game via the advertisement in Sushi Go (one of my Christmas presents). It is another matching style game but with a twist. Each turn you draw a piece from a bag. If it's a piece of furniture the player places it where it belongs in the room tile in front of them (or one of the other player’s tiles). If it’s a monster they tell it go away and remove it from the game.

My son has been at times afraid of monsters. Perhaps survival mode Minecraft wasn’t the best choice for a bonding activity. I think this game might help with that. In any case I’m excited to try it out.

Word Association

My wife and son just started this spontaneously. The rules are simple. First one person says a word, then the next. You go back and forth until you get bored.

This fun activity helps teach turns (which will hopefully make several of the above games more fun to play with him). It does include the risk of many nonsense words and insults involving bodily functions but that is what you get when playing with children. At least it’s not boring.

Play by Post, Part II: Internet Advice

Now we reach the research portion of my quest to continue my Demon: the Descent group via play by post. I’ve played in several Play By Post games before but as I mentioned two weeks ago, they didn’t work out. Let’s see what the experts have to say.

Play by Post, Part II: Internet Advice

I intend to sum up the advice I’ve encountered but I figure I’ll start by listing what resources I’ve found. Let me know if you know of any others I should be including.

Bibliography

Some selected resources include:

• Reddit
• Stackexchange
• Giant In The Playground
• Erfworld
• Roleplaying Tips

Synopsis

After reviewing these and other sources, a few common points emerged.

The Setup

There is a lot of good advice for where to stage your play by post game and what sort of media to incorporate. You want a place for your logs and/or forums, some way to include pictures (which are, as they say, worth a thousand words), defined places or styles for OOC (Out-Of-Character) material and especially ways to recruit both initial players and most likely their replacements.

For my purposes however this advice doesn’t really help me. I already have my players and we use Obsidian Portal for most of our needs. That checks off the boxes for pictures, forums, logs and more.

Sometime down the road I could see recruitment becoming useful but that’s really more of a matter for once my current players make this semi-successful.

Post Structure

Make sure your forum threads or email subjects are descriptive of where you are in the game. This helps players keep track of where they are in the game especially if they are involved in several plot threads.

The suggestion of creating new threads for new scenes seems sensible for the same reasons. I haven’t done that the best with my first week of the game but I’ll keep it in mind as the story moves along.

Post Content

Post enough details for your players to get a sense of the situation. They need to know where they are, who they are dealing with, the context of the event, and what the likely consequences are of any likely actions (or inaction).

Also you should end on a decision point so that the players have something to work with when they begin their response. A question of how does their character responds is a good choice as are requests for descriptions of locations belonging to their character or how they dress or act.

Good description is good but you also want the post to be readable. Check spelling, check grammar. Break up text into paragraphs of sensible lengths. Use coloring or font styling to call out characters and rules text.

Make sure your dice conventions are clear. Do the players roll their actions? Does the GM? Does your forum include some mechanism for doing the rolls automatically or do you work on the honor system? There are no wrong choices but make the decision clear to everyone involved.

In my earlier Hangout games I always went with honor system and had my players roll. But with the goal of speeding the game along, this provides a number important decisions to make.

Player Advice

I found plenty of advice for players and it mostly repeats the best practices for game masters.

Post detailed descriptions. Write out those inner thoughts. Show us your character, how they act and feel.

Keep posting even if you don’t do anything. Ask for help if you get stuck. Make it clear when you don’t want to get involved. Don’t leave the other players hanging.

Lastly be proactive. Find problems to solve. Introduce new details, items characters within the limits of the game. Push the game forward.

Tempo

The single most repeated and important piece of advice I saw was to maintain momentum. Set a posting frequency (one a day, twice a week, whatever) and stick to it.

If people go missing, NPC them to keep the other players’ scenes moving. If they can’t commit to maintaining the posting frequency then you need to replace them.

It is harsh but necessary advice. If the game masters in my previous play by post games had committed to it perhaps those campaigns might not have died.

Conclusion

Obviously communication is critical to an online game as it is for any game. The difference is that with a slower more limited medium (no facial expressions or intonation) you need to work extra hard at it.

Next week I’ll outline how I intend to put this advice to use in my own game.

(Not) Gaming with Babies

I’ve not done much actual gaming since last report (in December!). I hope that will change a little bit with the latter part of 2017. As you also see from the title of the article, my daughter has arrived. These facts are not disconnected (though there have been a couple other wrinkles causing scheduling issues).

(Not) Gaming with Babies

The Kids

Sebastian continues to grow and mature. Now three years old, he has become fairly willful but never quite reached his terrible twos. Recently disruptions to his life like a new sibling and the house renovation seem to have retarded some of his development (such as potty training and sleeping) but we are slowly overcoming those obstacles.

On the other hand, he is incredible sweet with his sister. He talks to her, soothes her, tries to help out, and includes her in his play. He’s very creative with his blocks and train tracks. He’s also doing more and more pretend play which bodes well for future gaming. He still hasn’t grasped turns though he enjoys matching games. I look forward to more complicated games in the future.


Miranda, my other midnight child, arrived healthy and strong. After a short trip to the NICU (due to inhaled liquids) she has shown herself to be much more physically developed than Sebastian. While not quite large, she is a much bigger baby than Sebastian and her development with regards to gross motor movements has been equally advanced. She’s hitting or exceeding all her milestones and looks to be as smarter and social as her brother. She is also a touch more willful. Her twos might be more terrible.

While Miranda is a little easier to work with than Sebastian (she sleeps longer and we know more) and Sebastian is becoming more independent, the combination of the two is sucking up most of our time. I’ve found time to write but not to game and my wife is finding all her time vanishing (being a teacher does not help).

The House

Last summer we began planning an addition to our house. Specifically we are removing Sebastian’s room and expanding the upstairs to add new rooms for Sebastian and Miranda plus a master bathroom. The process has been slow and at times frustrating. Permits were held up by the slow and sometime inept city planning office. Most of the quotes were way out of our budget. Financing looked threatened by a weird drop in local home prices.

This summer however the real scary part began. Two thirds of the roof was removed and most of the walls had some of their interiors opened up. Only one room in the house (the downstairs bathroom) avoided being worked on.



Obviously the impact on our gaming was severe. We had to move out for the summer, halting all of our local gaming for a while. We did not go to DunDraCon or KublaCon.

But it will all be worth it. Now we don’t have to worry about outgrowing our house. Even better the expanded space (both from new closets and from the necessary shedding of unused items) means more space for gaming supplies.

I’ve removed a shelf’s worth of books (mostly splat books for D&D 3.5) so my books should finally all have a place. Even better, once I shift my clothes to the new closet, my wife will move her craft stuff upstairs (into the old closet). That will open room to move the board games from the drawers in the office to the more efficient closet space. The drawers can then absorb the currently hard to reach office and game supplies (pens, dice, paper, staplers and so forth).

Gaming Groups

Now to review how my various gaming groups have not been playing.

Online Group & Demon: the Descent

This been a bit of downer for me but with some positive elements.

When Miranda was born we went on a long hiatus. It started as just a case of getting our bearings but developed into the realization that with Miranda and Sebastian’s bedtimes, we couldn’t play until after 8 PM. The problem is that all of my players are on the East coast and I’m on the West coast. Between work schedules and sleep, we couldn’t find a time that would work.

We managed a few games over the summer and found to a reasonable transition point.

The group then surprised me with their enthusiasm and interest in a play by post model. I'll need to work out exactly how I'll be running it (and what the log will look like) but it means I can work through the long list of subplots I have.

Local Boardgame Group

Things are more positive here. We are on hiatus for summer due to construction but before that we were managing roughly monthly game afternoons.

The couple we play with also have a small child so we have a common problem and it works well to play together. We can’t play late or very long but with the game table to store things between get togethers we can manage longer boardgames well.

Now hopefully that game of Golden Wilderness wasn’t jostled too much by the construction.

Local Gaming Group

Another group that is on hiatus but which I expect to pick up in the fall. It helps that we were already playing after 8 PM on Fridays.

We ended in January wrapping up our Urban Shadows game. Hopefully in September we will begin either a Mage: the Awakening or a Night’s Black Agents game.

The NOOP

Last time I wrote about this, we had a private Minecraft realm that we were developing. That got pretty far. We opened up the End, connected the center to most biomes via a rail system, and build some large pretty structures.

Then we decided to create a public server and it sort of became work to me. Plus getting admin privileges took the feeling of risk out of the game. Without the initial community of most of the gang, I sort of drifted away. Now I’m just preparing a local game to share with my family down the road.

Other Gaming?

So what options exist for increasing my gaming past the Friday sessions and the occasional board game?

There are few options.

• My friend Mike’s Play by Post may or may not be dead. The players seem interested in reviving it as long as they don’t need to do homework. That won’t be much of an Elder’s game then but it is still something.
• Conventions are definitely still going to happen. Once Miranda is weaned Grace and I intend to attend at least one each year. So some of the stories in my head will see the real world eventually.
• The local comic book store runs a weekly boardgame night. I have not snuck over there yet but it is possible I or Grace could attend occasionally. Once Sebastian gets older I can take him over as well.
• Online Play (starting at 8 PST) is perhaps the most promising but also the hardest for me. It is hard enough for me to put myself out there for people I know. Recruiting players online and then weeding out the malcontents is a bit of work but if that is what it takes, then I will do it.

We’ll see how things work out this fall.

Thoughts on Play By Post: The Whys

Recently I’ve needed to look into alternative modes of roleplaying. In this series I’m going to look at Play By Post or PbP: what it is, what advice exists for running it, and how I intend to implement it for my Demon: the Descent game, the Unusual Suspects.

What is Play by Post?

For my purposes, PbP is roleplaying via some slower media than in person or over an audio or video medium. This could be forum posts, email, or even text chat. Back in my youth, there were even people who ran games via snail mail.

The play proceeds similarly to a normal roleplaying session. The game master posts details on the current situation and the players respond with descriptions of their actions in their posts.

The difference comes in both the longer format and the slower pace of the game. Descriptions, both from the GM and the players, tend to be more lengthy and detailed than a live session. Player often have more narrative power to describe the world around them (partly to speed up play). Distinctions are made between In character (IC) description and voice and out of character (OOC) material like dice rolls and random chit-chat. Most of the time the effort is to keep OOC material to a minimum.

Die rolling might be handled by the medium itself (such as built-in dice rollers in a chat window), handled by the GM, or work on the honor system.

The players might all know each other as in a typical live game or they might be complete strangers recruited over the internet. Such games might include dozens of players and several game masters.

But the more relaxed response times and longer replies mean a much slower game. Scenes play out over days, sessions over weeks. On other hand this slow pace and freedom from set start and end times provides a lot of freedom to delve deep into the personal stories of characters.

But Why Am I Doing It?

I have two gaming groups, one local and one online, so you’d think PbP would have little appeal. Unfortunately with the arrival of my second child, I’m no longer able to run any live game that intersects with their 8 PM bedtime. It has to start afterwards.

That’s not an issue for my local game. We start after 8 PM already. But my online group consists mainly of players on the East Coast. 8 PM Pacific time (where I am) is 11PM on the East Coast. Even 3 hour sessions are thus out.

I thought that would be the end of that particular group but my players surprised me by suggesting PbP.

Previous Experiences

I hadn’t even considered PbP before the group suggested it because of how rarely the method has worked out for me before. The games always died and it seems a relatively large investment (emotional and creative energy put into my characters) for very little enjoyment (given how short most the games turned out to be).

My first Play by Post experience was shortly after the arrival of Mage: the Awakening a decade ago. A would be storyteller recruited people, including myself, from the old White Wolf forums. With a lot of enthusiasm, our small group of players began working through some introductory scenes.

Then the game master disappeared followed swiftly by the other player in my scene. The game died. I checked back over the next few weeks but no new posts arrived.

My second PbP game was Vampire: the Masquerade. This time I knew the gamemasters personally and they in turn recruited a much larger group of players. We made use of a play by post focused forum to help manage threads and rolls. The game had many subplots and levels of intrigue.

We got a few in-game nights into the action. Then it all fell apart. The main game master dropped out due to personal life issues. The secondary game master also began to lose interest as several players dropped out, following the normal rules of PbP attrition. An attempt to recruit a player for the GM role fell through and a few weeks later the game ground to a halt.

My last attempt only occurred because one of my best friends was running it. The small Vampire: the Requiem elders game proceeded pretty well lasting a few in and out of game months and completing a full story. It was helped by the monthly video chats and a fairly low barrier to posts.

Even so the other players resented the “homework” preferring the live sessions. The writer in the group wanted to focus on their own writing while others wanted to make things even simpler. The stress of managing all the communications (plus real life demands) wore on the game master and we stalled out before reaching the next story.

Lessons Learned

So what do I know right now?

Enthusiasm is key. Both the GM and the players need to be engaged. Both sides need to keep posting and posting regularly. Slow posting and stalled posts hurts player interest and that means hemorrhaging players.

The second take away is to lower expectations. Since I can’t pick my players (or rather I already have) I need to keep the level of posting at a level that everyone is willing to contribute to in terms of quality and quantity.

Lastly I’m realizing I’m signing myself up for a lot of work. Five times the number of posts (at least) that I want from my players. Ouch.

Next time I’ll read some advice from more experienced PbP game masters and see what other lessons I can find.