Tips for young players and Morgansfort

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Kane
Posts: 51
Joined: Wed Nov 16, 2022 4:08 pm

Re: Tips for young players and Morgansfort

Post by Kane »

This is borderline necromancy, but I am a fan of BF1 and I've played it with young teens. This game may be wrapped up and level 12 by now, but someone else might find this useful. My players had little D&D experience, though they were aware of it from video games and siblings.
What I found:

Not having too many expectations of what a module is, they are often just as interested in random minutia you make up, and arbitrary module details, as whatever core sites and narrative you have going on. The tower, the caves, the fort - these all have key functions from a OSR/RPG DM point of view, but a lot of players don't necessarily have that in mind beforehand. So, for one, it can be useful to give them some hints that these places are important/dangerous; for two, you can often get a lot of play by just expanding on whatever shopkeeper they become interested in. If you're like me, and definitely want to get some good wargaming in, you can always tie up Zerno the Tanner's interests and concerns with his missing niece, and off we go to the Caves of Chaos (or whatever level appropriate minidungeon you elect to place in the woods). It's often much easier to integrate player's interests into the structure of a module or campaign than to try to find a way to connect his character to it ex machina.

Young players may not understand tactics and coordination, but they often learn very quickly. It can be useful to have hirelings around, not only to soak up arrows, but also to demonstrate good and bad tactics. For example, if our poor Torchbearer takes an arrow to the knee, we can narrate it to demonstrate a tactic which is dangerous, or that he was incautious, and that's why it happened. If we're having a man-at-arms be particularly effective against kobolds, he can have a breathless discussion with party members about 'tactics he used', to indicate some ways that players can coordinate and to demonstrate the idea of discussing with fellow players/characters what abilities they have and how they might plan and act effectively.

If done well, a lot of young players can pick up on this, and it's not really surprising: I have been decimated by twelve year olds in RTS games, all they need is interest and information to learn from and there's no telling how effective they'll become. BFRPG and other OSRs are often very dangerous for low level characters, and the sooner they learn caution-without-dithering and that thinking about when and how to fight pays, the less frustrated they're likely to be and the more they'll become impressed with their own cunning. Confidence and caution are both important for this type of scenario and game, it's very much a player-knowledge (not necessarily system knowledge, but just how to strategize). Because in many games, even a 15th level character can be killed instantly by a much weaker character with a certain spell and an unlucky saving throw. It's kind of designed to be that way, and that fact is better confronted than avoided.

Scarlet Heroes also has some great rules for jazzing up characters so they're vastly more effective than D&D characters, as well as solo/small group play in general, but it ends up being very different from BFRPG or Labyrinth Lord as a consequence.
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