Did our
bedtime stories game go well? Well, the girls (7 and 9) seemed to enjoy it? R played May, daughter of the Witch Queen (R later said that May rarely used her full name; May Corpse-Death), and J played Pearl, warrior princess of the Crystal Castle.
I plumped for Fate Accelerated as the system as, despite being unfamiliar with *actually running* Fate, I figured that it would be the one of the best way to create characters for people who are not going to get to grips with the mechanical bits and bobs of chargen, or the constraints involved into fitting a character concept into the boxes of archetypes, classes, or even good old fashioned skill lists. Asking a kid questions such as "Who are you?" "Why do you get into trouble?" and "Tell me one more important thing about your character", to generate Aspects, followed by, "How does your character solve problems?" to assign scores to Approaches is about as total newbie friendly as it can get.
One thing that both of them instinctively got was Compels - in fact, they were always looking for ways in which their Aspects could complicate their plans (and so get them another Fate point to pile in front of themselves). This, of course, is just an extension and formalisation of their usual make-believe (role) play; without the background in rules-based games in which the goal is to mitigate weaknesses and maximise chances of success, 'making the game more fun' by suggesting that the Witch Queen might show up, or that the fact that Pearl is hot-headed and always getting into fights simply seemed obvious.
They also seemed far more open to approaches to problem-solving / encounter resolution that perhaps wouldn't occur to more experienced gamers. For example, they met Sir Percival at the ford across the Rainbow River, who challenged Pearl to a contest of arms. Pearl managed to get a "success with style", which we worked out as granting the Boost "knocked back into the shallows". Rather than follow this up with another physical attack, J decided that Pearl would brow-beat Percival with a "don't you know who my mother is" speech and invoked the Boost which took Sir Percival out of the fight.
I played a bit fast and loose with the rules - in part because I didn't really know what I was doing and in part because I was running a 'bedtime story'. One thing that I'll have to reconcile if I'm running Fate for adults is my 'old school' instinct to run a non-combat/non-physical peril encounter without calling for the dice, and to make use of what a game like Fate offers and play out these scenes making use of the Aspects, Fate Points etc. An example of this was when May bumped into her mother, the Witch Queen, in the Bone Orchard, and ended up in a very teenage "you're not the boss of me!" argument. R came up with some great "attacks", and it seemed entirely appropriate to run this is a "combat", especially as to not do so would be to privilege physical combat as *the* game. It's even more clear to me now that Fate (and a few other games with some 'familial resemblance') would be great for running games in which there is nothing recognisable as combat or even peril in traditional RPG terms.
Perhaps more importantly, I need to work on getting the "opposition" right mechanically - both in terms of Aspects and ratings on paper and the way in which they are played at the table. How do I represent Sir Percival? The Witch Queen? Bardon's Bandits? But perhaps more importantly; When do they create advantage? When do they concede? When do they use Fate Points? Things were probably *mechanically* a little too easy. This will come with practice.
But it was FUN. My wife told me later that she'd be listening from the other room and had been really impressed with how engaged and excited the girls had been. We'll definitely be playing again - there is Dragon to meet, after all.
