Tabletop RPG Fun!

Long. Apologies and thanks.

I and my friend and GM (I occasionally take turns GMing) were discussing the rest of our gaming group, which consist of his 14yr old step-son and 18yr old nephew and their 1 or 2 friends each.

Besides Assassin’s Creed, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and shoot-em-ups, the kids spend a lot of their time on WoW, one of them is on it constantly for like 9-10 hours at a time and even had to quit in the middle of our last 4 hr tabletop session to go sleep. They “roleplay” constantly in the chat window on WoW, are guild members, do all the social stuff, can type and speak some of the WoW languages fluently, plan out skill trees and calculate weapon stats and “best builds” and such and keep track of experience totals, thousands of locations and quests. But get them at a table, and though they all LIKE playing, suddenly become confused mutes.

I know they know how to roleplay, freeform at least. I know they know what character concept, background and immersion in personalities are, how to act out and play different types of people with their own likes and quirks. I know a lot of them could recite the entire mythology of WoW from both sides, tell you all the notable heroes, battles and geographical landmarks and areas from the entire universe, plus spells and magic items and costs and level advancements.

I also know they’ve all played a few times or more, have a good grounding in WFRP dice, combat, weapons and armor, stats and to a lesser degree, skills and how they work. Either myself or my friend also play with the other person running, and help advise and answer questions, and demonstrate roleplaying different attitudes and schemes and plans, come up with outside the box ideas and approaches to situations and puzzles and using different techniques and game mechanics.

But at the table, if and when they’re paying attention and not quoting the latest Family Guy episode while the game is going on (I know the answer to that is to tell them to shut up), they just seem absolutely at a loss of what to do, either when nothing is going on, or when something is obviously up and needing a response. They don’t plan or puzzle things through, develop an idea of how the story is going and anticipate possible solutions or problems or want to spend any time or thought developing their characters or HQ or NPC henchmen or mounts – they only vaguely skim through the equipment lists. I have even made sure to stay a subordinate character when I play, and help out with whatever the others do most of the time, occasionally interjecting to do something a little heroic just to see if the others pick up on it.

We are somewhat baffled by their lackluster response and effort, not from a performance “should have done better” point of view, but that they don’t or can’t or aren’t getting “into” the game more, paying more attention or thinking more, without prompting, they don’t roleplay social interactions or make speeches or give descriptive and relevant examples of how they are using a skill to accomplish something. We may not be the best GM or player, but me and my friend have been playing since ‘80 and ‘87 so I’d like to think we have at least minimal enough experience to have a basic grasp of at least one interpretation of “how to roleplay” and can somewhat impart some bit of that to others.

The two exceptions to this are that one of the step-son’s PC is Mayor and has a wife and made sure to tell the GM he was trying to get his wife pregnant every now and then for a handful of sessions, and the other is the nephew, who I give credit to, for roleplaying his weird circus-performer/brothel owner almost entirely through notes to the GM for the whole campaign so far, and eventually pledging himself to Chaos and betraying the rest of us to our main Chaos Warrior nemesis during a session.

While I like they have some things they can get into, these seem… rather indicative more of where their mindsets are at as players and their preoccupations and rebelliousness, rather than picking up on the cooperative “party” or heroic aspects, which I agree aren’t entirely necessary to play a game, but would be nice to at least give them a taste of.

Are we reading too much into it? Is it just their ages and lack of experience, even with other roleplayers present? I don’t want to sound like I’m griping or trying to force them into something, but while I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in them being a more “able” group to play with, we would like to help instill in them or help them develop a genuine interest and appreciation in the creative and social and educational aspect of roleplaying games.

Does their experience and familiarity with the way console and computer and MMORPG games work, and the requirements made by those games, influence the kids’ expectations/disappointments/frustrations with tabletop face-to-face games?

Any advice? Thanks for any replies.

Tags: attention, inspire, kids, learn, players, rpg, tabletop, warhammer, wfrp

This entry was posted by J P on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 11:13 pm and is filed under General RPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.