The Fen (Revisited)
In my last post, I mentioned that I've started a tabletop gaming club at my school. I've thought about doing it at the last two schools I was posted at, and decided this time I'd just do it. There was nothing much here for those students who aren't sport inclined, so the take-up was instant. 25 kids wanting to game... all wanting to play D&D. A third of whom are girls, and probably half of whom are on the spectrum to some level (where a quarter have issues complex enough that require them being in special education classes).
I've run games wth 6 to 8 players no problems, I've done 10 to 12 at a pinch, often with sub-GMs... but 25 newbies. Nope. I don't want to give them the wrong impression of what gaming can be.
At first I was thinking that we should play boardgames, and run single sessions with an RPG of some type. However, a half hour lunchbreak isn't enough time to really get much of anything happening. So I'm working on a few new odeas, one of whch is to revisit my game "The Fen". See Here and Here (actually, just check "The Fen" labels on this blog)
The orginal version of the game was designed for 2 to 6 players, where each player would portray an aware survivor and a bunch of amnesiac survivors in a mysterious swamp locked nto an eternal night. With each player portraying 1 aware and 3-5 amnesiacs, that meant about 15-20 survivors were in play, and it really wouldn't take a lot to tweak the game for 25 aware characters. The game is played in turns, where more players means more food is required to keep the encampment alive... it also means a quicker initial phase of the game exploring the lands around the encampment. Another bonus is the fact that the game won't lose too much momentum if someone goes down early.
It requires a bit of a revamp of the game on a few levels, but I really feel that this could work well. Maybe restructuring the game so it works more like Diplomacy, with everyone spending the half hour lunch break working out their moves, then before the next gaming club session I can work out the results from the moves. The actual interactions between players will be fairly freeform, and could happen over the course of other boardgames being played.
The trick at the moment is linking the game into Department of Education syllabus outcomes, to show that this project has academic merit for the students involved.
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Comments
I got my kid's group playing free retro-clones that ran quickly and I could give them a list of free stuff I looked over and I wanted money to not be an obstacle. Also, education catalogues have great dice packs.
We made some games including a dungeon crawl dm-less card game they worked on and played on own for weeks. Managers let me spend more shifts all gaming and started with nerds and other kids saw them and wanted in and I found I could use them for basic maths/comprehension skills. I had some kids because the nerd-dom peer group got into reading. Ran games as fighting fantasy level complexity too (simpler than the FF rpg). Had some great TPK events when they failed to co-operate.
One mistake was playing modern era games and the kids talking about what they did in the modern era sounded worse while fantasy seemed to be no problem. Did have to explain talking about getting your sister drunk in RPG (own time games on her own at home) might alarm the adults.
One core girl player decided she wanted to be a boy and so all the misgendering monsters ended which was probably good learning for them all (are you sure they are all rat men? A few months later she decided she wanted to be a cat-girl instead.