Category Archives: Blog
Running Games for Kids Without Losing Your Mind
Picture it. Six kids. One dragon. Zero turn order.
The dragon lands on the tower, and every kid talks at once. One wants to fight it. One wants to pet it. One wants to know if dragons like pizza. The quiet kid in the corner says something brilliant, and nobody hears it, including me. Twelve minutes later, nobody had rolled a single die, and a kid named Jonah was under the table.
That was my first kids’ game. I went home, lay face down on the couch, and cursed myself for ever buying the starter set.
Was that session a disaster? Yes. Well, actually, the kids called it the best day ever. So, no. It was only a disaster for me. And it taught me the thing most kids’ guides skip. The kids weren’t the problem. My pacing was.
Here’s the thing about “short attention spans.” You probably heard that people now focus for about eight seconds, less than a goldfish. That number came from a 2015 Microsoft Canada report, and researchers question where its data even came from (Treetop ABA).
Kids aren’t goldfish. Their focus is normal, predictable, and, guess what, measurable. So this post gives you a method built on that math. I call it the 3-Beat Table Method: Clock, Token, Script. Three beats. One calmer table.
Read the rest of this entryHow to Scare Your Players Without Taking the Wheel
A few years ago, researchers in Denmark did something wonderfully cruel. They strapped heart-rate monitors onto 110 people, sent them through a haunted house, and asked two questions. How scared were you? How much fun was that?
Guess what? Fun went up with fear. Then, past a certain point, fun crashed. Too little fear, and people got bored. Too much, and it stopped being fun at all. The researchers called the peak a “sweet spot” (Andersen et al., Psychological Science, 2020).
That curve is your whole job as a horror GM. Get players to the top of the hill and keep them there. And the fastest way to fall off the far side? Take away their choices.
I learned this the hard way. My first Call of Cthulhu one-shot ended at 10:40 p.m. sharp, because I wrote it that way. Cultists win. Sanity gone. Everybody dies. I thought it was bleak and brilliant. Then my friend Marcus folded his arms and said, “So nothing we did mattered?”
He wasn’t scared. He was annoyed. At me.
Did that one-shot scare anybody? Nope. Well, actually, it scared one person pretty badly. Me. Out of running horror for a full year.
So let’s fix that. This post covers how to tell fear from frustration, why your players’ characters can be doomed while your players still feel free, and a seven-step method I call Scared, Not Stuck.
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