Totally Immature, Childish GM's. Literally.

I have done my job well. I have two sons, both of whom navigate the seas of geekery with expertise and cool aplomb, and neither of them are burdened with the lingering self-conscious nerd-shame my generation was cursed with. I could end up living in a six-by-six cell under Guantanamo, and still consider myself a successful father for that alone. They like what they like, and be damned the nay-sayers.
My firstest-bornedest is sixteen, and, while not a role player, takes all of ten minutes to quit bitching about "having to play another one of Dad's stupid playtests" and totally gets into the game. He's the one that wants to keep going after four hours, and he's the one that will drive a totally dice-less session of Savage Worlds. My secondest is eleven, and he's my gamer. He plays in anything I make, along with a weekly group at his school. He paints minis and knows what a bec de corbin looks like. And he's wanted to GM since he was six.

These Nerds are tasty. Almost as tasty as
your character's slow and painful death.

THE EVOLUTION OF A GAME-MASTER
Of course, he started with wanting to push minis around on a dry-erase game mat. What the hell, he was six, right? We'd lay out a handful of the old plastic D&D minis and break out the markers and go to town. When a particular mini didn't fit the bill, out came the Lego dudes. That's Stage One: chaos on a table-top.

 "You kick open the door and there are eight Beholders!"
"Eight?"
"Yeah, I saw them in your book and they look cool."
"I run away."
"You can't. Uhh...the door shuts and locks behind you."
"Can I talk to them?"
"No. The first one floats up to you and turns you to stone with his eye attack!" (cackling laughter)

Stage One is rules. His rules. And accessories. What I realized during this phase, was that the kid was story-telling, but he wanted rules to enforce his plot idea. We'd spend hours with him basically telling me what I did and what happened. When anything deviated from what he had in mind, he'd throw monsters at me and fake-roll dice to tell me how everything magically got back on track.

Worship me, children. With dice.

I've played games with adult GM's who still live in Stage One.
Stage Two was "I love X/Y/Z and want to make a game about it". This is where the kid got infatuated with a particular IP, be it Halo or Fire Emblem or Pokemon, and saw a tabletop RPG as a way to get more of whatever it is. Again, lots of arbitrary rules, but not to rail-road his idea of a story; instead, he was actually designing rules, with increasing consistency, all geared toward capturing elements and flavor of his obsession du jour. This stage is all about detail, tons of detail, and the whole point of playing is to recreate the IP.
I've played with adult GM's who do this. Hell, sometimes I do this. Almost every futuristic military campaign I've ever written is an attempt to game-ify James Cameron's Aliens Colonial Marines.

Stage Three arrived this year. That's where it all starts to come together, and Actually Fun to Play becomes a real consideration. He surprised me with a zombie-apocalypse game that grew out of Call of Duty Nazi Zombies, and ended up being a RP-light mostly-board game that was shockingly fun to play.

Disclaimer: don't get me wrong. It's fun playing with your kids. Better than fun. It's part of the tapestry of them growing up that you'll look back on when you are old and crusty and incontinent and it's absolutely frigging priceless. They do silly things, and it's fun to watch their little brains work. But, in the early stages...let's be honest: if it wasn't my kid I was playing with, it would have been excruciating. Which brings me (finally) to my point:
Pretty much every stage in the kid's gaming career is a legitimate way to game. The kid was on track with what a lot of adults pass off as gaming. The big difference between the kid and the adult is two fold: first, fun for players wasn't a concern when he first started. He was having fun, and of course that means it's fun for everybody, right?

Except this guy.
He thought the combat mechanics sucked.

The second thing that made his early games 'immature' was strictly that: he was immature. He lacked experience, and (most especially) the tool-box that a good GM brings to the table. A good GM can rail-road a game just as egregiously as any six year-old, but she has the back-log of plots, stories and situations to camouflage the rail-roading. A good GM can artfully lay out options that really aren't options, and can gently nudge the random actions of players back on story-track.

So I guess my advice to any dual-class parent/gamers out there is to let the little monsters have fun. Let them run amok and run rough-shod over the concepts of rules and balance. Let them trap you in a room with eight Beholders.

Because what I've discovered is that kids don't really need much teaching when it comes to gaming. They already have it figured out. They just need practice, and to build that story-telling tool-box. And the best way to encourage that is to keep having fun.

Bizarre Love Triangle

I'm in the middle of a nasty love triangle, and it's getting out of hand. On one hand, I have a love who lets me be who I want to be. She doesn't confine me nor define me. She's open to whatever I'm in the mood for, and she just makes everything fun. But, on the other side, I have a new love, and she really reminds me of a junior high infatuation, but all grown up and infinitely sexier. What's a guy to do?


My quandary. Except I'm a dude. With a beard.
Otherwise, very similar.

So right now, I'm trying the John Ritter Three's Company strategy: I flit between the two, trying to balance one with the other so nobody gets hurt (especially me). But it's starting to get out of hand, and I feel this stupid urge to commit to one or the other.
My lovely ladies:





Hippie Chick.

 Savage Worlds is the one who never seeks to constrain me or tie me down. With Savage Worlds, I can whip up a Ghost Busters campaign, a Wild West campaign, a Star Wars campaign, Cthulhu (yeah, lots of Cthulhu)...hell, players have even revamped the Battletech RPG so it's actually playable...all from a single, fairly thin book. At this moment, Savage Worlds GM's are adapting every imaginable IP into slick, smooth-running games. And if you don't want to use someone else's setting or idea, write your own: it's easy with Savage Worlds. Really, really easy. Even better, the system has tons (literally tons) of licensed settings, ranging from the Weird West of Deadlands to the awesomely grim Saxon-inflected desperation of Hellfrost. 
The flexibility of Savage Worlds springs largely from it's generic framework. It's not GURPS, but it relies on character creation and rules mechanics that are common to any setting. Shooting skill is shooting skill: if you're in Mad Max, it's a gun, but if you're playing Doctor Strange versus Cthulhu, it may be arcane energy squirting out of your eyeballs. Regardless, it's aiming something at a target, and you adapt it as needed by the setting and common sense. Likewise with magic/powers/etc. A magic missile and a ray of frost are pretty much like Gambit's ability to shoot plasmicated playing cards at bad guys; the rules provide a trappings concept that customizes the framework to make it fit the application. It sounds clunky, but it sho ain't. It's smooth, and damned near effortless.

Adolescent crush. Grown up.

  But the we have my other new love: 13th Age is everything I ever loved about Dungeons & Dragons but revamped for maximum playability and fun, the love of my adolescence all grown up and made over. Unlike Savage Worlds, 13th Age is straight fantasy, and mechanically tied into an implied setting; but that setting is pretty awesome, so I'm not complaining.
It's the love-child of Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo, of D&D 3rd and 4th edition fame, respectively. According to the foreword, they got together to make a game that combines everything good about both editions, and dumps everything else into the garbage. Not only are the rules pared down, there are actual mechanics in place to encourage player agency and kicking ass: for example, you don't level up by killing little XP nuggets in the form of monsters. Instead, you fight, you play, you carry on in the face of adversity, and, after a big fight or two, you get an incremental advance to the next level. One of my favorite tweaks is discarding the voluminous skill lists for your character. Rather than picking a load of specific skills, you pick backgrounds, and you use those backgrounds to role-play why your character has specific skills. If your character has the 'wharf rat' background, you just tell the GM, "Of course I know how to mend a net, I grew up on the mean docks of Blehtown" and it's up to you to sell it to the GM and the group. You make up your backgrounds, you determine whether or not they apply, and the GM and other players are there to throw a bullshit flag as needed.
Tweet and Heinsoo also differentiate the character classes: some are mechanics light, allowing a new player to roll dice and slay kobolds without a lot of overhead, while others are heavy on the crunch, allowing an experienced player to use specific rules to really tailor their characters abilities and skills.
That being said, every rule in 13th Age is geared toward maximizing the collaborative story-telling aspect of the game, without resorting to the diceless, 'story game' extreme. It's still dice-rolling, but with a lot of player collaboration, all in the service of story. This is a massive positive, but can also be a problem. When I tried out 13th Age at the table, my group was a little overwhelmed. It can take a while to break habits of "DM presents, DM describes, I react, roll dice, DM interprets". This game heavily relies on players taking charge of their actions and story, and that requires some adjustment from some players. It is definitely not for lazy players.



So here I am, with two very different, very attractive games pulling me in two directions. My gaming time is limited, and I have a group that doesn't switch easily...but it's whiny of me to complain. There are definitely worse problems to have. We'll figure it out somehow.

Just so long as they don't hook up behind my back.