Continuing from last week, as I met again with the participants in my local library’s Dungeons & Dragons program, I presented the group with an opportunity for the aspiring Girl Scout to take command of the in-game party as they faced a challenge I’ve had prepared for them for some months, now. (I had had it set on something of a randomizing countdown, a mechanic to make it certain to occur but that allowed for it to happen earlier than might be expected; it is a device I might use in other games, although probably at the table, proper, rather than in a play-by-post game…but who knows?) It was her first time doing so, so there were some snags, but nothing major and fewer than expected, so I consider the exercise a success. I’ll be working with the aspiring Girl Scout on the next phase of her project, developing a one-shot to run with the group, which I look forward to doing, both because it will help her and because it will help me refine some of what I need to do to help others in the program come up to being able to run their own games–part of the point of the library program, as it happens.

I think it is a good pattern to follow in training up potential game-runners, the one we’re following at my local library: work the candidate through a series of games before gauging interest before having the candidate take on in-game leadership for an encounter or event. The expected next step, and the one I have more or less assigned to other participants at the local library who have expressed interest in running games, is to solicit narrative ideas; I take the approach that mechanics should flow from story, rather than the other way around, and I’ve had a fair amount of success in that with multiple groups across some years, now, so I think I’ll stick with the approach. (“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” comes to mind as a useful principle, and changing for the sake of changing annoys me immensely in both my personal and professional capacities.) I’ll review those narrative ideas with the candidates, and then we can work out what mechanics need to emerge from them, helping the candidate compose a brief and coherent narrative arc that they can then try out with the existing group.

Such is the path on which the aspiring Girl Scout currently walks, anyway; I am still testing and refining things, which she accepts as part of the process of development in which we are all engaged. And I do mean all; despite my decades of experience on both sides of the GM screen, I have things to learn as a player and as someone who runs games. A play-by-post I’m currently in is helping me with the former at the moment; the middle schoolers continue to help me with the latter. I am grateful for both, as the better I get at both, the more I enjoy them, and it is nice to have something to enjoy in this world we occupy.

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