The Monday session of Ian’s Awesome RPG had its first meeting today. I have mostly high school kids signed up, with two middle school brothers, one of whom is possibly very slightly autistic. He made it today, but his brother was sick. I think I was able to model some behavior to the other teens to set the tone with him, and that end of things went pretty well.
But the really exciting thing wast that even though it was our first session and even though there was a lot of character generation yet to do (most players had at least started their characters based on instructions communicated on the Awesome RPG blog) and even though we didn’t play a whole lot, we played enough to see that everyone was interested and paying attention for the whole time we were there, not just when it was their turn in combat. A coworker said that even the kids who were taking a break went past her buzzing about the game.
If I haven’t mentioned it recently, most of the mechanics of character generation and conflict resolution are coming from D. Vincent Baker’s game Dogs in the Vineyard. The setting is even approximately the same time period as that game, but that’s where the similarities end. Still, the way the mechanics work to keep everyone involved is a great feature of the game, and so a huge part of this success (so far) is Vincent’s doing.
More on the events of the session soon.
