Mousey Behaviour
Introduing RPGs to Youth Work
Role-playing games are something I truly love. Whether I'm running a game or acting as a player in someone else's game, I can't get enough of them. There are few hobbies I can think of that have managed to burrow into my psyche and become something I think about daily in the way a good RPG campaign can.
There are benefits to RPGs beyond just having fun. Not that having fun isn't enough - the social element of these games is a huge reason they're so popular - but people are starting to explore their other benefits. In the UK organisations like Game Therapy are digging into the therapeutic effects of RPG groups for all kinds of groups, for example.
Now I'm no therapist, but I am very interested in applying RPGs in my day job to see what results we get. I'm a Youth Worker by trade, and one that's always been interested in game-based learning; introducing RPGs to that setting was always inevitable.
I've brought DnD in to my work before, though more for fun than a deliberate project, and it went down a storm. There are a few causes for that:
Popular culture. DnD is at a high point of visibility currently, it's all over TV and podcasts like Critical Roll are huge
Lack of accessibility. It may be popular to watch, but for your average teenager DnD is difficult to get into. It calls for a lot of reading, and RPG books aren't always the clearest to put it mildly. Add to that the cost of around £50 per rulebook (and you need 3 of them just to play) plus dice, accessories, and you can see that a typical 14 year-old isn't going to be able to try this on a whim.
Running an RPG in a youth club or similar setting capitalises on the former while overcoming the latter. It provides opportunities that a lot of young people simply wouldn't get, which is what youth work is all about.
DnD has been the recurring term above, and there's good reason for that. When I've spoken with young people about RPGs, DnD is role-playing games. It's all they know, and how they frame RPGs; when I told them about the other games out there they'd tell their friends 'it's a DnD but in space' or something to that effect. They use the term DND for RPGs the same way all vacuum cleaners in the UK get called a Hoover.
As popular as it may be in the vernacular, DnD doesn't seem like a good fit to me. 5E's biggest achievement, and arguably a major factor to its success, was how it stripped away a lot of the admin of previous editions into something more manageable. More manageable doesn't equate to accessible though, merely that it's less difficult than before, and there's still a significant chunk of swotting up required to play the game properly. I'd even go so far to say the 'make a ruling and wing it' attitude of many is a direct response to 5E's density and the difficulties finding a correct ruling.
This won't cut it with most young people, and absolutely won't fit the time constraints of running a game at a youth club. Something much snappier is needed. I'm an advocate of teaching games through play rather than front-loading information, so I wanted an RPG that would fit that ethos, too. This calls for a game from the OSR.
I decided to go with the game 'Mausritter' as a starting point. It's not a game I've had a ton of experience with, but had fun whenever I did play it. There are a few mechanisms that will work really well with young people, but the biggest selling point was the speed of the rules - the players section can be read start-to-finish in an hour, slicing away any potential places gameplay could stall.
For our first session we were just going to go through character creation and ground rules, typical 'session zero' stuff. The first thing that needed to be addressed, however, was player expectations. A number of them (the anime fans in particular) arrived with fully-fledged characters, most of them being kitsune or similarly uncommon races, complete with superpowers, while another young person had downloaded DnD Beyond and made a character on their phone. I'd asked them all not to do this so that we would all start in the same place, but enthusiasm got the better of them - a lovely problem to have. Explaining why these characters wouldn't work in a world of adventuring mice deflated them a little, but explaining how the game runs perked them back up.
Ground rules are different in a youth work setting than a game with friends. As the worker I'm in a position of power, and this has to be kept in mind. Certain standards need to be set by the worker that are non-negotiable – ensuring the gaming table is an inclusive environment and what kind of behaviour is acceptable, for a start, is entirely down to the worker. Yellow and red ‘time out’ cards were brought in immediately, with yellow being ‘I need to step away from this, but carry on’ and red being a signal that the current topic/angle/plot needs to stop immediately. This was also an opportunity for everyone to identify any ‘red flags’ that we needed to keep out of games, either sharing that with the group or emailing me separately. I’m fortunate enough that the group of young people were already friendly with one another, so are well aware of boundaries and triggers.
Next up was character creation. OSR games angle toward dice-based character creation with an emphasis on the random factor, and doing this as a group would be entertaining. Mausritter is simple enough that they could all quickly understand what the stats stood for and were rolling stats right away, getting an idea of what their mice were like. There’s potential, when playing a game with young people, for them to get upset when they end up with a total lemon of a character, but Mausritter has a simple yet clever solution: starting items are determined based on your stats and money, so that PCs with great stats get worse items, and statistically-weak PCs getting the best stuff. Explaining this to the group took the sting out of some of the PCs being a little lacking, and the sting was taken out altogether when they rolled up character appearances and drew their portraits. Comedy took over, and they laughed with each other rather than at each other.
That’s really only as far as we got for the first session, character creation took up a good 90 minutes or so as the group got to grips with things. Despite being so rules-centric, they found character creation entertaining in a way I don’t think a point-buy system could have been. Every roll had them enthralled, every little detail like the colour of a mouse’s fur had them interested. Part of me thinks that a game of rolling dice to create characters would, on its own, be great with a group like this, but let’s get stuck into some campaigning and see what happens next.