Last night, we started a new Dungeon World game with the regular Tuesday night group. As I shared yesterday, I've been pretty excited about the game, as have the players, and it went about as well as I'd hoped.
But that's not what I'm posting about.
Normally, +Kaylee Testerman isn't around on Tuesday nights, but she was last night, and in lieu of doing some Overwatch matches with her (which is what normally happens if she's around and has no homework), I asked if she wanted to join the game.
She did.
Now, Kaylee's played quite a few RPGs with me, her cousins, and even with Sean, but she's never joined in on a 'regular' play group, and after I asked and she said she was in, I had a few niggling worries because… come on: she's eleven. She didn't even know two of the guys in the group. What if she ending up being the "super annoying kid of the GM?"
I may be (probably am) biased, but really I needn't have worried. She was focused, polite, thoughtful, inventive, and just all around a positive contributing member of the game – I was particularly impressed with her answer to the question I asked each player: "This land is beautiful/desolate, because…" (here: https://youtu.be/ML-LUfjNgas?t=1h10m26s), but all of her play showed so much thought, I worried people would think I'd coached her.
(She told me after that game that during the owlbear fight, she'd been googling "how to take down big monsters in fantasy games" so she'd have a good action to take when it was her turn.)
Nerd-gamer-me was proud as could be.
The microphone volume was kind of rough, but she herself did great. I figured if you let her in that she would be fine, and that was indeed the case.
Yup. A surprise to have her in as a "special guest star," but she contributed nicely.
The mic thing was weird, because we do hangouts all the time and her volume is never a problem. I have to wonder if the real issue was the headphones rather than just using the mic on the ipad itself.
It doesn't help that the video recording volume was, unrelated, low for everything, which I fixed too late.
Most of it sounded okay (the first half hour or so I listened to so far, at least).