Punching With Kids

Over the weekend, I had the fun and unusual opportunity to run Ghost Punchers for a pack of seventh-graders at our Friendly Local Game Store. It started with a message from one of my local gaming buddies when Ghost Punchers first came out.

“Hey, would you be willing to run Ghost Punchers for my kids and their friends? I think they’d get a kick out of playing a game with the guy who wrote it.”

I hesitated for a moment. While I’ve run various games for my own kids since they were small (most recently while playtesting the Adventurers RPG), I haven’t run a table full of young’uns since… (does a quick search on the blog) this crazy event several years ago.

But only a moment. I love running RPGs, and I needed to do a test-run of my Ghost Punchers adventure for Genghis Con anyway (sign up here!), so I agreed.

We had five players. Most had played the Savage Worlds system (which fuels Ghost Punchers) at least a couple times before, but we had one raw recruit: this was his first RPG experience of any kind. I handed them each a pre-made character (complete with a backstory they largely ignored), made sure we had enough dice at the table, and jumped into the game.

It went really well.

Whenever you’re asking a squad of adolescent boys to focus on one thing while sitting at one table in one room for more than four hours… You’re asking for trouble. And yes, there were some focus issues (for some reason, they were obsessed with the cans of spray paint I let their characters buy before the game started), but once the dice hit the table, they were totally engaged.

At one point, they were trying to rescue a woman who had been possessed by an angry ghost. If they didn’t exorcise her quickly, she was going to harm herself and probably take out a bunch of civilians. Realizing they didn’t have time for a full exorcism ritual (the power called “Eviction Notice” in Ghost Punchers), they frantically tried to pull the woman into their “circle of ghostly protection,” which would essentially “strain” the ghost right out of her.

They tried, but failed. Driven by the spirit inside her, the woman held onto a post and couldn’t be budged.

“Spend a benny!” they shouted at the player making the roll.

He did, which gave him a re-roll, but he failed again.

“I’m spending another one!” he declared. The table cheered.

Another roll. Another failure. He was running out of bennies.

“One more,” he said, and rolled his six-sided Strength die. It came up “6” which, in Savage Worlds rules, meant that he got to roll again and add the second result to the first.

His second roll came up “6” as well. The kids went nuts. He rolled one more time and got a “5” — for a total of 17, a fantastic success!

“You yank her through the spirit force field!” I said. “And you can see the ghost squeeeezing out of her like toothpaste out of a tube.”

The other people in the store turned to see why a table of kids was alternately cheering and crying “Eew!”

It was a great session. Fun was had. Ghosts were punched. And we must have done something right, because the one kid who’d never played before vanished when the game ended, only to reappear minutes later proudly brandishing his brand-new Savage Worlds rulebook and dice set. The store got a sale. And his friends got a new player to join their ranks. Who says RPGs have no winners?

Would I do it again? In a heartbeat. Heck, I’m thinking about offering it as service — you know, like a birthday clown — “Hire a GM to come run a game for your kids for an afternoon.” It’s a niche market, but who knows? It’s probably not the craziest idea I’ve ever had.