While I’ve been recently writing about the dark in games, my newest campaign has been, in fact, running a far more whimsical experience.

I’ve got a battered copy of Wild Beyond The Witchlight and have recruited my family, which features two kids under ten. As a result I’ve cut back on my base storytelling impulses, which usually make me introduce horrid or challenging content. The game has so far only just left the titular carnival and we are having a great time.
I could easily write a classic ‘How To Roleplay With Kids’ content here. You’ll see that advice a lot, and I was thinking about doing one myself to be honest. But I’ve been recently thinking about dark content in games and began to consider how my games as a kid were still full of excitement even though I had no idea how to process the darker stuff I do now. I still felt moved and engaged.
And then a thunderbolt of thought hit me. As it did, it revealed something interesting about how we all roleplay, which was taught to me by my kids. I re-examined a fundamental fact about roleplaying that I’m going to try to keep track of.
Kids Will Be Kids
So, we’ve been playing Witchlight, and my son won a cone full of marshmallows at a circus game early on. He’s been giving them out to any NPC he feels might be a friend or ally. My brain is lowering the DC of any persuasion checks to people who are given marshmallows. But he’s ‘just’ making friends. My daughter has decided she’s a fox person from a world that is more modern animal-based reflection of our own and has got stuck on the planet on this fantasy earth – meaning she can make wisecracks about pop culture but still play an animal person in a fantasy world. Of course, my brain just wen,t ‘Far Traveller Background, let’s edit the Harengon race to make a fox’. But she ‘just’ wants to play a fox person and make jokes.
And it’s this ‘just’ I want to take a moment to look at. As adults, we’re using rules as a framework to generate content. But they are just shamelessly generating that content themselves. They’re not worried about what the rules say; they are honestly trying to imagine, and then I am trying to focus the rule I’m making around that. Their solutions are creative and practical in the headspace of the game. They have only a base understanding of what is on their character sheet. They don’t care as long as they can create.
And I realise this is not a new idea, but what hit was: This is what the OSR (old school revival/revolution) movement is driving at. Often, the most watched online content about D&D focuses on builds. We’re interested in whether our uses of spells make sense in the rules. We take a feat to be able to do something cool. Because the very act of codifying something in a ruleset is BOTH to tell us what we can do if we use the feat/spell/rule but also to tell us what we can’t do. We always see this as a D&D edition’s feats grow – suddenly, things that players could do before become feats and now people without the feat feel like they can’t do a thing. Fifth edition D&D is better at this than, say Third, but it happens. So we have to be careful about not limiting our roleplay.

So What? We know this, right?
Yes, we do and the OSR movement has always focused on having a bare minimum on character sheet when they design games. The theory is quite simple. The solution to your problems in game exist in your mind and the pieces of the ‘game puzzle’ you have – not on you character sheet. It is about using the fiction of the game to solve your problem, not your abilities. If there’s any ‘skill’ to the game it’s not in the mastery of the rules but in the space of imagination.
And that idea, your idea of value which might vary, is worth inspecting. Because it made me wonder about nostalgia. The OSR was originally driven by people who wanted to get back the feeling of playing first edition. It was, to some extent, an exercise in nostalgia. They wanted D&D to feel like it used to when they played it when they were younger. And they identified the evolution of rules as the problem with playing like that. They wanted to get back to what the game was like when they were kids.
That’s a noble idea. Being able to fully explain what my early gaming life looked like to the people in my life who joined later is interesting. We’d just do stuff and make stuff, a frenzy of creation. We used the storyteller system to run Star Wars. I once, in the mid 90’s, I spent an entire weekend just building a miniatures wargame based on Dominaria that used Magic: The Gathering cards as the basis for its ruleset. We’d just make stuff up and then wholesale invent and change. We weren’t thinking about ‘ludonarrative design’ because we didn’t need to invent rules to point towards the story we were making. We could ‘feel’ it. We knew what felt right for telling a story we wanted to tell. Because the play was the thing.
Playing 5e with my kids felt like those days. Without having to change ruleset. To them, the rules exist because that way Dad can keep up with them. Not because of they need limitations or to tell them how a fantasy world functions. They KNOW that bit.

And you know what? So do we. Reach back to when you were a kid for a moment, playing intensely, either with others to create or on your own. You knew the way those worlds worked. Anything you added to it followed your internal logic. Look back. The world might have crushed being a kid out of you, but you’re a roleplayer now. Can you feel it? The worlds waiting to be explored, the potential, the adventure in front of you?
I hope you can. I think we’re all often trying to get back to a place where play was a place where we found out new things – about ourselves, about the people we shared the space with, and about what we could create when there were no limits. That’s what roleplaying is when we get down to it. Play for play’s sake. In that we understand not just how to run games for kids but how to run games for anyone. Find the place that makes them forget they exist, and they are just creating and imagining – the run hard in that direction. Then they are in that feeling of being a child again, playing without limits.
Nostalgia is a powerful tool, and RPG games have the potential to tap right into the vein. Not to the specific things that we played in our childhood but the actual feeling of being younger and in a safer space. If we just look after each other and notice when a person at our table is really in the world, they know how it WORKS. And then going with them. Don’t worry if it’s on the sheet, just work out how to make things feel fair and fun. Tell the story with them and let them feel young. Because gods knows we don’t get enough of that in our real lives.
If I make it back from taking my kids to see the feywild, I’ll see you all next time. May your games be amazing.
Creative Commons credit: Kitsune Flat Color and Background by Chrissyissypoo19 and Hallways of Thime by Djekspek.