RPG a Day 2017 Question 17

What is RPGaDay2017?

I’ll link here to the actual group. Basically, it’s a series of questions that you can answer. There are 31 questions that you can answer to help shine a light on the different reasons people play role-play games. This is my answer to the 17th question. For my full list of answers check here.

Question #17: Which RPG have you owned the longest but haven’t played?

The answer to this one is easy, Grimm from Fantasy Flight games. I’ve never played Grimm, I never expected to get to play Grimm. None of my friends were interested in it and I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to play it at all. I bought this book strictly to read about the world and the setting.

Grimm is a dark fairy tale game set in the world of the Grimm brothers where things have gone terribly wrong. After Humpty Dumpty fell from the wall he cracked and the spoiled, rotted from the inside. As the king of the land, his rot spread to his kingdom and subjects. Horrible things have happened and many of the old favorite characters have twisted and warped under these new rules. Cinderella forces her step sisters, bound in collars and kept on leashes, to crawl in front of her scrubbing the ground as punishment for how she was treated. The players take on the role of children trapped in this world.

This is part of where we as a group faltered. We thought it would be hard and in some ways frustrating to play children. That we would have to remember that kids are afraid of things like large barking dogs when adults know how to handle these situations. We didn’t like the idea of having to react in a way that relied on inexperience. We also felt it would be difficult to approach challenges and riddles without relying on our own experiences to solve them. It felt like it would be frustrating to know the solution to something but not be able to act on it because our characters wouldn’t.

That said, I found a large amount of the book and its contents fun to read. One of the classes that still stands out to me is the every kid. You aren’t the hero, you’re the every kid, the background child that no one remembers. The upside was that you could go places unnoticed that the other players couldn’t. The downside was that every time a random child was chosen for something bad to happen, it happens to you because the every kids are the ones that die before the story starts. I loved the concept of this. If the bad guys are specifically looking for your group they won’t notice you, but fire one shot at random into a crowd and you’re the target.

I’ve seen other games that have focused on playing children, like the Land of Yeld, but those are all designed to be played with children; kids are players at the table. Grimm was in no way for children. I think that’s the important difference. If I play a RPG with kids, I tend to throw out suggestions but I let them come up with the plans and ideas. I don’t try and solve the puzzles, I let them do it. It’s easier to play a child character in that way because while I may have solved the riddle or puzzle already, I like to let the kids at the table have the chance to succeed.