Organizing family gaming groups
ShoshieB1 and I would really like to game more with some peers, and so we've been thinking about how we might organize a group around families and RPGs. Being married with a child requires a different gaming lifestyle than when you're single, and we're curious if any of you game with other families of gamers.
These are some of the ideas that we've been kicking around.
We want to include the kids so that they have RPGs to play as well. We're not sure we have enough gamer families to really do a second table for the kids though.
We want to rotate through GMs, game systems, and game settings every two or three months. This gives everyone the opportunity to play as well as run new ideas.
We want to do no more than twice a month. Would once a month be too seldom? Obviously families have a lot of their own things going on, especially during the summer, so maybe once a month from May to August. We could then do twice a month from September to April.
So people don't have to worry about babysitters, we want to do Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon.
Anyone have any experience doing something like this?
Some experience
We do something like this, but really haven't developed it as fully as I would like. Our gaming group has 4 families with children. We've been playing in a homebrew RPG for nearly 3 years. Some of the children have been playing with us and others have played in the past and then dropped out. The children of the 4 families (2 parents each family) are 18 years, 14 years, 13 years, 12 years, 10 years, 8 years, 4 years, 13 months and 8 months.
Unfortunately, the kids that don't play sort of just run wild around the house. The 18 year old plays regularly. The 14 and 12 year olds also play fairly regularly, but are often bored. The remaining children make messes around the house with toys and DVDs and video games. There has been talk about the 18 year old running games for the younger children, but it hasn't gotten any further than that.
We have also started trying to get together with friends for board game nights. This goes a little better with incorporating the kids. Lately, we've been playing Ticket to Ride. We have a stack of other games to play, but Tom and I haven't finished our Ticket to Ride addiction at the moment.
We've also done some LAN parties and played Neverwinter nights.
I would really like to play Faery's Tale with a group, but haven't gotten to that either.
It sounds like such a thing
It sounds like such a thing is doable. We would probably have mostly younger children with all or almost all of them younger than 10 years old. I think we'll end up with a mix of RPG for the parents and board games for the kids. That way, too, parents can drop in and out to play board games if they want as well.