The Only Editors That Mattered

My first tabletop game was Colostle, a solo journaling RPG that was right up my alley. Beautiful cartoon art. A rich, welcoming world. Enough rules to guide you and enough room to wander off. It was a good way into the genre, but it felt less like a game than a creative writing exercise, and there were nights I didn’t want to write prose after prose. I just wanted to play.

So, Dungeons and Dragons. I’d been circling the hobby for a couple of months, reading more than playing, when my daughter overheard one of my podcasts and said she wanted to try it with her friends. That was the whole hurdle gone. I finally had a table. I put my uncertainty away and consumed everything I could find about being a game master.

The first thing I built for them was a Halloween dungeon based on a local theme park that had been closed for decades. It opened at lunch. Everything goes silent, then slow, and when they investigate the music room they get pulled through to the park to find out where all the sound went. Every location had a themed puzzle or a boss guarding an instrument, and each instrument they recovered pointed at the next place to go. Collect enough of them and the final fight opens up. I called it The Night the Music Went Missing.

I loved every part of making that. I did a pile of research on the real park, its history, what had actually been there. I built locations for them to walk through. I hid the clues where I wanted them found. And it worked: she and her friends loved it.

That was the high point, and it took me a while to notice what it actually proved. They loved a thing I made. They did not love D&D.

Riding the momentum, I found a couple of local game stores running beginner campaigns with players willing to teach newcomers, and we ran straight into the first hurdle. Character creation. These kids could not have cared less about stats. We came to play, not to roll dice over and over doing math to fill out a sheet that hands everyone the same level one abilities. Mountains of pages to flip through picking a race, a class, languages, proficiencies, armor types, on and on.

When we finally got to play, all they wanted was to be silly and make things up. They invented a magic bag they could pull anything out of, and acted out whatever came free. Never mind the dice. Never mind whether they had the item. They wanted to play the way they wanted to play, which was not by the rules, and the GM would not allow it. That stuck with me. A table full of kids, plainly uninterested in the pregen book he was running, and the answer was to hold the line on the book.

After their turn they had no interest in what the other players did. They just drew. Their characters. The enemies. The clothes they wanted their characters to wear.

I wasn’t ready to let it go, so I threw a D&D themed birthday party and ran another game with a bigger group. It was a blast. Drawing, acting, snacking, shouting, causing as much chaos in town as they could get away with. There was a fifteen minute intermission that was actually a battle. They had decided the dog was the enemy and chased him around the house to fight the bad guy.

That taught me more than the sessions did. What they wanted was to act, draw, snack, be ridiculous with their friends, and laugh until their faces fell off. None of which requires D&D.

Over the next year I brought other systems to the table to see what might stick. Teens in Space. Kids on Brooms. Nothing really landed. Starting was still hard, the classes still didn’t make sense to them, and every table still just wanted to draw.

But something kept happening underneath all of it. No matter what system I brought, they drifted toward the same setting: a traveling food truck, a diner, a bakery, something that went from place to place catering an event. The wilder the location and the occasion, the better. They kept building that game out of whatever rules I handed them. I just hadn’t noticed it was the same game every time.

Being the curious sort, I tried to build the thing that maximized what they liked and cut everything they didn’t. I had no shortage of ideas. Dice. Card flips. Oracle tables. Predefined missions and random ones. Fantasy settings, sci-fi settings, loose mechanics. On its own, none of it was bad. Together it was cumbersome, frequently in conflict with itself, and somehow carried more rules than any system we’d already given up on. I had mashed a pile of TTRPGs into one monster and asked it to be simple. Frustrated, and with no idea how to untangle it, I shelved the whole thing.

It sat there for a few months, and when I came back to it I wasn’t only thinking about the game. I’d been circling a question about gen AI I couldn’t answer cleanly. As a developer I’d been more creative in the past year than in the decade before it, and some of what I was learning there looked like it might apply well outside of code. So the question got sharper. Was it possible to build something with it and still be the artist? Does using it negate the creativity, or just move it somewhere else?

The only honest way to find out was to stop asking in the abstract and build something, with rules for myself going in about what I would and would not hand over. So I pulled the idea off the shelf with that question sitting under it. Traveling crew, new land each session, cook something, deal with whatever chaos turns up. I had a draft together fast, faster than months of solo ideation had ever moved, and got it back to the table.

We played it. Then we played it again, and again, across a handful of sessions. Some of it worked from the first sitting, the drawing especially. Some of it didn’t. A mechanic I thought was clever on paper would sit there untouched all night, and the next draft would cut it. My daughter and her friends were the only editors that mattered, and they were blunt the way kids are blunt: they never critiqued the parts that bored them, they just stopped doing them.

Somewhere in there it stopped being a thing I was testing and became a thing they were playing. Nobody was waiting on the rules. Nobody asked what came next in the book. They were drawing their meals and their monsters and arguing about who was cooking what, and the game had finally gotten out of the way enough to let that happen.

It worked. They love it. We’ve played several sessions now, and the only thing left undone is the part that was never about mechanics: drawing the zine and laying it out so it’s finished. Nobody outside this table is waiting on that. I’m finishing it because there’s still something left to make, and because I started this to build a game with my daughter, not to answer to anyone watching.

The other question is still open, but I know more about its shape than I did. The work moved. It used to be researching a dead theme park for hours and hiding instruments where I wanted them found. This time it was deciding what to cut, reading a table, noticing which mechanic went untouched. Both of those are mine. What I can’t tell you yet is whether the second one will ever feel like the first one did, or whether I only think that because the park is the part I did alone.