Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share (16 page)

The basic idea of most RPGs is rolling a die to determine success or failure at a challenge based upon your character’s abilities, skills, and a luck factor. Success (and sometimes failure) brings experience, and characters will “level up” after accumulating experience—attain a discrete new level of understanding and skill where they may get new points to spend on increasing their skills and attributes.

For our game, the challenges won’t be imagined combat with subterranean monsters or solving a puzzle to disarm a trap; rather, these are the chores our kids must do regularly, the tests we want them to study for and perform well on, or the sports, music, or theater events we want them to practice for and perform well at. So, since the characters in our game (our kids) will actually be performing the challenges we give them, we won’t have them roll a die beforehand to determine success or failure. Instead, we’ll have them roll a die after the job is done, to determine how many experience points they earn from the job they did.

Below are some suggested challenges with base exp values and tags to help determine which skills and bonuses apply. This list is by no means exhaustive, and you should work up your own list based on your kids’ habits and talents. What is very important, though, is balancing the exp they earn. The game is set up based on the idea that kids will gain one level every three to four months. For younger kids and those just starting out, that means twelve to sixteen weeks between levels, which are 1,000 exp apart, so kids should be earning in a range of sixty to ninety exp per week. Like any good game master, you need to balance. Too many points coming in, and the kids will get bored with the game; too few and they’ll get frustrated. Use your best judgment, and communicate with them to make sure they’re getting something out of it.