Not quite, but I wanted to write down a couple of notes. My 12-year-old wanted a D&D birthday party (interspersed by bouts of nerf combat). The D&D part was my job.

They wanted to play 5e, which I am much more positively disposed to than 3e or 4e. I ported forward the 1e module U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh.

ERROR 1: The first half of U1 is a lengthy investigation / vermin cleanup typically followed by a single challenging combat (human/oid opponents spread out in 3-4 groups within earshot of each other. It's possible for the players to completely miss the main combat. The 15-year-old is very happy to spend an hour casing a site trying to learn its' history, but the 5 12-year-olds mostly want COMBAT. NOW. I should have chosen a different module.

Tangent 1: I chose U1 because it plops down fine into a world I'm tired of having sitting on the shelf, because I thought it had a reputation as a good starting point, and because porting a module felt like less work than putting together something myself; by the time I started having second thoughts I was short on time. Also the construction in two halves fit the plan for the party: 2 hours D&D, lunch, nerf, second D&D - they could follow up the second half of the module in the afternoon, or branch off to any of 3 other hooks I was vaguely ready to throw down.

Tangent 2: I think there's some minor contradiction in the placement of the mansion: as described but not mapped, the mansion probably faces the sea, and the road probably passes between the mansion and the cliff tops, which means there isn't much room at all for walled grounds. Flipping around the mansion to face the land means doing some surgery on the basement/cavern maps. But moving the road *behind* the mansion, which is what I chose, means that the first door the players come to is one of the two back doors, both of which can lead to the end quite quickly.

[edited to add] ERROR 2: I Jacquayed the dungeon, adding a narrow dangerous path down the cliff face to give the characters a way to skip the house. One or two players found the top of the path, but I didn't actually say "it looks like there's a switchback path down the cliff here" or do enough to describe the old, corroded anchor for ropes at the top; they investigated only cursorily then refocused on the house where the other kids were preparing to force an entry.

ERROR 3: The players found the magic mouth immediately inside the back door; this was probably the high point of the session, since they rapidly figured out that it was a repeating recording triggered whenever anybody entered an area. The chaos among the kids was enough that when one of the players mentioned wanting to look at the ceiling and floor, I didn't clue them into the secret trap door, and I should have done so to steer them to the fun.

ERROR 3a: The tracking rules in the adventure are very ad-hoc, and strongly assume that the players come in the front door of the mansion; I'd made a note of how I wanted to switch them to 5e, but I didn't improvise quickly enough when the players were working around the back door - there certainly was enough interaction that I should have called for a skill check or two as they came in the back. Marking up the map with notes like where tracks were and where sounds would likely propagate inside was on my TODO list.

ERROR 4: Upstairs it was clear I was close to losing the attention of a third of the crew. The elf ranger found the collapsed stairs to the attic and started asking me about ways to rig a rope for climbing. I didn't explicitly remind him OR the gnome rogue that the rogue was carrying pitons and a hammer, OR that the gnome wizard had the jump spell prepared and was itching for ways to use it.

Last time I ran a campaign for kids, I always had one or two adults and an experienced older teen in the party. This time my one scheduled adult was home with a sick kid, and the 15-year-old was having fun more than helping steer the pre-teens.

Did the kids have fun? If so, then you don't suck.

The hardest judgement on our own capabilities always comes from ourselves. Relax, remember what you think could be improved, and do that. There will be another game soon enough.

Quote from: jeff37923;939078Did the kids have fun? If so, then you don't suck.

The hardest judgement on our own capabilities always comes from ourselves. Relax, remember what you think could be improved, and do that. There will be another game soon enough.

Amen. Self-analysis is good. Sharpening the saw and such. Use that as a goal to improve not over-analyze to the point of discouraging yourself.

I don't know man, your kid plays D&D, so you're clearly winning the war even if you flubbed a battle.

Plus you seem to have a keen awareness of how the session went, missteps notwithstanding. I think the real test is: does he ask you to run the game again?

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the answer.

You just keep doing it over and over and over until you don't suck anymore, and you accept that there will always be occasional bad game sessions and try to learn from them.

I'll join in on the opinion that you are probably being too hard on yourself. I think sometimes when we GM, especially for kids, we want people to thrilled from beginning to end. When that doesn't happen, we feel something is wrong. You at least got in one cool memorable scene with the magic mouth, which is better than some sessions.

GM's remorse is an easy trap. It's a tough juggling job, and it is normal after a session for me to think of some awesome thing I could have had happen that didn't occur to me at the time. RPGs are always the first draft of a story, and you don't get to revise them.

I've actually run this same module for kids. Thinking ahead to the future modules in the series and to heighten the Scooby Dooiness of it, I introduced the town councilor that is in league with the smugglers right away. I started with them heading out of town, and had the crabby councilor run into them telling them they better stay away from the haunted house, which of course heightened their desire to poke around the house. It also meant that later when he was revealed as a traitor, the players already didn't like him.

I had the stairs already broken, and while I made it clear there was an upstairs, I didn't encourage trying to get up there. It made the house portion less drawn out, letting them get to the smugglers faster.

I think it was a good thing your players didn't find a route right to the to smugglers. As you saw with the magic mouth scene, part of the fun of the adventure is figuring out the house isn't really haunted, as you saw with your players really enjoying the magic mouth. That raises the question of why someone is trying to make it look like it is, leading to them finding the smugglers.

Just finding a cave of smugglers to fight wouldn't have been bad. It's a perfectly serviceable session for players still high on the novelty of D&D. It just would have been a poor use of a classic module.

The good thing is that anything you are beating yourself up about are things that the PC didn't know about. Maybe you missed some cool opportunities, but you didn't make any big mistakes that the players were aware of. That fact that this isn't your first campaign for the kids, and one of them was ASKING you to do this says a lot.

I also suspect that if you were this conscious of every mistake you made, you probably got a lot right too. Most genuinely crappy GMs are utterly blind to their mistakes. Good GMs are always thinking about what they can do better next time.

Quote from: Naburimannu;939061Not quite, but I wanted to write down a couple of notes. My 12-year-old wanted a D&D birthday party (interspersed by bouts of nerf combat). The D&D part was my job.

They wanted to play 5e, which I am much more positively disposed to than 3e or 4e. I ported forward the 1e module U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh.

... Snip ...

Last time I ran a campaign for kids, I always had one or two adults and an experienced older teen in the party. This time my one scheduled adult was home with a sick kid, and the 15-year-old was having fun more than helping steer the pre-teens.

So, the 15 year old was having fun? What about the others? It sounds from the description that they enjoyed playing the game.

There is no Right Way to run/play any scenario. So what if they found the magic mouth immediately? They don't need to go through every room/cave/tunnel in the scenario. So what if they ignored the path down the cliff? They don't have to follow what is there slavishly.

Sometimes it is helpful to remind players who else is in the party. If the ranger wanted to climb down and someone had a jump spell, then I'd have mentioned it casually.

If you think that something needs a bit of combat, then introduce some combat. You have the power to do anything you want. You don't have to slavishly follow the scenario and neither do the players.

Quote from: jeff37923;939078Did the kids have fun? If so, then you don't suck.

The hardest judgement on our own capabilities always comes from ourselves. Relax, remember what you think could be improved, and do that. There will be another game soon enough.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;939248You just keep doing it over and over and over until you don't suck anymore, and you accept that there will always be occasional bad game sessions and try to learn from them.

What these two said:).

Quote from: Baulderstone;939249I'll join in on the opinion that you are probably being too hard on yourself. I think sometimes when we GM, especially for kids, we want people to thrilled from beginning to end. When that doesn't happen, we feel something is wrong.

I see this a lot on other forums, like Yog-Sothoth.com, for example. Keepers that beat themselves up because they didn't run a scenario perfectly; that they made mistakes, and think that they're a failure; that they feel like they let their players down. A lot of hand-wringing over what's just a fucking game.

Mistakes happen; you learn from the experience.

I will ecco the sentimate that you probably did better than you thought.  However in case we are wrong, none of us were actually there, I will say that it looks like you will do better next time.

  Also, many of your "mastakes" were not telling the players what there charcyer could do.  You get the chance to learn from you Mistakes the players do as well.  Its even more valible for them since they are kids.  The one who forgot his Jump spell was 12?