Toddler gaming part 1—roleplaying games

Recently, my daughter played what I called her very first game. Since that time, she’s become something of a hardcore gamer, at least as much as a two-year-old is likely to be.

No, she’s not like this kid (featured in a story that smacks of bad parenting and a healthy serving of hot, steaming bullshit), but she does love to play games.

There are the obvious “pretend” games. This past weekend, for instance, she decided to pretend that we were going on vacation again. She packed bags (paper ones) full of her favorite toys, handed one to me and one to my brother-in-law, and led us in an endless march around the downstairs. She also enjoys making pretend food in her kitchen (which must be left where she puts it on the dinner table next to the real food or we are subjected to serious complaints) and pretending that things are not as they seem.

“This is a truck,” she declares, holding up a toy rabbit. And when corrected: “I want to pretend it’s a truck!”

This is all good practice for roleplaying games, of course, as is her budding collection of various dice. She found my dice collection very interesting long before it was safe to let her play with the little polyhedrons.

I remember one morning about a year ago when I came downstairs after a late-night game session with her. Back then, we took great pains to make sure that nothing that could fit in her mouth that wasn’t food got in her hands. Apparently though, in my exhaustion, I’d left 1d6 on the living room floor. I discovered the wayward cube in my daughter’s mouth, the lopsided grin on her face giving away the fact that she’d popped in something that wasn’t supposed to be there.

She has her own dice bag now (a satin bag that a small bottle of Godiva liquer came in, donated by my wife), and it’s full of several dice I don’t need. Even though I haven’t played D&D for years, I still have a notion that a set of dice requires, at a minimum, 1d4, 4d6, 1d8, 2d10, 1d12, and 1d20, so I made sure my daughter has all of those. They’re mostly dice I never pick up, but I did include several of the very first geek dice I had, clear crystal dice with numerals that I filled in with crayon sometime in the early ’80s.

While on vacation, we played quite a few games with her three friends who were staying in the house next door. There was, of course, some good pretend play, but they also had some purchased games that I’ll write about soon.

Add comment September 6th, 2007