what I'm learning about TTRPGs from playing Magical Kitties Save the Day with kiddo and her camp friends

I long meant to but don’t think I ever got around to blogging about the fun afternoon I spent last year playing a session of the excellent all-ages TTRPG Magical Kitties Save the Day with kiddo and two friends she’s made at the family camp we’ve been attending since 2022. (I also cannot be bothered to see if I did actually blog about this because I am writing this on my phone from a network-poor area and only because I’m feeling stupidly committed to my running “blog once a week” goal.

We’re back at camp (the aforementioned network-poor area), and since it was a hit last time, we brought our Magical Kitties stuff again to play with friends. We’re two days into camp and two sessions in and having a fun time. Playing for a couple of hours this weekend has got me learning (or relearning) some lessons about TTRPGs broadly.

sandboxes are great

I really appreciate the Magical Kitties sandbox that is provided: Well, multiple sandboxes for multiple settings, which is even better. I also recently made a half-effort to get into the Land of Eem TTRPG based on the strength of its sandbox. With about six months of hindsight from running a session at Christmas, I’m not sure that I love the Land of Eem system as much as the sandbox, but I’d be willing to “port” the sandbox materials to a slimmer system (FATE?) because it’s just so dang useful to have a sandbox to work in.

Getting back to the purported inspiration for this post, I had a crazy week leading up to camp, and that meant absolutely no time to prep anything campaign-wise. As an insecure gamemaster, I’ve been surprised and proud of how easily I’ve been able to plant the seeds for possible adventure paths this week simply with some quick thinking and flipping through a sandbox document. I think I like sandbox structure for a TTRPG more than an adventure structure

stories are more important than rules

Speaking of no time for prep, it’s also been a year since I played Magical Kitties, and I realized partway through today’s session that I had not correctly remembered the basic mechanics of how a check works. I felt a bit embarassed, but it also impressed me how much fun we were having while playing “wrong.”

I think that also speaks to my growing preference for rules-light systems. I get the impression that a misunderstanding in the very crunchy Pathfinder is a bigger problem than in Magical Kitties, where story comes first and the dice are clearly subservient to it.

let players contribute

Letting my young players contribute to worldbuilding has been a lot of fun for us these past couple of days. I have intervened for a couple of suggestions, but we had a bonkers detail of a cat door built into the city government offices come up today, and it not only ended up fitting nicely into the sandbox in a way I didn’t expect but also just made the scene more fun.

Once again, this system does a good job of building that in. It’s not that this couldn’t work in D&D, but it’s mechanically present in Magical Kitties, and that’s good. I almost overruled the cat door suggestion when it came up, but because the player in question was proposing to use one of her “Kitty Treat” tokens, I couldn’t really say no. And I’m glad for that! It made things more fun, and giving players a voice can often do that.

• TTRPGs
• Magical Kitties Save the Day
• Reunion
• Land of Eem
• FATE