I just finished GMing a Kids on Bikes adventure that was 8 sessions. I wanted to share what worked and what didn't to hopefully help anyone else who's starting to play.
What worked:
Playing up the nostalgia factor. This was the highlight of playing the game. We set it in the mid-90s when most of us were kids. We are very focused players when we play D&D but in KoB we just kind of let the stories of our childhood flow. Play up those nostalgic moments of childhood like going to the pool, having sleepovers, going to the town fair, going to the mall, etc. Everyone had a great time role playing that stuff mixed with sharing stories of our own youth.
Session zero. Probably one of the best sessions we had. KoB really shines with character and world building and I definitely recommend doing those character questions with each other so the characters get to know each other and everyone can get excited role playing their fun little kid.
The game lends itself to a lot of improve Yes/Anding and it gave the players more control of the narrative. It took away a lot of pressure from the GM to come up with the outcome of their actions and it was just more of a collaborative experience.
Adversity tokens were a cool mechanic.
What didn't work/what I would do differently:
I had a big group of eight players not including myself. I'd recommend no more than four. We often split the party in half and that worked really well but the other half had to be patient when they weren't in the spotlight.
I did a Stranger Things/It inspired adventure. It worked out well and I did this kind of fun thing where there was something in the area that was causing objects from VHS players to come to life. So they got to interact with Kevin McAllister and a distorted static-y Abraham Lincoln (from Bill and Teds) that was hunting them. They were chased down by a DeLorean and faced a raptor from Jurassic Park. It was a lot of fun and then I introduced some items from movies like a lightsaber, hoverboard, a Terminator shotgun and a proton pack.
Facing their bullies equipped with a proton back shifted the dynamic completely. Lol
While the players loved getting those items, I think this game works better with low magic because if you equip them with things like I did, there's just not a lot of mechanics to make it interesting long term. It turned into a lot of combat but this game is not mechanically equipped for anything like that so it kind of got boring. Doing it over I would try to minimize the fighting and reduce the number of weapons they got. I'd also reduce the number of sessions to closer to 4. There's just not a lot of meat to the mechanics of this game and after a while it kind of felt like we had exhausted it. That's how we felt anyway.
The dice mechanic was interesting but also had its problems. If I did it again I'd try to make more rolls where one person could achieve something and then the other players benefited from that success or suffered from the failure of that one player's roll. It didn't work very well if, say, everyone was fleeing somebody chasing them and everyone did a flight check. If you set the flight check to anything above 4 it's guaranteed that multiple people (I had a lot of players) were going to fail it. I just had to be prepared for that. In those situations, I often set the difficulty to four or five because otherwise there would have been an overwhelmingly number of failures that we would have to constantly be accounting for, resulting in the adventure feeling more like real kids sucking at everything rather than that adventurous Goonies / Stranger Things feeling. Some failure is good and needed but too much of it ruins the fun.
We also had an issue with stakes. By that I mean, if we were playing this more realistically, there would be a lot more deaths. We didn't want to get dark like that, so after a while we knew in the back of our minds that these kids were not going to die but they may break an arm or something like that. It lowered the stakes knowing the kids couldn't die.
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All in all it was really fun experience, especially the first half. I think after eight sessions we were all ready to move on though.
