Fantasy RPGs for Kids

[pukunui]

Good to know. Thank you.

 

[Weezknight]

Found this thread because it mentioned Hero Kids. I, too, just took advantage of drive-thru's sale on "kid" related RPGs and picked up the full Hero Kids line.

My daughter (8) already read the rules, and she and my son (4) can't wait to play. It looks like a really good introduction to role-playing, without bogging them down with a whole bunch of extra stuff.

 

[Fuseboy]

Roleplaying, as a hobby game genre, is quite possibly going to be a challenge to any child that young. There is strong evidence that children’s cognitive ability to perceive ideas from another person’s point of view is still very much in development. So it’s not just an issue of finding a simple or rules-lite game system.

In my experience, it's not an issue. Kids have zero problem pretending to be someone else, I've been role-playing with my kids since they were 5, and I was GMing at age 9. (Kids might struggle with a negotiation situation that requires them to simultaneously juggle their own needs and those of someone else, but taking on roles seems to come naturally to them.)


Pukunui, I've had good success with World of Dungeons. I ran a drop-in West Marches-style game for 9-10 year-old kids last year with it, and it went very well.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3269630/dwdotcom/world_of_dungeons_1979_bw.pdf

Nobody's writing content for it, because the system itself is essentially a joke - it's an attempt to make the 1979 version of Dungeon World, if such a game had existed. On the other hand, since it's so freeform on the GM's side, it's dead easy to reuse content for B/X D&D or whatever other system.

By freeform, I mean that there are no difficulty ratings or other target numbers, everything's essentially a stat check. (Difficulty is represented by tweaking the success and failure results.)