D&D 5E D&D, for kids?

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I started playing D&D at age 13. It's currently written 12+.

Making it too kid-friendly would turn away adults.

Because it's a game often played by people under 18 living with their parents, I think we can't avoid censorship. We don't want to make the parents uncomfortable. The deck is already stacked against the hobby when it comes to some parents.

 

[Blackbrrd]

Well, do remember - "teenagers" covers almost a decade of life, and that's a decade with a *lot* of changes. "Teenagers" includes 17 and 18 year olds. "Kids" covers 8, 10, and 12 year olds. Those groups are worlds apart in terms of what they can handle appropriately.

I, personally, have little problem with having the core rules be kid-appropriate. D&D violence is not all that far from cops-and-robbers that kids are playing from, what, age 5? ("Bang! You're dead!" "No I'm not!" - rules lawyers even then!). D&D sex, as far as rules are concerned, doesn't really exist. So, we're good so far.

That leaves the artwork as a consideration. I, myself, have no real desire for cheesecake art in my game books - if I want cheesecake fantasy art, I can get it so many other places in so much volume, my game books just don't need it! There are better venues, honestly. Given the double-win of making the game more kid-friendly and less sexist, getting rid of cheesecake art in the core rules seems a no-brainer to me.

If you with cheesecake art mean random big boobed girls in chain mail bikini - then yeah, they should get rid of them. Other than that, I think aiming at 11+ is a good idea.

The biggest thing they need to achieve that is by creating basic rules that don't span 4-500 pages. I liked how the red+blue+? book version of DnD worked, where they started with full width of options in the red book, but since they only covered a limited set of levels, it was really accessible. For those that wanted more you had the blue book, and for the ones that wanted a lot more, you had even more.

Doing it this way, adding depth instead of width makes for a much better progression and it makes a lot more sense to me than the current level 1-20 or 1-30 in the same book. Building a campaign for level 1-5 or 10-15 are two very different beasts and I think each rule book should focus on one part of the game.

 

[Blackbrrd]

A little addendum to the post above:
I really dislike the style of the drawings in 4e, didn't really like the style of 3e and really loved the style in my AD&D 2nd edition books, especially the page separator images done in full color, full page. They were awesome.

This one is just soooo cool



And this one, just look at that loot!

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I think starting around 12 to 13 is very common, but I think part of what makes D&D so appealing at that age is the maturity of it. Not in the R rated sense, but in the way it talks to you. It should feel like a game for grown ups that kids can still play.

Some have said PG 13 for content is about right, and I agree. Though there's certainly room for more mature content down the road.

 

[Umbran]

The biggest thing they need to achieve that is by creating basic rules that don't span 4-500 pages.

I dunno. Kids are *amazing* at soaking up information and patterns. It is, in large part, what they're built to do - learn. Kids playing Pokemon, or Magic" the Gathering have nigh-encyclopedic understanding of the rules in their infinite fiddly-bits.

The game, as it is usually presented, may not be so great for a 8-year old. But by age 12, it is okay. Especially because while the rules in total may span 500+ pages, it isn't like a player, when starting, has to absorb all that. The player has to get a basic grasp of only one book - the PHB, and not really in its entirety, before play begins. If the young are brought to the game in what I suspect is the most common manner - apprenticeship, where someone who already knows the game teaches them to play - I don't expect the number of pages of rules is really that much of a barrier.

Now, some guidelines to GMs who want to run games for kids would be stellar, but that's adding something, not taking it away.

 

[Quickleaf]

Someone raised the point that D&D population is aging, and since most of us are in our 30s and 40s that is the audience D&D should speak to most.

While that's a good observation, I think the conclusion is incorrect. Many D&Ders have families now and are teaching their children the game. Heck I began playing when I was 8, and I just DMed a playtest session for my friends and their 5-year old!

I also agree that D&D is / should be educational (socially, mathematically, imaginatively, and reading-wise) and the level of writing should improve kids' reading skills, not speak down to some imaginary lowest common denominator. After all, D&D is a thinking person's game and the sorts of kids attracted to it enjoy that aspect.

I'd like to see the new Red Box explicitly made for kids, with age-appropriate content (I.e. no heads being lopped off or chain mail bikini warriors), and guidelines for using it educationally. For example, the whole inter-party dynamic should be given more attention in the Red Box, including elementary group conflict resolution guidelines, how to establish a "caller", how to handle disruptive players, etc. Maybe "Inter-Party Dialogue" could even be a distinct pillar of the Red Box D&D, with each player given a turn to express their ideas.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Suddenly, I'm thinking that the Deck of Infinite Fiddly-bits needs to be a magic item. It could be in a RPG, it could be in a work of fiction. It could even be in a CCG.

But it needs to be.