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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6139442" data-attributes="member: 1465">I have children, and I wish D&D would be educational.Now, I don't pretend that to mean, that D&D shouldn't have combat. It is possible to play a game of D&D without any combat, but that makes the game a little bit unusual to say the least. I assume that if you decide to play D&D with your children, you're fine with letting them play a game that includes combat.However, I think presentation is the key for a children-friendly product. That includes both description and illustration.Personally, I think D&D could be better in terms of description, but are still a long way to being children-friendly in terms of illustration.---In terms of description, if they wanted to be more children friendly, all that would be needed is to avoid the details. Avoid describing injuries in details, avoid descriptions of pain, disease and poison effects... normally this is not a big issues, but occasionally some authors have indulged in needless details of a spell's effects, that could have been left to the imagination.Still related to description, one thing that would really help, would be to put a simple rule (at least in the Basic game) that whenever a character/monster drops to 0 HP, the DM (or the player) decides exactly what happens: it doesn't have to die, maybe it's just knocked-out, maybe the player chooses to capture it, maybe it flees... the DM can even rule that the "end" is a comic relief effect (maybe the evil eye drops his pants and runs away in shame). In all cases, in a children's game the effect is the same: the PCs win the adventure (or the fight, at least)!The only criticism possible for such rule, is that the consequences of different "defeats" can be very different. A fleeing foe or a captured foe, is not necessarily defeated forever, not-killing is usually a non-efficient solution. This is however something I do not want to teach my children! It's a very military mindset that is acceptable in a real war, but it is not something you want your children to have in mind when they are still growing up, and may not be able to understand that it's very different in a normal civilized context! All in all, this is a very adult theme IMO, and anyway a child is not going to raise this sort of criticism.---In terms of illustration, first of all just avoid gory details in the Basic books. Monsters are rarely a problem, unless a particularly frightening image is used. But blood, wounds, severed body parts could be so easily avoided... and really there is little reason to have them illustrated for adults too.Then there is of course the sexualization of characters. This is where D&D is currently really coming short, and largely unsuitable for children. It doesn't matter that images aren't explicit, it's the subtle messages that are non-educational.I think the 3e corebooks were fine with this, there were few sexualized images after all. But later artwork, and most especially artwork in non-WotC books (WotC itself has done overall a much more moderate job than other publishers...), was really bad.---In conclusion, I think D&D as a game is totally suitable to children, even of very young age (eventually with some parental control).But it is the books and their presentation that bothers me a bit.I am not worried tho... I will play D&D with my children. I'll just make sure the books themselves are off-limits for them until later. I'll be their first DM anyway <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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