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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6692377" data-attributes="member: 4937">[MENTION=49099]jedijon[/MENTION]: Just based on my experiences with RPing with very young children, what you want in a system is:1) Success happens most of the time: Little kids have a very hard time handling failure in a game.  In particular, there needs really to be no way to lose.  2) Still, failure can almost always happen: Little kids are used to life having lots of bumps and bruises and used to their feelings being bigger than they are.  They are used to failing and for every task to be challenging.   It won't strike them as odd that there is a chance of spilling the milk when pouring a glass.  You want failure described in a way that they can relate to, act on, and which is non-threatening to them.   Even then, you'll probably have to coach them on handling failures.3) The focus should be on problem solving, not conflict:  I don't know how universal this is, but my kids found conflict to be completely threatening and generally responded to it by very logically evading it.  They tended to respond to conflict by not doing things that could get them in trouble (much less danger), by running away, and by seeking a grown up.  It was very hard to get them interested in a story of conflict, and in particular stories of large and broad 'epic' conflict tended to create 'not my problem' fields around them.  If it was clearly a big problem, it was clearly (to them) something adults ought to handle.   It didn't even matter that the kid characters they were playing had superpowers, because they did.  To them, it still didn't make sense for a kid to intervene in epic problems.  I found I had a hard time arguing against that logic, and in particular I strongly sensed that problems that the grown up couldn't solve would terrify a 4 or 5 year old and it would not logically make sense to them that they could solve problems a grown up couldn't (despite this being a common trope of the fiction that they read).  On the other hand, a story about resolving the challenges of being a kid, and handling a kid's problems very much interested them.</blockquote>

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