My ears were burning...
I've pimped it before in my Samanth the Red threads but if you want a really simple ruleset for killing things and taking their stuff then get Descent by Fantasy Flight Games. It's an $80 boardgame but it's worth it for several reasons:
- It's a very fun boardgame!
- It comes with 80 miniatures that you can use in your regular games!
- It has a bunch of these cool, snap together dungeon pieces that already have 1 inch squares on them that can also be used in your regular games!
- It has a bazillion counters that you can also also use in your regular D&D games to mark everything from pits to fires to pits that are on fire!
- It has a super simple dice mechanic that resolves whether you hit, range, damage and special abilities in one roll.
The mechanics are simpler than D&D by far and you can transform it from a simple dungeon crawl game to a more in-depth story driven game by degrees as you go. My daughter (now nearly 6 years old) has been running one-shot games with this setup for over a year for my wife and I.
Things like equipment, treasure and advancement are easy to track as well. The only thing it lacked was a skill resolution system and that's now been incorporated with the Altar of Despair expansion. And it's easy enough to understand how to add that in even if you don't have the expansion.