Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenjib" data-source="post: 536321" data-attributes="member: 530">I play with an 8 year old daughter of a friend from time to time.  I also let her pick her race and class by looking at the pictures in the book.  She is playing a druid.  She has a little trouble remembering her spells, but she's more focused on the story anyway so it doesn't really matter.To start the game we sat down with a blank piece of paper and worked together on creating a map of the surroundings and a story for her character.  The great ideas she had really surprised me.  We've got a fey forest filled with lots of interesting locales -- abandoned castles, mines, an enchanted lake an encroaching darkness, and other good stuff.  She was found at the cave entrance of a dragon by her father, who is now dead, and whose golden castle (with secret tunnels and treasure) is now abandoned.She's the only player, so when we play I giver her great leeway in driving the story.  She often decides where the plot will go or what results will happen from a certain event.  We play in a very loose joint-storytelling kind of fashion.  I think this is very good for encouraging her imagination and she has more fun with that freedom as opposed to the times when I am more direct in propelling the story myself.Don't be afraid to be goofy.  I play a really goofy dwarf sidekick NPC and ham up the cheesy slapstick humor in a rather excessive fashion.  She loves it.Don't be afraid of cliches either.  A six year old is still full of wonder and excitement.  Cliches are new and vibrant.  There is a good reason why these things are cliches -- they work very well.  Take advantage of this before your kid grows up and becomes a bit more cynical.  Fairy tale stuff like princesses, unicorns, dragons, knights, fey goblins that lurk in the darkness, trolls who ask riddles and guard bridges, and the like are all fair game.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Grimm's Fairy Tales, Arabian Nights, and the like are goods sources of inspiration.EDIT 1:  Finally, I think personally that collaborative story telling and the use of imagination are better for children than combat and dungeon crawling.  If you agree, try to think in terms of how stories for children are written and how various conflicts are resolved in clever ways.  ymmv of course...EDIT 2:  Also, when combat does occur, I often have it revolve around a specific goal and death is not usually one of them.  For example, the goblins throw a net over the unicorn and are trying to escape on the back of evil wolves.  Her druid and companions are trying to rescue the unicorn.  Some goblins may die, but that is incidental to the goal, not the goal itself.</blockquote>

Verification