Does anybody have experience with any RPGs for little kids?
a quick google search turns up results, but i was wondering if anyone here has personal recommendations...
what age?
Well, my kiddos are still preschool...
when you do a google for 'children RPG' the first site that comes up (http://www.tlucretius.net/RPGs/kids.html) has a good sized list of candidates, and some of them mention very simple systems that use tokens or a few six sided dice.
i was just thinking about it, because my kiddos found my dice sack yesterday and were enjoying separating them out and playing with them. then i was thinking about how simple it could be boiled down to, and figured there's got to be something out there suitable for really young kids.
Do you have any experiences with young children LARPS, Cram?
let's see...
this guy wrote about his experiences playing D&D with his seven year old. http://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-397944.html -- with a bit of coaching, sounds like the kids got it pretty quickly.
There are a ton of interesting board games which are suited to kids... but none come to mind at the moment.
Kids love LARP - most of their playtime is basically unstructured LARPing anyway. If I were running a LARP for little kids, I'd probably make it something like a scavenger hunt. Give them a quest to find a bunch of objects hidden in the back yard or something. Maybe you're a wizard looking for reagents to make a spell, and the kids are your apprentices. So you send them all over the yard looking for little rubber props, and when they find a certain number of them, you act out the next little scene in the story. Maybe they have to "slay monsters" by throwing spells (beanbags) at a picture of a dragon or something. Essentially you're just coming up with a little bit of story justification for a fun activity.
If I remember my past correctly, when I was a little kid almost every game was an RPG, because I identified with the game. Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Uncle Wiggly... I took that shit personally.
FATAL
oh, yeah. it totally comes natural to little guys.
my boys are into (among other things) the lone ranger at the moment (over 50 years, and still entertaining young boys!) and we were going around the house rounding up sheep rustlers, and bandits, etc. with their nerf guns and bow and arrow set...
they method act, apparently, and will stay in character the whole day even when eating lunch and going to the store.
a setup with a story line that requires achieving some goal before moving on would really add to it, though.
i was thinking some simple table top rpg would be fun to spice up bedtime stories...
I'd check out Monsters and other Childish Things.
Overview: http://www.arcdream.com/pdf/monsters_sell_sheet.pdf
Review: http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13007.phtml
http://www.arcdream.com/zencart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=6&products_id=15
Quote from: LMNO, PhD (deceased) on July 13, 2011, 06:08:53 PM
If I remember my past correctly, when I was a little kid almost every game was an RPG, because I identified with the game. Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Uncle Wiggly... I took that shit personally.
Fuck yeah. After I started playing Pokemon and found out what an RPG was, I started getting disappointed whenever I found out that a board game I hadn't tried before didn't have stats for player characters.
EDIT: I was like 7 at the time. Just so we're clear.
Quote from: Iptuous on July 13, 2011, 06:18:42 PM
oh, yeah. it totally comes natural to little guys.
my boys are into (among other things) the lone ranger at the moment (over 50 years, and still entertaining young boys!) and we were going around the house rounding up sheep rustlers, and bandits, etc. with their nerf guns and bow and arrow set...
they method act, apparently, and will stay in character the whole day even when eating lunch and going to the store.
a setup with a story line that requires achieving some goal before moving on would really add to it, though.
i was thinking some simple table top rpg would be fun to spice up bedtime stories...
I've got a son and a daughter and they were fascinated with
Ratchet and Clank at that age. You need to play it with them, as there's a fair amount of cartoon violence involved. Provide some sort of a moral compass kind of thing. Dunno if that bothers you overly. I never found it turned mine into sociopaths. There's a lot more to raising a violent kid than letting them have some fun playing a video game occasionally. Or giving them a cool set of six shooters.
They sound like pretty sharp witted kids, and the one liners in Ratchet and Clank are priceless for developing a sense of irony in a kid early and entrenching it there. Things like
"Anyone failing to adhere to this regulation will report to Level 3, where they will be annihilated and fined". I can say that to my kids now (12 and 14) when they haven't done something I've asked... and they
still laugh.
That old chestnut Trouble was their favourite board game for years. We also had a Snakes and Ladders mat that went on the floor with large scale dice...they got to climb the ladders and ride the snakes down and still got the benefits from counting all the little dots, recognising the numerals and manipulating the board pieces. You can buy those at specialist toy shops.
They cheated shockingly at both board games of course. The ability to follow rules is not the strong point of most preschoolers. Well, not the good ones anyway. But learning to cheat effectively and learning how to catch another cheat out are important life skills too. So it's all good.
Oh I just thought too...there is one on the Net called Runescape and as long as you supervised them well they'd be fine with it. They get to go on quests and if they like team up with other players to do naughty things like rob monks of money (churches have lots of money so it's true to life) and steal the wine from monasteries.
I've heard runescape downloads lots of awful crap onto your computer.
I never had any real problems with it. I run a scan every morning and that always cleaned up anything slightly untoward and I didn't have any real issues with it. They used it for years. You just gotta supervise them and disable the mike so they can't use the talk options if you don't want them chatting with strangers on teh Webz.Like I said when they're that young you need to supervise them on it all the time. I had my pc in the kitchen..still do and they're 12 and 14.
For preschoolers I have no idea what to recommend.
(For elementary schoolers though, I would recommend Toon: The Cartoon Roleplaying Game by SJ Games)
Quote from: Iptuous on July 13, 2011, 05:46:28 PM
Well, my kiddos are still preschool...
when you do a google for 'children RPG' the first site that comes up (http://www.tlucretius.net/RPGs/kids.html) has a good sized list of candidates, and some of them mention very simple systems that use tokens or a few six sided dice.
i was just thinking about it, because my kiddos found my dice sack yesterday and were enjoying separating them out and playing with them. then i was thinking about how simple it could be boiled down to, and figured there's got to be something out there suitable for really young kids.
Do you have any experiences with young children LARPS, Cram?
LARPing is what young children tend to do all the time, they call it "playing" we just need the complex rules as adults to let us feel comfortable letting go and playing freely.
heh...
i remember one of the first rpgs i played had an intro chapter that described what the genre was about. i think it may have been Buck Rogers in the XXV century. it described how we would, as children, play roles such as cowboys and indians. at some point, one kid would say, 'i got you!', to which the other would reply, 'no. your the bad guy, and you have horrible aim.' and argument might ensue, and the play stops unless agreement is achieved about when one player 'gets' the other one. RPGs, then, can be seen simply as a refinement of this.
so, yes. obviously, as mentioned several times in this thread, children naturally, 'play roles'.
this thread, then, is about how to introduce children, in an age appropriate but expanding way, to adding structure to their imaginative collaborations so that they can take it further if they would enjoy to.
also, i envision you with a monocle when you explain the reasoning why mature adults such as ourselves use rule sets when we play make believe. :lol:
I'm a little biased, but I'd recommend Laser Ponies http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=65022 (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=65022)
(http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/images/2039/65022.jpg)
Note: The actual QAGS Rulebook is written for adults (we say "fuck" a lot), but the Laser Ponies PDF includes the Qik Start rules, which are sanitized (and a bit simplified) for your protection. We're hoping to do a PG-rated QAGS For Kids rules set one of these days.
D&D for kids!
(http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lrl7j21ck01r1g5m2o1_500.png)
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/04/wizards-of-the-coast-publishes-dd-for-kids/
here's the author's website, with lots of goodies: http://jamesstowe.blogspot.com/
Looks very nice! What ages is this for?
I think it's meant for age six and up
Sweet!
and it's free... :D