Hmm. Settlers is a wonderful game, no doubt, but it’s not a good game to play with kids, IMO. The rules too heavily favor strategic thinking and an ability to juggle multiple numbers in your head (what are my chances of getting two ore before next turn, or should I go ahead and get a development card? Do I need to discard some resources through unfavorable trading in order to avoid that 1/6 chance of the robber? If I give this player two wheat in a trade favorable to me, how does that affect his victory points?). A decent player will cream a kid every time, and that’ll turn the kid off of gaming. Playing with parents could work, if the parents enjoy playing games.
How old are the kids you’ve played this with? My experience with kids is that they prefer really open-ended gaming, almost diceless, until they’re at least 8 or so. But I never tried Toon until I was 12 or 13, and I’ve never played it with younger kids, so maybe it’s a goodun for that.
Diceless can work fine with extremely young children.
That’s what I was wondering - I’ve never played, so I couldn’t say as to whether it’d be good for kids - but I thought maybe as a “gateway” to get the parents playing…
We’ve played Toon with kids down to five years old. That’s the thing - we do play it pretty much “diceless”. You don’t NEED dice to play that one well - you just need a good imagination and a GM who’s willing to let you run with your imagination, and help the story along. If you WANT to play with dice, you can - we’ve done this game both ways, and for my money, it was way more fun without dice.
What exactly are RPGs anyway? They’re just codified versions of “lets pretend”.
So the way you start your kids into RPGs is pretending with them. They pretend to be a favorite character from a show they like, and you pretend to be the various other characters for them to interact with. Or you get some dolls or animals, and your kid has one of the figures and has that figure move and talk, and you control the other figures.
At my house we have a bunch of teeny little plastic figures…fairies, horses, unicorns, mermaids, dinosaurs, princesses, kittens, and so on. And the princess gets her jewels stolen by a bad dragon, or someone gets captured and has to be rescued, or a horse gets lost and has to be found, or the King of the Sea is unreasonable with his mermaid daughter, and so on. This is exactly the same sort of thing two kids would do with each other, except I’m concentrating on making the game fun for my daughters.
The only reason you need to add dice or character sheets is to resolve disputes. “I shot you with my gun so now you’re dead!” “Nuh-uh, you missed me!” “No I didn’t!” But at an early age there’s no need for this when they’re playing with an adult. You don’t need to roll dice to resolve disputes about whether the princess was able to sneak past the sleeping dragon and get her jewels back, you just decide whether the dragon wakes up or not. You only need to introduce game system rules when they get older and start arguing with you about it.
I can only speak for myself, but the major reason I play D&D today was because of Tolkien and Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type books. If you can foster a sense of the fantastic (whatever genre he gets into, super heroes, space, anything) while keeping a desire and feel of control of the world, he should be well on his way.
I also agree with people upthread that encouraging his imagination and playing pretend along with him will help out too. If nothing else, you’ll be the cool aunt/uncle that has lightsaber duels.