# What is the best pen and paper RPG to introduce kids to? **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [June 3, 2016, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-best-pen-and-paper-rpg-to-introduce-kids-to/756394 "2016-06-03T15:34:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2016, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-best-pen-and-paper-rpg-to-introduce-kids-to/756394/61 "2016-06-15T04:00:18Z")
The thing is, alignments are effectively useless. D&D is fundamentally a game about playing heroes of some form. Alignments work decently for a bestiary entry or a vague description of the viewpoints of a large organization (“the guild of assassins tends to be evil” or whatever), but it make increasingly less sense for player characters or NPCs you want to have any depth. It’s not that alignment is bad, and its vagueness works in its favor in many ways since there are a lot of archetypes in Lawful Good alone. It’s just that I feel like it’s more of a “first draft” tool, a vague way to come up with a vague personality **before** you fill in the details, and the fact that it started getting roped into things like class requirements makes it a bit problematic. ---
**Author:** ![Airk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9de053/32.png) [@Airk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Airk)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2016, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-best-pen-and-paper-rpg-to-introduce-kids-to/756394/62 "2016-06-15T15:02:46Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > I agree, my objection to the 4e version of alignment isn’t that it’s harder to play, it’s that it feels neutered. > > It’s an interesting observation that lawfulness fundamentally different from goodness. This is a useful observation that many people learned from d&d and took to their real lives. And it’s a differentiation that by and large still exists in the 4e alignment system if you want it to be there. I think the differentiation that actually gets lost is the one between Neutrality and Chaos. You DO lose Lawful Neutral, but that’s not a neutering all by itself. > [@](#): > > But really, i think that Airk and i just have a different idea of how to play RPGs in general. I’m not really sure what you are basing this conclusion on right now, since neither of us have really talked about how we play RPGs. It’s an especially problematic idea when you consider the fact that I play a LOT of RPGs and I play them differently. The way I play say, Blades in the Dark is very different from the way I play D&D, which is very different from the way I play Mouse Guard. Maybe we play D&D differently. But I don’t know that there is a lot of evidence to base that conclusion on yet. ---
**Author:** ![puzzlegal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/puzzlegal/32/3827_2.png) [@puzzlegal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/puzzlegal)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2016, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-best-pen-and-paper-rpg-to-introduce-kids-to/756394/63 "2016-06-16T03:45:24Z")
Just that you play lots and lots of RPGs suggests you approach them differently than I, an extremely casual player, does. ---
**Author:** ![Airk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9de053/32.png) [@Airk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Airk)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2016, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-best-pen-and-paper-rpg-to-introduce-kids-to/756394/65 "2016-06-16T21:21:32Z")
> [@puzzlegal](#): > > Just that you play lots and lots of RPGs suggests you approach them differently than I, an extremely casual player, does. Can’t argue with that, I guess, though it doesn’t take us to a very interesting place, alas. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2016, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-best-pen-and-paper-rpg-to-introduce-kids-to/756394/66 "2016-06-17T12:48:46Z")
Yesterday, I tried my 4-year-old out on the Ghostbusters RPG from West End. He seemed to get the idea pretty well. I tell him what he sees, he tells me what he wants to do, and if it’s difficult, I assign the difficulty and help him count up the pips on the die rolls. If you’re familiar with the game, you know that you want to interpret the outcome of any task as though you’re writing a cartoon. He played Ray, and I ran Egon as an NPC. We did the scenario with the cab posessed by the Dog God, and Ray ended up attempting to flee from the terrible howl of the Dog God. Egon matched his roll when trying to stop him, so he ended up hanging on while Ray continued to run dragging Egon behind him. The policewoman tried to body check Ray, and also rolled the same as Ray rolled to resist, so ended up clinging to the front of Ray as he ran. Ray managed to come to his senses when the posessed car had caught Egon in its teeth. Well, hood. He decided to blast the car’s motor with the proton pack, and I set a high difficulty to do so without hurting Egon, and by god he did it. Then the Dog God manifest and it did kind of bog down a bit with the boy failing to roll well enough to hit the beast, but continuing to roll well enough to dodge it. Eventually I fudged the ultimate victory to move the story to its inevitable conclusion. And he woke me up this morning wanting to play again. ---
**Author:** ![Airk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9de053/32.png) [@Airk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Airk)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2016, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-best-pen-and-paper-rpg-to-introduce-kids-to/756394/67 "2016-06-17T13:13:06Z")
Haha, awesome! I can totally see that system being a good choice, though I don’t have any firsthand experience with it. I did play the d6 Star Wars game back in the day, which I’ve heard described as sortof a clunkier version of the same rules, so I can see how the Ghostbusters game would be a winner. I think most kids will easily grasp the idea of the “conversation” part of the game, so it’s important to try to select a system that doesn’t tell them “no, you can’t do that” too much, or make things unnecessarily difficult. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2016, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-best-pen-and-paper-rpg-to-introduce-kids-to/756394/68 "2016-06-17T13:32:19Z")
It’s a dilemma, when to make things difficult or impossible. Because the imagination of a 4-year-old is pretty broad. But you want to keep it somewhat grounded. One of the solutions the boy proposed was to create a portal and suck the god through it. Presumably something like that happened in the cartoon. Well, the way the game works, any one with Brains can try to pull off a feat of super science, and that was definitely within Ray’s skill set. I gave him a very hard difficulty of 20, which Ray could actually pull off with his 6d6 in Brains. But I said he’d have to canibalize the proton pack to try and set it up, and the boy relishes his proton pack, so he decided against it. ---
**Author:** ![Airk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9de053/32.png) [@Airk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Airk)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2016, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-best-pen-and-paper-rpg-to-introduce-kids-to/756394/69 "2016-06-17T14:21:08Z")
Well, the keywords in my earlier statement were “too much” and “unnecessarily” - if everything is trivial, that’s dull, but a system with too many inherent restrictions that you need to then disregard or discard or change or apologize for isn’t doing the job right. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2016, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-best-pen-and-paper-rpg-to-introduce-kids-to/756394/70 "2016-06-17T15:11:41Z")
There is the additional challenge posed by the West End style of game (Star Wars being the exception) that the GM is constantly on the hook to make something zany happen. You really have to be on your toes. In Ghostbusters, you are almost entirely forbidden to let a character die. But you are unrestrained in how ridiculous you can make their survival. They imagined much of the game being like the “Are you Gods?” scene, with the Ghostbusters being nearly blown off the roof of the building by cosmic lightning, but always somehow managing to cling on. The GM must limit the imagination to scenarios in which failure only leads to more gags. Repeated failure should lead to different gags each time. So, it’s quite a feat not to be strict about what the characters can possibly do in the game. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-best-pen-and-paper-rpg-to-introduce-kids-to/756394.md?page=3)