Also, you don’t have to follow the rules. I mean, you need to be consistent, but you can change the rules to suit you and your kids. I played D&D 3.5 with my kids. But the rules were way too involved, so we started with a very stripped-down set of rules. (Need a physical component for your spell? Unless it’s an especially rare or costly item, you have it. Grappling? What’s that?) We started without even using an explicit grid or explicit rules about how far you could move. “You see goblins, they are attacking you. What do you do?” We added more rules as we went, but never did take the full package.
They were different enough that everyone paniced that their old 3.0 stuff was obsolete, no longer supported, and incompatible, so it might not be as irrelevant as you think.
Monster of the Week is a great choice! Hopefully it works out for you. It’s also really easy to adjust in terms of difficulty/level of ‘grittiness’ so it should be easy to find the audience’s sweet spot.
Pathfinder has really high availability, but I’d really strongly advise limiting yourself to the “core book” at the start. Acquiring the rest of the stuff will just make it overwhelming for everyone. You can grow into it later on if you feel the game needs more mechanical bits and bobs.
This is absolutely true, but it’s one of those weird places where you have to think about why you are doing it. If you are an experienced GM with one system, then yeah, you might as well run a stripped down version of it for your kids. But if you don’t have that level of experience/investment, then you are probably better off just picking a game that hews closer to the level of mechanical heft you’re going to actually want, rather than taking a complicated game and spending a bunch of time deciding what you don’t want to use. Otherwise, the answer to everything would be just be “Play GURPS, it has rules for EVEEEERYTHING.” But sometimes, having rules for everything that you then have to pick through to decide what you actually want isn’t a plus.
I’m curious - do you feel your D&D game was improved when you started adding in all those various rules?
None of the games I played with engaged in such a panic. A few of the folks on ENWorld, where I was moderating, engaged in such a panic. Of the few that did, some of them were INCREDIBLY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY PANICKY, in the same way that some folks get INCREDIBLY LOUD AND ANGRY when Steam puts games on sale that they just bought. I wouldn’t give too much weight to those voices :).
Count me as one of the people that Valve is spying on. Every single time I buy a game at full price, it is part of the next midweek madness or weekend sale! (Definitely no confirmation bias here, I’m sure…)
In this particular case, I was actually thinking of people who did things like make supplements/content for D&D, because that was a large part of the D20 license.
My experience living through the 3E/d20 era of RPGs:
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d20 became the monster that ate everything else for a few years. Most game publishers felt compelled to release d20 versions of their games, because that’s what the market seemed to be demanding, and non-d20 game systems got pushed to the side for a number of years. With the demise of WotC’s direct support of d20 and that OGL (in parallel with their release of 4E D&D), other systems finally got their chance again.
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The market was absolutely glutted with third-party D&D supplemental material in the d20 heyday (say, 2001-2005), particularly adventures and splatbooks. Sadly, most of them were mediocre-to-bad, poorly written and clearly not playtested. The biggest part of that glut did seem to be during 3.0; maybe the switch to 3.5 drove those publishers out of the game.
I also remember a few more ambitious 3.0 product lines, like Fantasy Flight Games’ Dragonstar (“D&D in Space”), that wound up dying when WotC went to 3.5, as the publishers didn’t want to invest in updating their “crunch” to 3.5, and players didn’t want to buy “outdated” material.
Yeah; I don’t resent the relative “implosion” of D20 at all, and it was probably good for the hobby as a whole, though I think it probably also did some damage.
This is pretty far afield though.
Yes, it meant I didn’t have to make as much up. But I also think we were right to start simply, otherwise we would have spent the first few sessions just learning rules.
I do agree with the people who say the important thing is to have good plot and narrative. The game really bogged down when I ran out of plot (I wrote it as we went along, and at some point, I lost the main thread.)
I wasn’t familiar with any of those alternatives, and researching them would have been at least as much of a chore as trimming the rules I was vaguely familiar with. I basically ran AD&D from memory, supplemented with the charts and stats from D&D 3.5
I’ve had a lot of fun playing Mice & Mystics with my seven year old boys as a way to get them introduced into roleplaying. I’d highly recommend it. It does get slightly monotonous after the tenth game or so, though – we have some of the expansion sets sitting unopened and they’ll probably stay that way for a while. But that might just mean that they’re ready to move on to a more ‘real’ roleplaying system.
If you decide to try Pathfinder, there’s a product called the “Pathfinder Beginners’ Box” (Home of the Pathfinder and Starfinder RPGs. The Golem’s Got It! | Paizo) that is worth getting. It’s forty bucks, so a bit more expensive than just getting a book. (The core Pathfinder book for the ‘real game’ is $35). But for that money you get a mini-“Player’s Handbook”, a mini-“DM’s Guide” that includes a ready to run series of adventures, a bunch of cardboard “figures” with plastic bases and a map to move them around on, some character sheets and – most importantly – a full set of dice. If you’re trying to stack the enthusiasm deck by having lots of neat bits to play around with, it’s a good bet. After you play through the materials in the box, you can transition to the full Pathfinder game pretty easily, and as you’ve noted there are tons of materials for that game around.
Good luck – I hope you and your kids have tons of fun.
I don’t understand; Why would you have needed to make things up in any case? (Aside from like, the stuff that you NEED to make up for an RPG.)
I see people say this a lot, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I think it’s because a lot of people who are basically only familiar with (A)D&D have a very enlarged sense of how much “work” is involved in learning a new game, because D&D is a FLUPTON of work to learn, and therefore all games must be at least in the same neighborhood. That’s not really true though.
I am playing D&D 5e with a 6 year old.
I did a 1-5 level adventure and he was able to understand the mechanics but he was too young to fully participate in the mutual storytelling aspect of the adventure. I used a very wise healer NPC to help guide him and remind him to loot bodies and stuff like that. It sort of turned into a “choose your own adventure” campaign, still fun but there are a bunch of fantasy adventure conventional wisdoms that you are not equipped with until you have a few fantasy movies/novels/adventures under your belt.
Still, he loves rolling the dice and is improving his reading skills as he sneaks peeks at the monster manual to find out the best way to deal with different monsters.
What you continue to ignore is just how much people retain in memory, even after periods of decades without play. It’s a lot like learning to ride a bike - once you establish the habitual patterns of behavior, they are there and ready to access even after very long times. What you forget are the little pieces, not the general concept.
It’s been 20 years since I ran anything using the Palladium system, but if you handed me a Palladium book with the rules chapters cut out, I’d be up and running anyway. Someone who’s checking me against the real rule book would find a flupton of mistakes and omissions, but a couple of kids on their first RPG experience wouldn’t be doing that, would they? They’d say “Wow! That was awesome!”
Indie gamers are fun to hang out with now and then, but you have to learn that 90% of the market doesn’t care. They’re having lots of fun with what they know and would not be having more fun with something “better”.
I remember jack about about how BECMI worked. Ditto AD&D. I remember there being lots of tables and there were a whole lot of seemingly unrelated subsystems. (1 in 6 for finding a secret door? Or was that a “concealed” door?) If you can remember what a first level fighter needed to hit AC 7 in AD&D, more power to you, but those little pieces you forget are kindof important if you actually want to use dice and have them mean more than “high is good, low is bad, and if you roll a ten on a d20 I’ll make something up arbitrarily” I mean, let’s say you decide to cast a sleep spell. What’s a first level rogue’s save vs spell? These aren’t weird edge case “gotcha” questions. These are things that happen in these games all the time.
Are these versions of D&D too old and inconsistent? Let’s try something newer. What does two dots in Presence do? (old OR new World of Darkness, dealer’s choice) One dot in Animalism? How many dots in Life do you need to heal wounds on a person? How many successes do you need?
Details are important.
It would be way simpler for me, personally, as someone who has played every version of D&D from AD&D to 5E, to pick up a completely new modern game than it would be for me to try to run a game of D&D 4 or less without heavy referencing. D&D 3+ is a bit easier, being fresher in the mind and more internally consistent, but it also has a lot more fiddly bits. How many spells does a first level specialist wizard with an Int of 17 get? Does it matter?
The one Palladium game I ever played (TMNT, for what it’s worth), I couldn’t even create a character without the rulebook since there were so many strange widgets and options and different prices. I guess that would all need to be skipped too?
My real question here is: If you’re basically just making stuff up and calling it D&D (or whatever) because all the actual mappings between stats and results have been forgotten, obfuscated, or need to be looked up…why bother with all that stuff? At some point, you have basically stripped out the entire game. Sure, you’ve got your Str/Dex/Con/Int/Wis/Cha, but they don’t actually mean anything. It’s like playing chess with only pawns. Sure, you can do it. But maybe you should just play checkers instead?
I guess if you’re literally just running the game from memory, there’s an advantage - it’s free. But as soon as you start saying “Maybe I should drop $50 on some books” the value proposition changes.
The funny thing is that I’ve found that most people who argue this don’t actually know because they’ve never tried. They’ve been eating potatoes all their lives and don’t even know what curry tastes like. I used to BE that person. I am speaking from experience.
But the really funny thing is that I find most gamers are fine to hang out with, they’re just annoying to talk to on the internet. You should probably avoid stereotyping though.
First, my son already had a lot of D&D books, as did one of the adult players who joined the campaign. So D&D was free.
Second, your post is a great example of why it was easier for me to run a D&D campaign. Dots? What the hell are dots?
Yes, of course I used the tables to map dice rolls to outcomes. It’s really quite easy once you have character sheets (and I wrote up an index card with key stats for all the monsters and NPCs.) There are only a handful of tables you use regularly.
So what did I make up? Initiative. When I started the game, I just decided whether the players or the monsters went first in combat, and whichever player spoke first moved first. Later, when we had the basic mechanics down, I added initiative and I think the game was a little more balanced (and I didn’t have to make as much up) due to that. Similar for speed & distance details, and whether a shot was blocked or otherwise obscured. Stuff like that. It really did add a lot when we put figurines on a map and moved them around.
What did I never use? The technical limits on how much weight each character could carry, and how much that impeded them. They gave all the heavy stuff to the fighter and the paladin, recognizing that it made sense to do so. The wizard wore light armor anyway because she wasn’t allowed to cast if he wore heavy armor. Besides, she tended to hide under her riding dog during combat. On the rare occasion when they wanted to haul something really heavy and speed matters, I mentioned that they would be impeded by the weight. It maybe came up once. So that I continued to make up, but it wasn’t a big deal.
I also never used grappling, or strict rules on material components. Probably some other stuff I didn’t even notice existed. But I used all the basic, bread-and-butter mechanics. And of course the stats mattered. It’s not that hard to look up how many spells the wizard gets WHEN SHE IS CREATED AND EVERY TIME SHE GAINS A LEVEL. it’s not as if you have to look that up every session – her spells are conveniently listed on her character sheet. And the Paladin gets to detect evil at will, because, Paladin. And I know that off the top of my head because I played D&D 30 years earlier, and none of the really basic mechanics changed.
Other details I used: occasional random monster encounters, basic “who hits what” mechanics, “who moved how fast” mechanics, “what does each spell do, and who can cast them when” mechanics, and lots more. All that is pretty easy to administer.
Maybe I should learn another RPG. But I’d have to invest in it and get up to speed. But hey, if you want to persuade me… Some of the things I like about D&D are:
The narrative interest of character alignment (good v evil and chaotic v lawful)*
The Tolkienesque background
The relative consistency of the rules and mechanics
The rich body of resources to draw on – monster manual, books of spells and magic objects, gazillions of pre-defined weapons, helpful list of Gods and their realms,…
So, what’s simpler that you think I’d like?
- yeah, I know they removed that from version 4. There’s a reason I never played version 4, it doesn’t interest me. If I get a chance, I might try version 5.
I’m pretty sure that THAC0 and saves are on the character sheet. You’d need to look them up at character creation, but after that it should be pretty straightforward for the most frequently used items. THAC0 is not the most elegant mechanic, but it does provide a pretty easy way to figure out your odds of success. In any event, having it on the character sheet means the kids don’t need to know how the number got there, just what they do with it.
But going back to the sleep spell… if you’re not familiar with saves vs sleep, why introduce a sleep spell at all? There’s no reason a couple of kids can’t have an enjoyable evening using D&D rules to play Robin Hood in a non-magical universe that only needs warriors and rangers stealing treasure or rescuing Maid Marian from the Nottingham’s warriors and rangers. As they master parts of the rules and simpler characters, you can introduce more later.
It is interesting that you use chess with only pawns as an example. In most “teach your kids to play chess” books, that’s essentially the advice they offer. Here’s an example: How to Teach Your Kids the Basics of Chess | Blog | Kenney Myers
You could teach them checkers or some other game instead, but my main point continues to be that using something you’re familiar with will be better than trying to learn something new. If you don’t know checkers, then by all means stick with a simplified version of chess.
I’m not particularly interested in persuading you, and that last item is a doozy–you’re not going to find any other gaming system out there with the wealth of genre-specific and system-specific materials that D&D has. (You could go Star Wars and get lots of setting stuff; you can go GURPS and get lots of system stuff; but D&D corners the market on both at the same time).
But if you wanted to try something else, my nephew introduced me to Dungeon World; it’s like a pared-down D&D, more or less, but it places a bit of extra emphasis on character background. There’s alignment, and alignment has specific in-game effects that earn you XP: a good bard earns XP for “using your art to aid someone,” whereas a lawful paladin gains XP for “denying mercy to a criminal or unbeliever,” and an evil wizard gains XP for “using magic to cause terror or fear.” THere are also lots of abilities that are designed to spur creativity. For example if a thief gains marginal success on a pick locks/disarm traps roll, “you still do it, but the GM will offer you two options between suspicion, danger, or cost.” That’s pretty cool, IMO.
Thanks, next time I’m thinking of starting an RPG, I’ll check out dungeon world.
Free is convenient.
Second nature to anyone who ever played a White Wolf game. Instead of writing down a number on a character sheet, you filled in little dots like a standardized test form. Why did they do it that way? I have no idea, but some people really liked it. I guess it’s more visual? And I guess you just didn’t play any White Wolf games, ever?
This sortof amuses me, because I consider initiative to be one of the places where where all the silly modifiers really don’t matter and you can just say “Yeah, high is good.” 
But yes, it’s also a great place to just fiat the rules out. Actually, this is basically what Dungeon World does - it says, basically, “There is no initiative; Play just continues. Ask people what they do in whatever order seems appropriate.”
I’ve yet to meet an encumberance system that I liked, but I understand why some games include them - it’s basically to try to limit how much loot the characters can cart out of the dungeon. This is definitely another good place for fudging, especially since most systems are pretty bad at factoring in the fact that just because two things weigh about the same, that they’re not equivalently easy to carry. Wearing a chain shirt is a lot easier than carrying a sack full of rocks.
So good choice. 
Sure sure. But you’re not really playing the game from memory at this point. The spell list alone is too cumbersome for that to really be a thing. Even if the number of spells they know doesn’t change much, a cleric can potentially prepare any of a couple dozen spells at level 1 alone.
They didn’t remove that from version 4. They just gave you the option of not engaging with it by choosing “unaligned” if you wanted to. Then they dropped that in 5E and made “true neutral” into the “I don’t care about alignment” alignment and instead gave “unaligned” to things that aren’t smart enough to have alignment. All the old standbys of Lawful Good, Chaotic Annoying, and the like have persisted throughout all versions, sometimes more vestigially than others, but then, they’ve always been a bit of a weird appendage.
Regarding your other points of interest though:
Few games have “alignment” - basically, just D&D and its spinoffs/derivatives emulators. (Dungeon World expressly contains alignment because it is ‘emulating’ D&D style worldbuilding.) Lots of games however have some sort of narrative designator for a character’s beliefs, and a lot of them mean more than alignment does. Alignment’s big problem was that it was basically a penalty. “If you don’t act this way, you lose XP!” Few people played it that way, but that was pretty much the only mechanical heft it had outside of like, Protection from Evil.
Tolkienesque background is an interesting way to describe D&D; I just tend to describe it as “D&D Fantasy” because at the end of the day, any resemblance to Tolkien is superficial at best, and few of the things that happens in most D&D games would make a lick of sense in Middle Earth. Still, “generic Tolkien influenced fantasy” is a really common setting.
D&D is a fairly inconsistent game by modern standards, though it has improved over time from the kitchen sink that was AD&D.
The one place D&D really shines is your last criteria - it has more supplemental stuff than you can shake a stick at. The thing is though, that most of it isn’t really… D&D specific. Sure, the idea of a Sword +1, +4 vs Reptiles is very specifically D&D, but the idea of a magic sword that is usually only slightly better than a normal one, but that deals deadly blows to dragons is very far reaching. (Actually, I believe the former is D&D’s attempt to model the latter) Similarly, Gods, Realms, and the like are fiction, rather than game material for the most part. I confess I’m not a big fan of tons and tons of different kinds of weapons though, because I think it leads to people looking for the “best” weapon and picking weird, incongruous stuff because of how the stats work out. Why doesn’t every fighter wield a gnomish double urgrosh? It clearly has the best combination of critical range, base damage, and reach.
So yeah. As has been pointed out, if you’re willing to forego having actual stats for all the stuff in your final point, the list of games that meets these criteria is… kinda massive. Dungeon World is the obvious choice here though. It will feel very familiar in a lot of ways, and make you wonder why you were bothering with all the complexity in other ways. It models all the familiar D&D things - fighters, wizards, alignments, spells, etc. uses a unified action resolution mechanic for everything (no cases of “When you try to hit someone with a sword, YOU roll to see if you can hit their very static defense number, but when you try to affect someone with a spell, THEY roll to see if they can beat their defense number” or “When you’re rolling to hit, you want to roll high, but when you’re making a skill check, you want to roll low…” - and yes, I’ve played D&D games where that last one is a thing.) and does it all with roughly 15 numbers on the entire character sheet. (And if that sounds like a lot, that’s your 6 D&D stats, your 6 D&D Stat MODS, hitpoints, XP and level.).
I could go on, but Left Hand has already hit some of the other high points (Actual motivation to play your alignment!) and it’s laughably easy to use material from any D&D source. You can get the PDF for $10, or the physical book for $25, which is a bargain, since it’s a complete game, and not one of three (or more) essentially required books. It DOES leverage your understanding of D&D tropes a bit, but I consider that a plus in most cases.
THACO didn’t even exist during the era I was talking about. THACO was a 2nd edition creation. Prior to that, it was all charts. You could’ve even really hack in THACO, because sometimes numbers doubled up on the charts, so it wasn’t the simple 1 to 1 that you’ve become accustomed to. There was a place to write down your saving throws on the sheet, but they were still basically arbitrary values you needed to look up. Which is going to involve time spent nose-in-book. Is it a lot? Depends on your point of view.
Sure. Though it’s not just sleep. It’s basically all spells (except for the ones that utilize some -other- mechanic instead). Or you could use a system where you don’t have to remember a bunch of completely different rules in order to use magic. That’s what I’m getting at.
There’s nothing in D&D that you can’t drop if you want. That’s not the point at all. The point is that you are trying to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver at that point. You can do it, but unless a screwdriver is the only tool you’ve got…
Well, they kind of did drop it from 4E, from the standpoint of the separate “good/evil” and “law/chaos” axes.
4E took the classic nine alignments, and collapsed them into five:
- Lawful Good
- Good
- Unaligned
- Evil
- Chaotic Evil
I know that the designers felt that this streamlined things, but I knew very few players (and I played a lot of 4E, both in home campaigns and in Living Forgotten Realms organized play) who felt that this was in any way an improvement. People who liked D&D alignments felt that the new version didn’t make sense, and people who didn’t like alignments didn’t like this arrangement any better.
Oh, you’re right. I’d forgotten about that entirely. Shows how deeply invested I was in Alignment at that point. (the only reason I know how it works in 5th is I looked it up in the SRD to chip in on a ‘what alignment is this’ question elsewhere.)
It does kinda mess up the symmetry, but I can’t say as how I miss the difference between Neutral and Chaotic in most cases though.