TOR for Kids: A Little Ring

[Terisonen]

"It's hard to made things simple, and easy to made them hard."

All we have is RPG boiled down

[Glorelendil]

Just want to pop in to say that I've been thinking obsessively about this ever since Falenthal posted in the other thread. I bought the Faery's Tale PDF and read through it. It's neat, but still more complex than what I'm looking for. I suspect that young children...5-7...would be perfectly happy using more constrained abilities in a more finite range of challenges. What would seem boring to adults can actually be a lot of fun for young kids. (Think about Tic Tac Toe, for instance.)

I have a two-year old boy, and before he turns 5 I want to have a game system to play with him. I've already got the outline of some ideas, some borrowed from Falenthal, some from Faery's Tale, and derived from TOR. This isn't the forum to discuss it, but anybody interested in this drop me a PM; maybe I'll start a private Google Group or something.

[Falenthal]

I bought the Faery's Tale PDF and read through it. It's neat, but still more complex than what I'm looking for. I suspect that young children...5-7...would be perfectly happy using more constrained abilities in a more finite range of challenges.

Exactly my thoughts.
I think that Faery's Tale, as is, can be a very entertaining ruleset even for experienced RPG players. Sort of a light-rules game for interludes in a TOR Campaign or such. Faery's Tale is MERP, and TOR is Rolemaster... with all his Companions.

I'm in for this discussion. At least I can explain my own experience with my own daughter (who is turning 6 this year). My second guinea pig... errr, child is still only 20 months old, so he has some time before the conversion. By the way, his name is Elric, so I've damned him from the beginning.

[Glorelendil]

Oh that is a GREAT name.

I told my wife when she was pregnant that if we got twins I wanted to name them Butch and Sundance.

[Majestic]

You guys are horrible.

My daughter has a friend named Luke Walker. If I was his parent I have to admit I would be really tempted to make his middle name "Sky".

[zedturtle]

My youngest is Westley, my preferred spelling of the character from The Princess Bride.

My middle child would have been named Deleen (if possessed of two X chromosomes). Unfortunately he has an X and a Y and is named Dillon. His mother was disappointed.

My oldest has a name of my her mother's fabrication, but one that has since become popular, due to a supermodel possessing that name as well.

[Falenthal]

My youngest is Westley, my preferred spelling of the character from The Princess Bride.

Does he show a special tendency to dress as a black pirate during Carnival?

In fact, I wanted to name my son Iñigo, but my wife didn't like it. I only let it go because my last name is not Montoya...

My middle child would have been named Deleen

As the Minbari Diplomat from Babylon 5??? Great...

[zedturtle]

My youngest is Westley, my preferred spelling of the character from The Princess Bride.

Does he show a special tendency to dress as a black pirate during Carnival?

In fact, I wanted to name my son Iñigo, but my wife didn't like it. I only let it go because my last name is not Montoya...

Not as of yet, but soon...

My middle child would have been named Deleen

As the Minbari Diplomat from Babylon 5??? Great...

Yep. Totally her idea.

[Falenthal]

Lately I've been doing an improvement with my daughter in how we make our adventures. We've mixed the Hobbit Tales card game with the rules mentioned above.
Right now, she creates a character as before. But as I don't always have the ability to improvise a full adventure for her, what we do is draw an adventure card. Between the two of us, we come up with a situation were her character is involved using the card as inspiration. After that, we just go on explaining a story using a mix of the adventure and the hazard cards. For everything that looks like a trouble, she uses her character's abilities to allow the drawing of a new card and advance the adventure.

This experience made me come up with an idea for a rpg-narrative card game, where we could have a character created with a few stats (Body, Heart, Wits), and then a deck of locations/individuals and another of hazards. The players would draw a card and explain a story for their group. Hazards would occur, that allow to deepen the story. Each card should have a difficulty attached to a certain stat (Combat: Body, Travel to a place: Heart, Encounter with an individual: Wits). If the card is not succeeded, the failure should go in the story, and draw another card to continue the narrative.

Well, I even came up with more rules for it (party splitting to make different parallel stories in the same group, like the parting of the Fellowship), day and night rules (some enemies would have the Denizen of the Dark ability, which make them more dangerous when encountered at night. Elves would also be more powerful by night), Hope points to help in succeeding the card's tests, etc.
But I must say that, two days after I began developing those rules (just for the fun of it), I found a game in Kickstarter that was more or less the same as I had thought, but much better developed. It was less narrative, but probably more fun in the end. Well, all this goes to show that it's very difficult to be original in this world...

[Blubbo Baggins]

My youngest is Westley, my preferred spelling of the character from The Princess Bride.

Wow, very cool Zed!


Regarding the original topic for this post...well, sort of... last evening I played Hobbit Tales with my 8, 6, and 4 year old (first play for all of us). We actually kept score, and due to rolling several eyes while playing Hazards and drawing up all the "3" point tiles, my 8 year old won by a huge margin. It was fun; they still need help adding more detail to each part of their stories and connecting them in a logical fashion, but I think they enjoyed it. I helped my 4 year old on his turn, since he cannot read yet.