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Comment by ra120271 | Hacker News Reader

ra120271

Any thoughts and recommendations on how best to introduce my 5 year old boy to ttrpg? Recommendations on playing tips, games, narratives that engage and how to progress as he gets older?

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Recommendation: Start with the story and narrative elements. You can abstract away all the rules, and math as need be, and re-introduce them over time.

Some nice tidbits. Thank you. Follows the general theme here of allow them to shape a narrative and character with less focus on the rules.

I think this is a tough one because table top often involves reading, writing, and mathematics that a 5 year old might not be able to handle. My 11 year old niece is getting into D&D now, but when she was 5, she would not have had the wherewithal to play.

When she was 5, though, she did enjoy collaborative storytelling. I would start by building the character with her:

"Once upon a time there was a..."

"Squirrel!"

"Yeah, and this squirrel was named..."

"Elsa!"

Then, when we'd established the character she wanted, we'd establish the type of "campaign" she wanted:

"So, one day Elsa the Queen of Purple Squirrel Kingdom was sitting on her throne when one of her squirrel subjects came to ask her for help, 'Please, O wise Queen, I need your help...'"

"Finding Taylor Swift!"

Then we'd proceed to tell the story of how Queen Elsa the Squirrel saved Taylor Swift from the next door neighbor's dog together (actual example), stopping every few sentences to get her input.

I learned to play this game with her from her father, who also happens to be a great D&D GM.

We’ve kind of started a start a story daddy, the he continues and then I do. I think your ideas will fit well with that. Taking turns on the narrative and with elements he loves. Cats as characters and trains of vehicles for fantasy. Thank you.

Start with stories where you sit down next to them on the couch and make them the main character. Just make it up as you go, doesn't have to be wild fantasy, can be anything. When you come to a decision point ask them "what do you do?". Then weave their decision into the story. Make it fun, make them the hero and never leave the story hanging at that age (they need to feel safe). You don't need dice and such yet, and even when they're older you can still keep it up. Builds fun memories too.

I used to do this with my niece, who is now old enough to actually play table top. I still remember a couple of the weirdest stories we came up with together.

I have memories from this as well. I have a recording someplace (physical tape) that I made on one occasion. Hope I can find it again someday. Then all I need is some way to play it :)

Bonus: if you do a very good job, you may end up writing Alice in Wonderland.

That’s so coincidentally funny. The most recent story we’ve made up is a cat sleeping in the living room gets woken up by a toy sized steam train chuffing towards a mouse hole tunnel. The cat leaps after the train, hits the hole and is transported to a humanoid cat land where he’s lying on the tracks in front of a full sized train tunnel. Below lies a new world to explore.

I like the point of making sure it closes off the story and always feeling safe. I’m going to play with this thinking some more. Thank you.

Don't worry about special "kid friendly" rpgs. Just play D&D but water it way down. Get some miniatures and map tiles and let them set up the map to explore with their characters. They will want to play with these things as toys rather than a TTRPG and that's perfectly fine. Just establish the basic rule of "rolling higher than a number". Improvise like crazy, let them re-roll but set some appropriate boundaries, and let them guide the fun.

I like the idea of making it more toy like and guided by the path to fun. Thank you.

DriveThruRPG[1] has a lot of kid-oriented games. I have Amazing Tales[2] and the kids liked it well enough (although I got a little too scary with the goblins one time and they were a little hesitant to play for a while). At 5 you'd probably be running the same gambit I'd say but ymmv.

[1]: https://www.drivethrurpg.com

[2]: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/222950/Amazing-Tales-co...

Nice pointer. Thank you. I grabbed the pdf book.

Check out Hero Kids. Super simple mechanics that still have the general feel of D&D. In my experience younger kids are way more interested in narrative than in combat though so I would lean into that aspect of it.

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