Picked up the young adventurer books thinking that they had simpler kid rules, but I guess they have no rules (you’re supposed to just be motivated to buy a starter set or something). So I played with my niece (8) and nephew (5) without any rules and they LOVED it. Right after our first short adventure they wanted to play again.
I basically just made them roll for anything they wanted to do in combat and took turns as usual. Let them roll to respond to any attack back at them. No HP, just descriptions of injuries.
They loved upgrading their swords into go-go-gadget everything weapons with buttons to shoot spikes, or light on fire - so I let them. Even the boat they needed had to become a sword upgrade magic inflatable raft haha.
Anyway, highly recommend for young players.
Yep. This was how I learned to play. We played at tables or while walking around as needed, and for times we needed random numbers we had a little piece of paper with a big grid with numbers and we’d flick a pencil at it and wherever the eraser landed was the roll. Everything was d20 and we had very little idea of the rules, and over time as we got sourcebooks we started to absorb them gradually, but mostly we used the sourcebooks as a repository of lore as opposed to as anything prescriptive in terms of the mechanics we should be using.
10/10
You have to make sure you don’t have any power-hungry dickbags in your group that will abuse it I guess, but we had an absolute blast in every sense.
I have a core group of friends that I grew up with and we all loved role playing games. After using every gaming system you could (late 80s) we just knew how it worked. We’d play any scenario or setting with our common understanding a couple d10 and some notes for inventory and special abilities (or disabilities). So much fun. :)
This is the way, in all sincerity. The OG books all had a small blurb in the beginning to remind the reader that the rules contained therein were earnestly playtested by a group of geeks a lot like themselves, but that your own group’s interests and goals were more important than RAW, etc. Which, of course, makes the upcoming 6E bullshit all the more egregious: no “core” books, only “sourcebooks” for encapsulated lore, races, items, adventures, etc. 🤢🖕🏽
Yeah. Because the OG books were written by people who loved the game. There are still a few people at WotC who love the game, but they’re trying to hold back the tide of people who want to extract as much money as they can out of it.
Sadness
A DM that understands monkey’s paws can help with the power hungry. I was a power hungry player back in high school and played a game in a low rules setting with a ahape shifting character I thought was broken. The DM allowed it and it worked because you can try to do awesome stuff but still fail even if it’s possible for your character. And often it’s more fun to succeed but then have to deal with some other curve ball.
That same DM later ran a game intended to be like Devil May Cry, where the whole point was to do cool epic shit. The more descriptive and awesome your description of what you wanted to do, the more likely you were to succeed. You’d have a higher chance of catching a sword mid swing and judo throwing the wielder than just dodging the attack.
After those games, I don’t really care about the rules anymore. The flow of the game is more important. Arguing about what can and can’t be done isn’t fun and no one really wins.