Age Appropriate Adventures?


Gamer Life General Discussion


My 8 year old daughter and a couple of her friends, all in the 8-10 year range, want to play "D&D" like her old man and his friends. But I don't want something as R rated as standard adventures run.

Does anyone have any suggestions for PG or age appropriate adventures?

Has anyone else run into something similar in the past? Or do most just wait until their children are "adults" before allowing them to play?


Do you create your own adventures or are you looking for a published adventure for the children? If you're willing to put the work in, just pick any of their favorite (or your favorite) fantasy stories and base a campaign around it. I've made adventures based of the Odyssey, Lord of the Rings, the legend of hercules, and so on. Other possible ideas I can think of off the top of my head include Eragon and Deltora Quest.

(I don't pretend to claim that my adventures were exactly children friendly, but my other suggestions would be much nicer).


Thanks for the ideas. I generally find very little time to work on adventures, so I tend to used published adventures. Perhaps it wouldn't take too much to adapt a tall tale, or legendary story from the past. Especially if it was one that I knew pretty well.


Yeah, even if you just take a basic "rescue the princess (or prince)" type storyline it could be great. In fact, probably better than an in-depth premade adventure.

Have them start in town, maybe have to rp a little asking around to find out where the person is being held, then have them assault the castle, tower, dungeon or whatever and throw some very clearly evil monsters at them as they go.

Don't make it too long, just enough to get a taste of the fun and then go from there if and when they want to play again

Liberty's Edge

A point I want to make in this endeavor:

As a father of a 9 year old girl and 5 year old boy - both of whom have aspirations of playing, a trick I have learned for teaching them to play at a young age and to make it more kid-friendly, your kids PC's dont "kill the monsters" they just dissapear when they run out of hit points (like a non-gorey video game).

That way it eliminates the "dead" and death aspect of the game to make it more suitable for parents teaching their little ones.

It is great that they want to play though.

Robert


I've found it pretty easy to take inspiration from any kid's activity/movie. I am writing up a campaign now which will probably begin in sometime around New years and one of the adventures is based on a trip to a carnival/circus. Another is based on the movie "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown." Granted my gaming group is all adults so the plots have demonic/evil twists but would be just as easy to make children friendly versions.

Also if you'll be playing around a major holiday (such as Christmas), make an adventure holiday themed. Have them hunt down the grinch stealing Christmas (or similar type holiday), etc.


What kind of characters are they wanting to play? I would bet if you ask them what they want to do, you would come up with enough to keep an adventure together. If necessary, pull together a villain from a disney movie. I've run a few very loose and improvisational games with my 6 and 3 year old and their friends. Don't sweat the rules too much. Just use whatever monster from the SRD works


My experience is that it also depends a lot on the childrens' characters and tastes, not only on their age. My daughter is ten and is playing in our Steampunk campaign (the other players are a boy of 18 and 3 adults). My daughter likes the horror and mystery aspects of it, so this type of adventure can also be done if you are careful. Do not be too graphic in the details (not too much blood). But even creatures like werewolves, ghosts and vampires are OK, if you sort of make them Halloween-scary (use all the clichés). Children of the ages 8 to 10 even like scary, if you do not overdo it.

Use lots of action. Children easily get bored when they have the idea that "nothing happens". So use plenty of fights, especially the heroic kinds. Do not make the storylines too long. Some kind of twist in the story (e.g. the nice sheriff in the village turns out to be a traitor) is OK. They probably like that, especially if they discover it on their own (be sure to give a lot of clues). Then give them a chance to ambush the traitorous villain in the end, so that they get a real sense of victory, and see that the villagers reward them.

Be prepared that the children will be very enthusiastic and will probably do things you never expect, which makes it all the more fun.

I used the adventure Falls Run (dungeon 67) with this group and adapted it a little (more monsters). It worked out very well, especially when my daughter started inventing all kinds of theories about the plot (and she came pretty close).

Good luck with your group. I would like to hear how it works out.

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Personally if I was going to do it, this is what I would do. Use D1 and tweak it a bit. For one make it be the adults that got captured by the kobolds and let the kids play kids to rescue them. I think they would get a kick out of something like that.

Anyways good luck and let us know how it turns out.

Liberty's Edge

Dark_Mistress wrote:

Personally if I was going to do it, this is what I would do. Use D1 and tweak it a bit. For one make it be the adults that got captured by the kobolds and let the kids play kids to rescue them. I think they would get a kick out of something like that.

Anyways good luck and let us know how it turns out.

D0 may also be good because they can fight the big bad wolf to get the medicine and save grandma, plus it's a lot shorter.

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