I Designed a Roleplaying Game for My Kids
It Was Surprisingly Fun
TL;DR: I wrote Oddlings, and you should check it out.
I feel there are way too many RPG systems on the market. I sometimes mentally scoff at people creating them: how am I supposed to sift through all these new productions? It’s overwhelming. And the truth is, we don’t need that many systems1. Most people can (and do) stick to one for their whole lives. What we need is a lot of GM support, which is why I hope Mike Mearls is right about the fifth generation of RPGs.
Anyway, what’s an opinion without a healthy dose of hypocrisy? So obviously, I wrote an RPG system.
I love playing RPGs with my children. It is so different from playing with adults. Their creativity and flexibility is off the charts. They cannot focus for long, so you have to bring your A game to the table, and make things quick and exciting. And they are my kids so spending time with them is a reward in itself.
One of them is still a preschooler which limits what she can understand. She doesn’t read yet, and big numbers are a challenge. Systems I’d tried before generally worked because I rolled for her and interpreted the results. But I wanted her to be engaged directly. In addition, I wanted the character sheet to not need words or numbers so she can be independent.
I am sure there are already systems which do what I need. But as I said: who can sift through all these projects? I figured it would be quicker to build something myself.
If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that Into the Odd (ItO) and its ilk are among my favorite games. The understated elegance of its game mechanics is simply delicious. So I naturally went there for inspiration.
Cutting Into the Odd Down to Size
I knew I wanted to use a single six-sided die. Numbers of up to six should be fine for my little one. So how does one go from a d20 to a d6 exactly? It’s not that hard, actually.
In ItO, Ability scores are generated by rolling 3d6 so they are generally in the 3-18 range. Divided by 3, it becomes 1-6. Easy. So rolling a d6 under a stat between 1-6 is a very close approximation of ItO’s d20 under a stat.
I decided I didn’t want infallible characters so I capped abilities at 5. This means that the most competent characters will fail a bit more often than in ItO. That’s fine, though. We want some excitement in the game.
This “divide by three” mantra turned out to be also useful for combat. Since attacks deal damage to abilities, they needed to be scaled down, as well. In ItO, the typical damage die is a d6. The average damage dealt is 3.5 so it was not unreasonable to make the default attack simply deal 1 point of damage. I wanted some variability, though. The die steps (d6→d8→etc.) increase the average damage dealt by 1. In Oddlings, this became a coin flip for a 50% chance of +1 damage. Having a variety of weapons felt too complex (and uninteresting) to children, though, so I repurposed this rule to increase damage from situational advantages (which took care of ItO’s enhanced damage rules, as well).
Removing Literacy
Having a narrow range of ability values made it easy to operate with symbols instead of writing. This is a full example character stat block in Oddlings:
♥️♥️♥️
👁️👁️👁️👁️👁️
🙂🙂🙂
🎲🎲🎲
🛡️🛡️Simple, fun, elegant. My daughter understands it.
Another major source of text on character sheets is character classes, special abilities, etc. ItO already doesn’t have anything like this, which is perfect. Where ItO places unique effects instead is in gear.
What I found in actual play with my children is that they were happy to simply draw equipment onto their character sheets, and we remembered what it could do. I removed more fiddly parts of equipment management to facilitate this: there are no Bulky items, it is assumed that each character has a backpack full of useful staff, there is no tracking of supplies, and no damage dice. It works.
Engage Your Players
I included a specific worldbuilding procedure in the game. It is a close approximation of how I actually play with my kids. Why wonder what they would find interesting if they can simply tell you? You go around the table, each person adding an element to the setting. However, somebody else always adds a twist so every creation is authored by at least two people. I recently wrote how mixing two different ideas creates more interesting results, and that post was actually inspired by my experience of collaborative worldbuilding with my children.
Making Things G-Rated
Character death is a very contentious topic in RPGs. Kids can be surprisingly resilient but I didn’t want character death in my children-oriented RPG. This gave me the idea of characters being avatars of sleeping children. If such an avatar “dies,” the child simply awakens, and when it falls back asleep, their avatar reappears, their health restored. I called these avatars “Oddlings” as a nod to ItO but I thought it was pretty cute and on point.
I also added a home base to create an easy starting point, and make give the team quests natural. With children, you really don’t want to needlessly complicate things.
What It Feels Like to Create an RPG
Working on this project was surprisingly fun, and hearing from a child that they really like these rules and want to play with them again was the sweetest reward. I get it now.
Putting rules together feels like working on a puzzle. Finding a gameplay loop that works is yet another puzzle. And when the pieces fall together, it feels downright addictive.
There it is. I am a part of the problem now, adding my own drop to the ocean of indie RPGs.
I realize this is a hot take. I have deep respect for many amazing creators in the TTRPG space, and my life is better for them. It’s a curse of abundance. It is a well known fact that having too many choices can lead to less satisfaction.