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FlumphPaladin
2016-04-29, 01:02 PM
or,
RPG Age Limits

So D&D was designed with players of all ages in mind, going by the old commercials... how old were the youngest players you've gamed with/GM'd for, and how did it differ from the way you would "normally" play or GM?

Regretfully, I have no experience to offer of my own, except disappointment for not letting my nephew join us when I was younger.:smalleek:

Lord Torath
2016-04-29, 03:08 PM
I started playing when I was six. Unfortunately, my brother was not the best DM. Not a crummy DM, but an unimaginative one who had a hard time deviating from the dungeon modules.

I started DMing for my kids when the oldest were about 10, and the youngest was 7. Other than simplifying character creation, I didn't need to change much. I did create a smaller list of spells to choose from to avoid option paralysis, but other than that, no real changes needed to be made (now, 5 years later, they have the full list available). Partly because my kids want to play heroes, and not murder hobos.

Although I should note that we're playing AD&D 2nd Edition.

JAL_1138
2016-04-29, 04:22 PM
Youngest I've seen has been a six-year-old who tagged along with his dad to the game. We had to be quite patient and explain the rules in more detail, walk him through how D&D works, what it means to RP, and so on. The session kind of centered around making sure he had fun rather than being a normal session. But he caught on to it well enough for a six-year-old, and I wouldn't say he was "too young" to play.

There's another kid whose exact age I forget, but I know she's somewhere in the 9-12 range who's a frequent participant in Adventurers' League sessions (and a good player, too). We keep content strictly PG (which is store policy for AL games anyway, although we're more careful about it), we go a bit further than usual to try to make sure she feels like an equal participant (since most of the players are college students or older), but other than that her age honestly doesn't have much of an effect--she knows the 5e rules better than some of the adults we get in AL, and is actually quite good at the RP side of the game too.

I started playing when I was fairly young too, although I couldn't tell you exactly when. Been many, many years, and I've got a memory like a steel trap (that's rusted shut and missing most of the teeth and a spring or two). I was north of 10, I'm sure, but not by much--probably somewhere around 12-ish. I know I wasn't as good a player as the kid in Adventurers' League, though.

Once a kid can hold a coherent(ish) conversation, they're very likely okay to start playing D&D or other tabletop games (Star Wars would've been another good one to start with, at least in the WEG d6 era; I can't say whether the Fantasy Flight games would be since I haven't played them). They're still kids, and the content of the game and the behavior of the table need to adjust accordingly, as with anything else, but they're not incapable of it and may be better at it than you'd think.

Slipperychicken
2016-04-30, 04:22 PM
I don't have practical experience with children in RPGs, but kids are capable of roleplaying and 'playing pretend' from a very early age. They will often do it without prompting, and I dimly recall hearing something about it being good for their mental development and ability to empathize.

RazorChain
2016-04-30, 08:03 PM
I started playing myself when I was 9 with my older brother as a DM. Now my oldest, teenage daughter is playing and has kinda drifted into LARP, to my dismay of course. My son is just starting his gaming career as a 7 year old but seems to be more of a wargamer and more interested in miniatures. My 5 year old daughter is too young yet but I entertain her with stories about a warrior princess where she gets to dictate the actions of the princess...so yes in a couple of years she'll be playing as well.

Then when all the kids have been indoctrinated I will throw down the gauntlet and bring out The Dresden Files RPG and get the missus involved. Because she's such a Dresden files fan.
Mwuhahahahahahaha!

Noje
2016-04-30, 10:25 PM
Honestly, I think it depends on what game you are playing. If you want D&D, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons first edition is nice because the DM does most of the work anyway, and very little is left for the players to worry about besides what actions they are going to take. If you look at newer editions, players have so much more to keep track of and so many more decisions to make with character building and taking actions (especially with 5th edition, where so many things are happening all at once during combat) , so it isn't the best for younger players. D6 systems like W,R,&M are also good for younger players since there are less dice to worry about. Essentially, the simpler the core mechanics, the less time the younger players are stumbling over the rules and the more time they spend enjoying the game.

THEChanger
2016-04-30, 10:56 PM
My parents introduced me to D&D 3.5 when I was 12, and my younger brother 8. We had a fairly stable game running with another family we were close friends with - my father wasn't the best DM, and pretty much just ran modules for us, since it was also a large group. But I became enthralled, because fantasy is my jam, while my brother was only mildly invested, treating it more as a board game.

When I ran my first game in high school, I brought in my six closest friends. And a few sessions later, my youngest brother wanted to play with us. At the time, we were 14 and 15, me being the oldest at 15, and he was...six. We weren't the heaviest on the roleplaying side of things, and when he first began he didn't really grasp the idea of playing another person. But I set him up with a Barbarian, and he had a blast, as did everyone else. He actually displayed a very shrewd tactical mind, and the group benefited from him pointing out simple solutions to problems they would have otherwise made more complicated than they had to be. And as he got older, he really began to shine as a roleplayer too - as that campaign was winding down four years later, one of the most touching scenes was when his Barbarian refused to leave another player's father behind in an enemy held city, even though the group staying meant losing precious time to avert world ending events. He managed to convince the rest of the party to rescue the father, and with some very clever planning, they succeeded in doing both. When I asked him after the session why he had done that, he just shrugged and said that it was what his character would have done.

And then he scampered off to play Call of Duty. Can't win them all, I suppose.

Now, that's a small sample size, and as a proud older brother I have to say he's a remarkable kid. But I think asking if a player is old enough to join a game is asking the wrong question. I know plenty of adults who aren't ready to play a game of D&D, and I know a much smaller set of children who can really tear up a ttrpg. And the reverse is true. Gotta look at kids like people, as much as possible.

goto124
2016-05-01, 02:25 AM
The thread title made me think of a really tall gaming table, where players must be of a certain height to even see the top of the table, let alone play at said table.

Knaight
2016-05-01, 02:42 AM
If it has to be D&D, I think it works out to something like 13 (which is mostly a side effect of me not GMing D&D much). With any actual RPG, I can push that as low as 6, when I GMed for a friend's two younger siblings*. If outright freeform is in, I can push it to my 4 year old brother, when I was all of 7.

*Both of whom are above average players in regards to creativity. Older and more veteran players seem to have a habit of getting gradually worse.

Piedmon_Sama
2016-05-01, 03:53 AM
I started when I was thirteen, gaming with a bunch of other 12-13 year olds (and one guy's 16 year old brother IIRC) in an afterschool game run by our school's Spanish teacher (this was a v. small middle school, my class was about 45 kids). It was.... probably pretty nightmarish? Sometimes we had as much as twelve kids playing and we'd usually kill each others' characters left and right and have to be quieted every five minutes. Obviously I had fun though because I kept coming back, and I think our teacher must have enjoyed it somehow God bless her because she ran that game for the next two years. She was old-school as heck too. Literally my first game of D&D was Module B1: In Search of the Unknown thanks to her and she very much had the attitude of "act stupid, you die, it's my game take it or leave it." At one point we did Palace of the Silver Princess and I'm pretty sure we never got past like, the third room, we were so terrible.

Inevitability
2016-05-01, 06:45 AM
I got the 4th edition red box for my 13th birthday and haven't stopped gaming since.

Youngest player I ever DM'ed for was 8-9 years old. He was pretty creative and enjoyed the game. I did find myself keeping things simple: there's a goblin village, you should go there and rescue someone, there will be loot.

Laurellien
2016-05-01, 07:19 AM
I know that I've covered more difficult subjects as a DM with adult groups. Nasty stuff contained in the spoilers.

One session I ran about a year ago involved the PCs discovering the aftermath of an attempted rape aboard their ship, where the perpetrator had been interrupted and maimed by an avenging member of the crew.

The PCs have also used innovative torture techniques in the depths of an Indian dungeon.

Finally, I've used various tropes from horror to build up a sense of dread in certain scenarios, such as a a PC bargaining with Pazuzu for their life, or wholesale ripping off the original Wicker Man film.

These are things that I certainly wouldn't have done with younger players or those of a nervous disposition, as it could have hurt people's enjoyment of the game.

ApocalypseSquid
2016-05-01, 09:17 AM
my twin and I found my dad's D&D books when we were was in first grade, and, surprisingly enough, made fairly standard characters (already having read the Hobbit and LoTR might have helped in that), roleplayed fairly well (not sure why we didn't have to have roleplaying explained to us), and didn't have that much trouble with the rules (both of us have always been good with learning new things, for whatever reason.)

When, nine years later, I included my 7-year-old cousin in my campaign, he had some trouble with the rules, but was a virtuoso at roleplaying (seriously, he's the best roleplayer in the group, composed of mostly high-schoolers), and made a character based on Don Quixote (I explained a summary of the book after he explained a character idea that was basically Don Quixote)

Given both of these were 3.5e, I think that the lower limit on age is "Of an age to understand basic arithmetic, speech patterns, and lowest standards of maturity"

Granted, when in a D&D group with someone in lower school, you restrict the horror content to PG or PG-13, depending on their maturity, but heroic fantasy definitely generally falls within that.

FlumphPaladin
2016-05-02, 07:24 AM
I know that I've covered more difficult subjects as a DM with adult groups. Nasty stuff contained in the spoilers.

One session I ran about a year ago involved the PCs discovering the aftermath of an attempted rape aboard their ship, where the perpetrator had been interrupted and maimed by an avenging member of the crew.

The PCs have also used innovative torture techniques in the depths of an Indian dungeon.

Finally, I've used various tropes from horror to build up a sense of dread in certain scenarios, such as a a PC bargaining with Pazuzu for their life, or wholesale ripping off the original Wicker Man film.

These are things that I certainly wouldn't have done with younger players or those of a nervous disposition, as it could have hurt people's enjoyment of the game.

I think I read once that horror themes in general should be avoided for the under-7's, but that was for writing books, not playing games.

Tiri
2016-05-02, 08:53 AM
I think I read once that horror themes in general should be avoided for the under-7's, but that was for writing books, not playing games.

Well, I'm currently in a game with an 8-year-old who started playing a year ago, and some pretty adult things have happened in the game while he was there, like the murder of a whole town, the enslavement of a tribe of goblins, people's foreheads getting branded with symbols and potential sentient-being sacrifice. He's been taking it pretty calmly, and he remembers rules well, although the 'roleplaying' part sometimes escapes him. For example, he refused to eat raw crab and demanded that a hamburger materialize on a deserted beach, but it's mostly just small issues like that. In general, he's a great person to play with.

Inevitability
2016-05-02, 09:16 AM
For example, he refused to eat raw crab and demanded that a hamburger materialize on a deserted beach.

Give him a wand of Create Food and Water. It only says the food is 'bland but nourishing', you're free to refluff it beyond that.