A quick addendum to the last post: when I was just rearranging some books today, I realized that Into the Odd might also be a great game for kids. (Or, perhaps, it’d be a great game for the right kind of kids.) It’s quick, it’s fast, it gets you into a dungeon crawl or whatever without any hassle, and gives them some interesting items / arcana to mess around with (as Hobgoblinry has already pointed out). I think you’d need kids who are OK with their characters being a bit on the fragile side, but if you just wanted to pull a map or an old/OSR module off the shelf and get going (as, in fact, I was hoping to this past weekend), I think it’d be great.1

  1. My annoyance with skill checks where you’re trying to roll under a 3d6 attribute goes away a bit when we’re talking about kids, and when the kid who rolled a bunch of low stats gets something neat in their starter package. Also: I suspect ItO’s ablational attribute system might make intuitive sense to many kids. ↩︎