Playing role-playing games with my kids has taught me, more than anything else, how to be a better GM. It is incredibly fun when it goes well. But it can be hard when it does not go well, and so I thought today I would talk about why I am playing Mausritter with my elementary school-age kids. I also want to lay out why I think Mausritter is a better call for younger kids than something like DnD 5e.
This post (and its forthcoming follow-up) is inspired by the excellent reflection by Widdershin Wanderings on their experiences teaching Cairn to middle-school kids, and Clayton’s Haus Rules for Mausritter. But unlike those two posts, I wanted to first reflect on the principles that led me to playing Mausritter, specifically, with my older elementary-age kids.
Principles of Play
I should begin by saying that I began telling stories together with my kids when they were young. It’s something my grandfather and mother did with me, and I wanted to pass it on. So I would start a story, and when we got to a part where the hero or heroine makes a choice, I asked them what they wanted to happen next, and we went from there. Epic and episodic stories ensued over the years, from the Magic Cloud to Little Monkey Girl, from Hank the Dragon to Adventures on the Purple Planet.
At its heart, telling stories together is the simplest, and original, RPG. But at some point, once we started playing board games together, I could not wait to pass on my love of more complicated TTRPGs. I mean, Exploding Kittens was more complicated than some of the RPGs I saw online.
So when my daughter hit 2nd grade and my son was in kindergarten, I started them on Hero Kids. Hero Kids is a grid-based d6 system, an incredibly simplified version of DnD that is straightforward and easy, bright and attractive, and came with good GM advice and tons of adventures (from a Bundle of Holding). It is an excellent, award-winning game marketed for ages 4 to 10, and can easily be mixed with the outstanding d6 game Adventurous for additional options without too much added complexity.
At first, the kids really got into making their characters, and I thought it was going well.
But good heavens, Hero Kids was a mistake. First principle of playing RPGs with kids: match the complexity to their age. I went from freeform storytelling to grid-based combat with a 5 and 7 year old, and making that transition required constant rules-reminders and immense patience on my part when my kids insisted on grabbing their pieces and zooming it around the map whenever they was bored. Or scared. Or had a cool idea. Or wanted it to go talk with their sibling’s pieces. Or wanted to protect any of their pets by swapping places. I would like to say I never yelled at my kids for playing RPGs wrong, but I am not a perfect person. In fact, my evident irritation at them not staying on the grid is what eventually killed that game after a few sessions.
Age is a tricky thing: some kids are emotionally built to sit at a table and follow instructions, and others struggle with complex instructions, reading, or sitting still, or being patient and waiting their turn. Every kid is different. Mine were not ready, and honestly I was not ready.
So we went back to storytelling together for a year, and I pondered on what I did wrong. That’s how I arrived at my second principle of playing RPGs with kids: do it for love of a good story, and if a rule gets in the way, break it. Flexibility in playing RPGs is something I had struggled with up to that point. I am a neurodiverse person who memorized much of the AD&D Player’s Handbook and Monster Manual as a kid, and knew 5e like the back of my hand. But I had placed my reverence for a silly set of system rules over my first responsibility as a dad, being patient and loving with my kids. I had messed up.
Fortunately, my kids are wonderful and forgave me, and went on to create to a fantastic, years-long make-believe session with the fantasy paper minis from Rich Burlew, the author of OOTS (which, after a bit, I began to read to them, bleeping out all the bits inappropriate for 8-year old ears). They would set up our table for weeks at a time, and tell each other about elaborate backstories and create drama for the kobolds and yellow musk creeper and trolls and penanggalan. Yes, the penanggalan remains a favorite character in their game!
But at night, my search continued for a replacement RPG. After reading about a lot of systems, I found one that seemed perfect. It’s called Amazing Tales, and it is incredibly simple, intuitive, and story-first, and comes with wonderful GM advice and a few great pre-made adventures. Its freeform nature means you can play as anything, and yet fairly resolve any action. Players pick five things their players are great at, assign dice to each skill (d20 for the thing you are best at, down to d4 for the thing you are only okay at), then try to beat a target difficulty number. It’s my favorite game to ease adults into RPGs: I once ran my mom through an impromptu Amazing Tales one-shot where she played a magical pigeon.
But for all I enjoyed reading through and learning from Amazing Tales, I barely played it. Because when I proposed playing RPGs with my kids again, later, they agreed and then counter-offered. My daughter wanted to run the game this time, and her system? Playing with their paper minis, and flipping a coin. If you are good at something, flip with advantage, and if not, flip with disadvantage. I learned months later from this post that she is evidently a small John Harper.
So what did I do? I followed the second principle: my Amazing Tales rules were going to get in the way of her story, so I dropped them. Coin-flipping and paper minis it was, and my daughter was a creative and hilarious GM, albeit impatient with our antics (almost like she’s related to me or something).
Playing with them again taught me one more lesson. Kids don’t see a big difference between games of make-believe and role-playing games, and playing with pieces for both is just good fun. I have already written about why I think that is, on a deeper level, but this led me to Principle number three: a great kids game should have lots of room for imagination, scaffolded by fun game pieces.
Excited by this insight, I went ahead and bought two games with physical pieces (principle three!) that seemed great for kids in elementary school:
1) the Land of Eem Dungeoneer Adventures kickstarter (arriving in a few months)
2) at PAXU, the Mausritter boxed set (and the Estate adventures, I am a sucker).
If you are not familiar with Mausritter, the PDF is free and the boxed set comes with wonderful physical inventory pieces (the knapsacks for holding pieces in the Estate boxed set are especially beloved by my kiddos).
The inventory pieces can be printed out at home, but the thick board pieces from Exalted Funeral are great.
DnD vs. the N/OSR, for kids
But still, I hesitated to GM for them again, and Mausritter gathered dust on my shelf. And then last year my kids got invited to play DnD 5e: my daughter in the 4th grade club in her school, and my son with a bunch of his friends and a wonderful teen DM. I worried my window of us playing simple N/OSR games together was slipping away, as they got busy with their own lives and red-pilled into the DnD-verse.
Many people will tell you online, based on their own experiences, that kids as young as 8 are ready to play DnD 5e, and that’s right as far as it goes. But I don’t think DnD is right for all kids, for three reasons.
Rules complexity is a limiting in-language that signals ‘I belong’. Ever since ADnD, the game has been bound around and limited by too many rules, which partly exist in my humble opinion for psychological reasons. As a nerd, belonging was hard. But if I memorized a long set of rules and showed system mastery, instantly I belonged to a group. What’s more, I was ‘cool’ for knowing all the knowledge! Now as an adult, I do believe rules have their place and I like games with intermediate crunch–but I see two ral downsides of all those rules for kids.
First, complex rules are both a price of admission and a gate–if you don’t memorize a goodly number of them, you can’t play like a cool kid. And if you keep going outside the rules, you get asked to stop by impatient peers–which led my daughter to leave her DnD group after a few months.
Second, following so many rules means wearing an early corset on your developing imagination. Before you have even explored all the worlds of fantasy, you learn that character concepts have to be molded to fit the rules, and rarely vice versa. So kids learn to imagine playing a certain way, but not another. Dad, my wizard can’t wear a sword (JRR Tolkein, what were you thinking?). Dad, I am going to memorize every single spell in the PHB, and then rules-lawyer you about all the magic we imagine because it’s…fun?
The N/OSR is better for imaginative problem-solving. DnD 5e promotes a culture of play where the answer is not in your imagination, but which skill or item button you press on your character page. In the N/OSR, the rules are simple and you are weak, so you must be clever. Dad, I roll Perception (sorry kiddo, you see what you see–do you want to move closer?). Dad, I attack the giant head-on, because I am strong (kiddo, you should have thought of a way to sneak around, you have 3 HP so he knocks you out and puts you in a sack).
DnD is a black hole of sameness. Its cultural dominance and ubiquity calcifies fantastical imagination (and yes homebrew and settings can vary, but you are still pushing against the GRAVITY OF SIMILARITY). I could see DnD expanding my kid’s imaginations, but also making them expect all fantasy worlds to line up with the one they were reading in the Monster Manual and Player’s Handbook (although Pokemon and Minecraft help push back a little). Dad trolls always have to be bad, black elves are bad, kobolds are not helpful fae, sorcerers don’t memorize spells, magic missiles always are magical force darts, and dragons are color-coded.
So I took action, a stealth N/OSR lobbying campaign. I let them check out my RPG library, which features Dolmenwood and Mausritter (they loved playing with Mausritter’s pieces), and their minds were blown repeatedly that one can play DnD with different rules and cooler options. I also bought both the Land of Eem Dungeoneer Adventures book series for them (they loved it!), and let them know it was a RPG that would be coming to our house soon.
But after I checked out the Mouse Guard books from the library and we read them at night, Mausritter won the honor of the first game they wanted to try, and Dolmenwood and Land of Eem are scheduled for next year. (My son, the biggest DnD fan, read the entire Dolmenwood Player’s Handbook and was delighted to meet the creator at last PAXU–Gavin gamely asked him for his favorite Dolmenwood spell and was happily surprised when he rattled off three of them).
The goal of our Mouse Knights campaign
So starting about six months ago, we played our first Mausritter game, and we are five sessions in and having a blast. But we are not exactly playing it rules-as-written, which I will get to in my next post. Suffice it to say for no that I say a LOT of “yes, and…” to every zany request.
They wanted to draw their mouse characters and invent equipment–done. My daughter wanted a pack-rat to carry all eight of her mouse-children around–done, but I capped it at four. My son wanted to invent crazy inventions with minor powers–done. My daughter wanted a wand to cast spells with, instead of an obsidian tablet–done, with restrictions. They asked me to have a DM PC who is a hedgehog–done. Here’s my character sheet for Fergin the hedgehog:
Mausritter is a magnificent system, because you can hack it to hell and gone and you still have A) an OSR system with low HP, so choices matter.
B) simple rules which make it easy to make up monsters, equipment, powers, etc., and
C) all the glorious tactile pieces they love to play with, discover, and draw on.
Next time, I will get to the Haus Rules we have so far, many crafted through negotiation with my kids. They all follow the principles: simple, flexible rules, with imagination first.
Rather than set my goal to teach them an OSR playing style, I follow my kid-RPG principles and have an easier goal: to have a fun game, one that gets out of the way of their rampaging creativity. One that they want to keep playing, with their dad. Cause that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
