Mr Muse's Corner of the Universe. Log 1- Gaming with Kids: A No Kill Mechanism

To add some variety to the posts, Mr Muse is going to jump in with topical discussion type posts to share with you all. I am obviously all for it and hope it helps you get a sense of how we work together as a team with our creations and projects.

Without further ado...here is Mr. Muse!

So with the new Facebook group going I thought it might be fun to talk a bit about various role playing topics that I find interesting that might provoke some fun discussion. 

I've played RPG's for many years, both as a player and as a GM, but mostly left it behind when I got out of college and got married.  The books (3E mostly) sat in the basement for about a decade until a couple summers ago when my Mrs. Muse had her 2nd back surgery.  I was home alone with the kids for a few weeks while she recovered and decided to crack out the old D&D books to run a fun game with the kids.  They loved it and Mrs. Muse started playing when she was  further on the mend.  Since then we've had a great time playing on the weekends and should finish up our first campaign (38 adventures and probably 16 levels) over Christmas vacation. 

It's been a lot of fun and I've learned a lot about gaming with little kids, both under 10, over the last year and a half.  It's not always easy but I think our kids have gotten a lot out of it and I'd recommend gaming with kids as soon as they're able to.  My youngest has learned a lot about mental math and patience and my oldest knows a lot more know about story structure, teamwork and working well with others. 

Now with that done, I want to drop out a topic and see what you guys think.  Ideally I'd like to bring up a topic every few weeks or so, toss it out to the group and see what we can do with it. 

For the first topic I want to talk about killing in the game and how your kids might handle it.  Only you can determine if your kids are mature enough to handle shooting arrows into goblins or if it's going to be a bit too much.  If it is something you don't think they can handle there are a lot of good options; and the best place I'd look for inspiration is kids cartoons.  The general rule for kids cartoons is that nobody actually 'dies' so over the years they have had to come up with creative ways to have conflict and action without a body count.  Some are kind of silly, I'm looking at you GI Joe and your ability to jump out of tanks right before they explode), but others are quite elegant.  Here's a few that I like that could translate well into D&D:

1.  "Robot" bad guys.  (GI Joe, TMNT, Voltron, etc)

In this trope all the expendable bad guys are either robots or some other kind of soulless constructs.  That way our heroes can shoot, stab, slash and bash them without remorse.  For D&D this can go a few ways.  First you can restrict yourselves to construct creatures like skeletons, elementals, animated objects, etc.  This works but it can be a bit limiting.  Though depending on your setting you can just reskin all kinds of monsters into fantasy 'robots'.  A goblin can very easily become a 'twig monster' or ogres become 'mud monsters'.  When they are 'killed' they just drop back into their original forms. 

2.  Subdual damage weapons  (TMNT is a great example of this)

In this trope, the heroes never do lethal damage with their weapons no matter how sharp or pointy they may happen to be.  (Leonardo seems to fight quite effectively with two swords without disemboweling anyone somehow)  You can either explicitly state this to your players, only give them blunt weapons, or maybe make them all magical 'training' weapons.  This allows you to fight almost any enemy (not just constructs) and they are just 'defeated' or knocked out when you're done. 

3.  Magical enemies that 'smoke' when killed (NexoKnights)

If you haven't watched NexoKnights they have a great example of this.  In the story monsters are summoned from a magic book and when they are defeated they 'poof' into smoke and travel back to the evil magic book.  You could also think of the ghosts in PacMan.  In this way you can have almost any enemy you want and the PC's can do whatever damage they want, but nobody is ever really killed.  This also has the side effect of creating re-occurring characters that can come back again and again to comedic effect. 

So for those that play with kids or have played with kids, what do you do?  Do you have any other ideas that could be used? 

~Dave