Picked up the young adventurer books thinking that they had simpler kid rules, but I guess they have no rules (you’re supposed to just be motivated to buy a starter set or something). So I played with my niece (8) and nephew (5) without any rules and they LOVED it. Right after our first short adventure they wanted to play again.
I basically just made them roll for anything they wanted to do in combat and took turns as usual. Let them roll to respond to any attack back at them. No HP, just descriptions of injuries.
They loved upgrading their swords into go-go-gadget everything weapons with buttons to shoot spikes, or light on fire - so I let them. Even the boat they needed had to become a sword upgrade magic inflatable raft haha.
Anyway, highly recommend for young players.
Yep. This was how I learned to play. We played at tables or while walking around as needed, and for times we needed random numbers we had a little piece of paper with a big grid with numbers and we’d flick a pencil at it and wherever the eraser landed was the roll. Everything was d20 and we had very little idea of the rules, and over time as we got sourcebooks we started to absorb them gradually, but mostly we used the sourcebooks as a repository of lore as opposed to as anything prescriptive in terms of the mechanics we should be using.
10/10
You have to make sure you don’t have any power-hungry dickbags in your group that will abuse it I guess, but we had an absolute blast in every sense.
I have a core group of friends that I grew up with and we all loved role playing games. After using every gaming system you could (late 80s) we just knew how it worked. We’d play any scenario or setting with our common understanding a couple d10 and some notes for inventory and special abilities (or disabilities). So much fun. :)