Candid thoughts on pixels, polyhedrons, and paper.
Let me start by saying up front that rpgKids is probably the best 3$ you can spend in beginning to foster the love of RPG’s in a child. Mr. Enrique Bertran (aka @NewbieDM) sent a call out to fellow gamer dads on twitter a few weeks ago, so I felt complied to answer him. After speaking to him I was given the honor to play test some of this delightful project before it came to the masses. I had been familiar with his rpgKids system only vaguely before this, having glanced over it a time or two. When it came to “playing D&D” with my son before it had always been some malformed abbreviated form of 4th edition I hacked up on the spot, no consistency. Thankfully with rpgKids that’s now a thing of the past and he has a simple yet understandable system to play with rules anyone can pick up within minutes.
This evolution of the system (1.5) is somewhat of a re-vamping of his rpgKids system he’d release a year or so ago. He’s made additions, changes, and clarifications as well as extra optional rules for magical items and bonuses/penalties during combat only to name a few. Also added in are special non-combat abilities for each of the 4 class archetypes which are the Sword Fighter, Healer, Archer and Wizard. The system is so simple and so easy to pick up I believe it could be used as a gateway not only for kids but even those non-gamer adults we all have in our lives.
The rpgKids rulebook is 24 pages, comes with everything you need to begin playing immediately and also provides printable grids for creating your own maps and tokens for heroes and monsters. Therein he’s also included a full blown adventure entitled “The Lair of the Frog Wizard” which is a sizable little adventure complete with flavor text and ready to print maps of the locales within the story.
So my second day at GenCon really wasn’t much of a GenCon day but I’ll tell you all about it anyways. I hit up the children’s museum with my son and wife, spent quite some time there dragging him to and fro. He had a good time for the most part, the line to get in was super long and I’m super glad I had a coupon to get him in for free.
Anyways after that we hit the hotel again and recouped a bit and then headed back to GenCon. After spending a short bit in the main hall, I didn’t have enough time to spend to make my epic ‘which game to buy’ decision before they closed the hall down, also bumped into an old buddy from high school.
I did get to meet @JasonMarker in the flesh afterwards though and that was one of the high points of my day – super cool guy, great conversation was had. Afterwards I wanted to go to the Ennies, so i made my way towards the grand ballroom and then after getting to the room where they were to be held I immediately had a mental flash forward in my mind as I looked inside – a quiet room, darkened and classy where an announcer would call out the categories and present medals to the winners and then speeches would be given. Then that same image flashed again where my son was roaring and whining up a storm and disrupting the whole ceremony, there was a 99% likelihood this would happen so I turned right around and headed to grab some food. So I decided to just skip the Ennies and just read about them on twitter, kind of a bummer I know but Congrats to ObsidianPortal and all the other winners, it feels awesome just to be privileged enough to wear the Obsidian Portal shirt around the con.
