My kid asked to play. Where do we start?
Start this weekend, with a game you print at home. Brave and Bonkers is a complete tabletop roleplaying game for kids ages 6 to 12: one rulebook, seven ready-to-play heroes at one page each, thirteen monsters, and a first adventure that fills about an hour. It costs nothing, there is no account to make, and the only things it asks you to find are dice, pencils and a printer.
What your kid is actually asking for
Kids rarely arrive at this on their own. Somebody at school has dice in a velvet bag, or a cousin plays, or they sat through twenty minutes of a video where six adults shouted about a dragon. Then they heard the name Dungeons & Dragons and decided that was the thing they wanted.
What they are after is the part where a kid says “I shout down the well” and a grown-up has to decide what shouts back. An hour of that is the whole game, with no board and nobody winning at the end of it. That is a tabletop roleplaying game, and this one is written for eight-year-olds.
Your three options
A boxed starter set is the obvious move, and it works well enough if your kid is eleven or twelve. Below that, most are written for players twelve and up, and you spend the evening translating at the table while a seven-year-old asks whether it is her turn yet.
A library program, a school club or a paid online game hands the problem to somebody who has done it before, which is worth a great deal. Take one if you can find it nearby. Most run on the school calendar or keep a waiting list, and the good ones fill in a week.
Printing a free game and running it yourself is the only one of the three with nothing to buy and nobody to wait for. The usual catch is that free games turn out to be fragments: a rules summary with no adventure attached, or an adventure that quietly assumes you already own the rulebook it was written for. This is the whole game.
What you need before the weekend
- A set of RPG dice, the seven-shape kind sometimes labeled polyhedral. A few dollars at any game shop, and a free dice app covers you if the shops are shut.
- Pencils, not pens. Kids change their minds about their own names, let alone their equipment.
- A printer and ordinary letter paper. Every sheet is one page.
- Three to five kids, and one grown-up willing to be the Game Master. A confident twelve-year-old can take that job instead.
Everything else is in the download.
What the first hour looks like
Ten minutes go on choosing heroes, and it is usually closer to fifteen, because the argument about who gets which one is half the fun and rushing it doesn’t help. Then Mrs. Pockle’s cat chases something down the broken well behind the bakery, the kids climb after it, there is one fight the party cannot lose, and the cat comes home. That is Adventure 01, and it fills about an hour.
Your side of it is smaller than it sounds. You read the marked text out loud, you ask what everybody is doing, and when a kid rolls you compare the number to the one printed in the scene. Run it tonight lays the hour out minute by minute if you would rather see it before you commit.
If your kid is younger than eight
Six and seven play happily with a grown-up beside them, reading the sheet out and nudging them when their turn comes round. By eight, most kids run their own hero without anybody beside them.
What decides it is whether your kid can sit through somebody else’s turn without wandering off, and there are sixes who can and nines who cannot. How old does my kid need to be goes through it properly.
Your next five minutes
Print all seven hero sheets and the How to Play page, even if only three kids are playing. If your printer does double-sided, put How to Play on the back of each sheet, and most of what a kid asks mid-game gets answered without going through you.
The kids pass the sheets round and read them, and one settles on a hero because of the picture, or a line in what that hero is good at, or a catchphrase somebody read out in the wrong voice. Give ten minutes to Run It Tonight while that is going on.