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Re: (TFT) Re: Kids and TFT

When we play any rpg my 7 year old son has a real problem with the possibility of having his character get killed. He loves to play Heroscape and Star Wars Miniatures and has no problem when his figures get wacked since, obviously, these are not full fledged people in his mind. They are more like playing pieces on a board game. But give him a rpg character with a name and skills, weapons etc. and he gets very protective of him. It's very interesting. I played a dungeon game with him and his older sister (she's 10) and he had to quit in the middle of the game because his barbarian got a little hurt and he became scared of loosing him. He wouldn't fight anything and wanted to simply leave the dungeon. (My daughter went on to win the scenario and my son's barbarian ruled the day!) 

--David O. Miller



  I have an 8, 6 and
3 year old. I'm not sure they're ready for a dungeon crawl...although they 
  don't mind taking over the galaxy on Star Wars Battlefront.
Based on my experience, 6 seems the minimum to get much into the game as a wargame. Even then, many of the role-playing aspects will be hard to "regulate" - kids younger than that just don't have the same concept of "fantasy" or same requirement for consistency within a world that adults do, so there will be a lot of referee/player clashes about "you can't do that". (Playing by canon helps some here).
Also based on my experience, boys don't mind hack/n/slash fighting, but girls will want to spend a lot more time on role-playing and developing relationships. This is probably pretty personality dependent, but your campaign probably needs to be able to support both if you've got both.
My experience is limited - kids now 6,10,13 and been playing for a couple of years. The 4-year-old was just *barely* interested when we gave him a strong dumb fighter and told him when to roll the dice and what he had to roll. His two older sisters were *thrilled* to discover the "mundane talents" (Baker, etc.) in the talent list. 
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