Can Young Children Play Dungeons and Dragons?

I have been playing D&D with children for quite some time now. Children enjoy playing "the world's greatest role-playing game” as much as adults, but playing with kids has its own special type of loot to be found.

I have found that young children can certainly play Dungeons and Dragons. However, the game is a different experience than that of one played with adults. Young children also need a lot more guidance. Luckily though, children have an easier time with the suspension of disbelief.

In the following article, I will explore some of my experience with introducing Dungeon and Dragons to young children.

How I Started

I started my son, who is now 10 years old, at the age of 6 playing Descent: Journeys in the Dark Second Edition. He immediately took a liking to it and we had hours and hours of fun. At first, I would play the “Overlord” (Descent’s version of the Dungeon Master (DM)) but after a while, we switched to playing more of the co-op adventures.

My daughter, who is now 6 years old, has never really taken to that game. “It’s only killing.” “I can’t read it” “The zombie is scary.” “Don’t make that sound.” were some of her reasons.

After playing Descent for some time, I started to feel the pull back towards D&D. I had played AD&D as a teen and remembered the vast fun we had in the basements of our teenage homes.

I was lead to Hero Kids (affiliate link) by an old friend and purchased the entire package and began to lead my kids down into the dark searching for rats and bats. Although Hero Kids, was quite accessible, I found it to be cumbersome in times when they wanted to do things that were not simply “attack.” I found them saying phrases like “I want to book that, to see if I know anything.” I started adding DC checks to Hero Kids that were more akin to D&D.

After finding that Hero Kids lacked the system to adjudicate things they wanted to do I turned to more adult-targeted games.

Dungeon World

I had found both D&D 5e and Dungeon World (DW) at roughly the same time. But due to some guidance from that same friend that introduced me to Hero Kids, I rejected the idea of playing D&D 5e. He told me that D&D 5e (The starter set) wasn’t balanced enough to be played with less than 4 heroes. Admittingly, the adventure that comes in that set, The Lost Mines of Phandelver, is not designed to be run with 2 or 3 player characters (PCs). However, I have since found that D&D 5e is totally playable with a small PC count. (more on this below)

So, into DW we delved. DW is a remarkable game, simple mechanics if the DM (aka GM) knows the system. It is great for “theater of the mind” and my kids took to it. But where it lacks, is in the available pre-made content. And with kids, the “empty sandbox” nature of DW, creates a demanding task that falls on the shoulders of the DM. Kids, I have found, tend to look to the GM for most everything that is not started with the personal pronoun “I...”

So, I started to bend toward D&D 5e again. And finding all the plentitude of content on the web, free for grabbing, or cheap enough to pick up. I took the leap and started my own campaigns.

Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition

Dungeons and Dragons is not a simple game. There are a lot of rules. 5th Edition (5e) has gone a long ways to simplify the game in comparison to AD&D, and other editions since then, so I have read elsewhere, but it is still a hard game to master.

The first difficulty my kids encountered was the character sheets, but coming from DW, they had a small prior education in some of the stats (mainly the ability scores, strength, intelligence, etc.) and this didn’t need to be carried forward.

DW had also taught the kids to tell me what they wanted to do rather than to look at their skills and try to find a way to use them. This created, what most people would agree, a better immersion into the world. They didn’t need to know what stealth meant, they just needed to say they wanted to sneak over to the goblins, and I the DM, would tell them to roll for stealth (and explain the mechanic for this).

My kids, have English as their second language. They have been learning English their entire lives, but they don’t use it as their majority language, rather they use Chinese in school and with most interaction in their lives. This creates an obvious weakness in their reading ability.

So when my kids turn to their character sheets, it tends to take them a bit of time to find “Stealth” sandwiched between “Sleigh of hand” and “Survival.” But, if my 5 year daughter can do it you can do it to. It just requires patience.

Know the Rules

Matt Coville, in his “Running the Game” video series, often says that the DM is not responsible for knowing all the players’ rules. Although I agree with this, especially as an encouragement for new DMs to get started, I would add the caveat that your players need to be able to read. Spells and skills are not written for children to read, especially ESL speakers. I have found that if I don’t know the skills, and have not done my homework, as well as have not continually reminded my children of their skills, they certainly fall into the repetitive hack hack hack pattern.

There are seldom times during my games when I sit back, tapping my fingertips Matt Mercer style, while my players discuss elaborate plans of infiltration. Kids, need guidance on what they can and should do. However, this does offer another benefit.

Railroading

It’s a common belief now that a railroad-style adventure is of lesser quality than that of a more sandbox-style. I have found the opposite true for kids. Kids want to be told a story. Yes, they like that they have effects on events, but they are usually not capable of molding muddy clay into an intricate beholder mini. They can’t write the story for you. This, as mentioned above, is one of the shortcomings of DW with kids.

So, what I have found is that, if you give the kids an ally NPC, they tend to look to them for guidance and you can adjust this flow of information as you see fit to encourage agency as well as to add guidance.

Kids also bite empty hooks, no need for dressing it up with a juicy, sweetened, worm, just to get a nibble.

Ignorance

Another value of kids’ lack of knowledge is that my kids can’t read my Monster’s Manual, and they don’t have many preconceived notions of what things can and cannot do. This does require that you spend time, usually with an NPC, educating your heroes on the dangers of allowing that shadow to give you a hug. However, that makes for a good role playing session.

Kids don’t argue with you about what a monster can and cannot do. They accept rulings as the word. As long as you describe things, kids will certainly latch onto your every word and often beg for more.

Sessions

Children are often attributed as having short attention spans, and sometimes this can be true. I have found that this is quite a benefit as a DM. It means that I only need to prepare a short NPC interaction and a single combat encounter at most, and even sometimes a single combat session can lag over into two game play sessions. It does do harm to the immersion, but the childish version of suspension of disbelief does allow them to jump right back into it.

Pulling Punches

Some might see this as a fault, but I prefer to be optimistic. That is that there is certainly a need for fudging numbers and faking rolls. Kids don’t take the death of a character so well, and rolling up new characters, learning the skills of that character, can be such a chore, that I have found that letting them live is the lesser of two evils.

I certainly take my kids down to 0hp at times, but I often use an NPC ally, (sometimes rolled behind the screen) to help them make their death saving throws. I definitely don’t add debilitating lasting effects. My daughter still runs to me, hugging me, and begs me not to let her druid Zolana die.

Perhaps lovers of gritty, rule lawyer might disagree, but I found that the fun is what matters.

In Sum

I have found that my ESL children are more than able to sit down the table with me, have a great time, with voices, ideas, and dice rolling and come away feeling energetic afterward. Sure they don’t have the ability to independently grasp all their rules, and I need to know them better then they know their selves, but they surely surprise me with inventive ways to handle the problems I set before them.

If you have kids and are considering D&D with them. Don’t hesitate and just let them play.