How to run Dungeons and Dragons for kids: All the rules you need and none that you don't (Free RPG Day giveaway!)

So, the young gremlins in your life want to do this whole "Dungeons and Dragons" thing they heard about. Who can blame them? What kid doesn't want to explore a magical world, fight monsters, and get treasure?

I recently had this exact experience, and I am here to share my accumulated wisdoms.

When it has to be D&D...

There's a million RPGs for kids out there. ...If they'll accept that.

The problem is that the kids that really care (such as my 12 year old goddaughter and her 8 year old little sister who begged me to run a game as a communal birthday present) don't want to play "an RPG" - they want Dungeons and Dragons.

Unfortunately, the current D&D is not designed for 8 year olds. (It's not even designed for my brain, and I have lived several eights of years.)

What to do? The gremlins will surely smell a counterfeit.

My recommendation: Throw aside every D&D book you have and get the original, unexpanded "0e" rules from 1974. Open it up and grab the dungeon, town, and negotiating rules. Job done.

Or you can just keep reading because I've done all that for you.

0e is the simplest, easiest, and most imaginative the game has ever been.

A town and a dungeon

For our purposes you aren't going to need rules for naval battles or aerial combat on the backs of gryphons. Heck, I haven't even had wilderness exploration come into the campaign yet. (Yes, everyone had so much fun at the birthday one-shot that it’s now been going for almost a year.)

All you really need are the rules for dungeon exploration, social interaction, combat, and shopping. These things can fit entirely on 4 sheets of printer paper.

In fact, here they are!

(Or grab all the PDF resources I made in this convenient bundle.)

Simplifying the rules for kids

If you want to speed run to adventure, make everyone a warrior

The fastest way to get into the dungeon is to make everyone a Warrior and have them roll for starting equipment. (Using this convenient roll for equipment sheet.) This is a great option for kids that love castles and knights and barbarians. Don't bog the start of the campaign down with options they don't care about. (And heck, they can always choose to become wizards later.)

Basic Character Classes for the more discerning gremlin

For players craving more character options, the original game has 3: fighting man, cleric, and magic user.

Ditch clerics

I removed clerics. I myself don't really understand clerics as a concept, so I wasn't about to try to explain them to an 8 year old. As best I can tell, they almost entirely lack a player fantasy present in media outside of D&D. (Remember: kids aren't familiar with the game yet. They know fairy tales, not game tropes.) Rather than spend 30 minutes trying to explain, "It's like you're a prophet in a toxic relationship with a small, passive-aggressive saint," I just axed them. The game did not suffer in the least.

I replaced them with a homemade sneaky skirmisher/archer class, but even that's unnecessary: warriors and wizards are more than enough for fantastical adventures.

Here's player cheat sheets for them:

Warriors

Magic Users

Skirmishers

Oh, and I made everyone level up at the same rate. (Kids ain’t big on disparity.)

Here's new character cheat sheet with that:

New character & experience points sheet.

The simplest magic users: stick spells in spellbooks and call it a day

Magic in the original rules is somewhat unclarified: there's a list of spells, wizards can only cast each specific spell once a day, and there's some reference to needing to prepare them, but no specifics were given.

So, I just grabbed some spells and put them into roughly themed "books" (a single sheet of printer paper folded in half). Magic users get to choose what spell book they start with, which gives them individuality and flavor without any mechanical complications. They can use any spell in there book, but each spell can only be used once a day.

This lets you grab spells from anywhere (there’s about seven trillion online), slap them in a "book," and the hide them in the dungeon as treasure. Balance doesn't matter as much when the overpowered spell is something that you have to risk life and limb to pluck from the jaws of a sleeping dragon.

Here's some starting spell books to get the ball rolling for you:

The Tome of Lesser Life & Death

The Tome of Lesser Druidry

The Lesser Tome of Power

(These spells are rough reinterpretations/rehashes of spells that I took from 0e and a handful from Knave*. They all work.)

*Quite a fun game in its own right, but it's not Dungeons & Dragons.

Rename "Wisdom"

I still don't understand the difference between wisdom and intelligence, so I wasn't about to bust out a thesaurus and argue semantics with an 8 year old.

It is used for very little in the core book, primarily functioning as

...intelligence, but for clerics this time.

I just renamed wisdom "faith" and called it a day. It made its purpose super clear, and worked with or without clerics. It's the stat folks use when they raise a crucifix and try to ward off a vampire (which I allow anyone to do once per fight - in a world with both vampires and crucifixes, it makes no sense that only one job would be able to do this. Of course, if your faith wavers, the vampire no longer takes it seriously.)

I also use it as a humanity stat - if players are cursed or mutated, they may also lose Faith. If it hits zero, they lose their humanity and become monsters of the dungeon.

Condense the saves

The original game has a bunch of "saving throws" - rolls that you can make to save yourself (or minimize the damage from) just about every gnarly thing in the game: dragon fire, paralysis, petrification, etc. I condensed them down to three to keep things simpler for the wee ones.

You can see it here on the character sheet.

Oh, while I'm at it, here's the inventory sheet.

Embrace the 'hit matrix' (but tweak the armor so higher numbers are better)

I love the to hit table at the bottom of the character sheet: it just tells you what you need to roll in combat to hit anything in the game. You don't have to worry about bloated modifiers and loads of math attached to every roll. Plays just move the numbers down as they level up.

Best of all, it's on the players' end of things, so you as the referee don't have to deal with it.

That said, the original rules have armor ratings go down as they get better instead of up. (It's an artifact of an early draft that got condensed and scrambled in the final manuscript.) Kids (rightly) believe that bigger numbers are better, so I rejiggered the attack tables so that armor numbers get higher the better the armor is. It's just more intuitive all around. (This also lets you easily adjust difficulty on the fly. Player wants to do something ridiculous to attack this monster? The armor class goes up. Players have the high ground and the monster is sliding around in a puddle of strategically deployed marmalade? It's armor class goes down.)

Making a D&D world that kids want to play

Fill the game with stuff that they love

Since 0e expects you to make the world yourself and the monsters/spells/treasures are so darn simple, it's really easy to palette swap a few for things that you know interest your audience. My monster tables include creatures that players invented when they were younger, the kingdom is named after an imaginary place they made up one afternoon, you can get chocobos instead of horses, and there’s even a "Dunpeal" character type because I know that the 12 year old is going through a little goth-y phase. (It's just a reskinned elf. If in doubt, you can make any fantasy race you want by giving the elf a new paint job.)

A word of caution about giving the players new character types: I stick to things that are already existing wish fulfillments. My rule is that a fantasy race should be instantly understood by the players without requiring any explanation. If I have to spend precious table time telling people what a Q'zaxnrv is, I've turned character creation into homework, and made it about my creativity rather than theirs.

Modern D&D may have fully embraced being a character creation game, but 0e is an exploration game. Characters are built through play. (Which is exactly what kids want.)

Anyways, here's the "types"* and their bonuses.

*"Race" wasn't used to describe characters until later. In 0e, you just get to be a type. Man-type, elf-type, etc.

In the original game, "demihumans" have level caps while humans can level up infinitely (to counterbalance the demihumans' early bonuses.)

I've hand-waved it and just gave human types some simple bonuses to put them on par, mostly inspired by the human types in the monster list. (If I were going to do it again, I'd probably ax all demihumans and just have a variety of interesting human types: barbarians, sea peoples, cavemen, forest bandits, desert mystics, decadent city scoundrels - stories are full of a million human player fantasies, most of them already in the monster list.)

While I'm at it, here's the monster tables that I used for myself.

Don't over-prep: make a dungeon, put a dragon in it

Over-preparation is the number one place where would be campaigns are dashed against the rocks.

You don't need a world history or fully storyboarded storyline or ten thousand hours of how to videos or any of that. There's no need to purchase adventure modules or setting guides - you get to make it yourself, and it's so simple that this is actually easier that buying a pre-made thing and studying it.

You just make a place and let players explore it.

I stuck with one dungeon and one town. It keeps things focused and avoids having to prep the four corners of the earth.

Draw a maze. Put a dragon in it. (Remember that players will have to draw their own map based off of your descriptions: make it easier on yourself and stick with right angles and rectangular rooms. Just be sure to include multiple paths everywhere.)

Here's a start for you.

The rulebook suggests having 3 levels of dungeon prepared, but this is overkill in my experience. My players have yet to make it to the back of level one. Having one level and a couple of rooms of the next will be more than enough for an inaugural session of perilous adventure.

Remember: Town just needs a name and a list of items

If you feel like mapping out a little fantasy town (or sprawling city), more power to you, but I decided to focus on the dungeon. My players want to get out of town and into the dungeon as fast as possible.

Add some adults to the party to stack the deck in your favor

I roped my players' dad and my younger brother into the games, which helped momentum/decorum at the table... and also gave us some players who could get their characters killed without heartbreak.

Speaking of player death, I added a simple death save to take away the sting just a smidge, while still keeping player character mortality a serious threat. When a player takes maximum damage, they get one last roll to survive (with permanently character-changing injuries, of course).

Send a physical invitation

Kids love feelies. A proper raggedy paper invitation - sent days/weeks in advance with some dice and character sheets - builds excitement and sets the tone in perfectly:

After centuries, the long lost [DUNGEON/TOMB/TEMPLE/etc.] of [YOUR NAME BACKWARDS] has been discovered! Have you the courage, luck, and cunning to brave its perilous depths and seize its secrets?

Dare you enter the deadly and wondrous world of Dungeons and Dragons?

Burn the edges for bonus points.

Running the game with kids at the table

Make characters at the table & immediately play

It takes just a few minutes to make a character in 0e: roll 3 six sided dice for each Ability score, fill in the starting saves and to hit rolls, and give them a name and some stuff.

So, just do that and then throw them at the dungeon.

A lot of folks talk about having a "session 0," just to discuss what everyone's expectations are.

Kids' expectations are: PLAY THE GAME. None of them want to sit around a table and do homework for the fun they could be having. (You try telling at 8 year old that we've all gathered to not play a game.)

Start at the dungeon

In fact, you can skip the buying starting gear part by just having players roll random gear and letting them trade amongst themselves.

(Sprinkle some starting gear into the early areas of the dungeon to even things out. The mythic underworld is littered with the bones of would-be treasure hunters.)

Start with exploration, not combat

Exploration gets people thinking collaboratively right out of the gate: Which door should we go through? What about those bloodstains? What's that moaning sound?

All the decisions are made communally, and all questions add to the group discussion. (It also requires less mechanical explanation.)

Also, my video game days taught me that whatever players do first, they will assume is the point of the game. Hitting them with cooperative exploration sets expectations right where you want them.

Both combat and talking with goofy characters put players into a position where only one can really act at a time.

Enthusiastic description is more important than funny voices

Kids love what if conversations. D&D is just one long, extended what if conversation. You really don't need improv theater voice acting to do it.

Being able to describe environments and actions quickly and with enthusiasm is a thousand times more important than putting on funny voices for characters.

If you've ever held a flashlight under your chin and made spooky ghost noises, you have all the acting chops you need.

Just describe monsters and let players come up with the names

I took this straight from the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. It makes the whole world feel more mysterious. Kids love it, because they get to name the world, and spares you having to explain what the heck a Stirge is. (My players call them "Floomphs.")

Make players draw their own map (and dont's bother with miniatures)

Players having to draw their own map was a huge part of the game. I was a little scared, because I had never done that before, but it actually made exploration far more engaging than just revealing a player-facing map. This is a great task to give one of your planted adult players. (Give your mapper a 10% XP bonus for their troubles.)

Embrace the fact that rolling dice is a full body exercise

The 8 year old rolls her dice by hurling them across the room and then chasing after them to see what the result was. Even the 12 year old will go to another room so that she can get a running start for especially dramatic rolls.

Make players return to town at the end of each session.

This avoids the "what were we doing when we hit the pause button a month ago?" problem. Having the game divided into discreet expeditions instead of one continuous action movie with random pauses of indeterminate length makes things easier for everyone.

Make downtime real time

The time in between sessions is the same as the real world time that's passed: three weeks since you last played? Three weeks have passed in the game world.

This was standard for original D&D, and keeps things very simple.

It also means that elapsed time is a resource players can spend next session: training, deciphering a magical book, recovering from injuries, researching a new language in the library... There are a ton of things that players can "purchase" incrementally with time.

("Where do you stay?" is a very simple choice to which you can easily attach a temporary bonus for the session. Spent a month meditation on a mountaintop? Here's a d6 that you can add to any one roll requiring intense concentration.)

If players want their character to be jazz-hands special, make them play for it

This turns annoying player homework into adventure material. Does the Dunpeal want supernatural powers? Don’t try to come up with character features and turn it into a character building game: tell her she’d better find someone that can train her. (This also means that you don’t have to worry about balance as much – something can be overpowered if the players had to go through hell and high water for it.)

Have players declare an heir in case of their demise

I did this after the relatively easy first delve - it's a super quick and easy way to remind remind players that this is a deadly and perilous enterprise without actually requiring any fatalities (and softening the blow a bit if and when such things do come).

I allow players to name a not yet created character ("My cousin Shiela!") or any friend/companion that they have recruited so far - this is a great way to let players who want weird characters earn them through play. One of my players has named a two foot tall talking gecko-man that he rescued from slavers as his replacement.

Don't skimp on the languages

Negotiation is a huge part of the game: very few denizens of the dungeon will mindlessly attack on sight. Every intelligent monster can speak. Whether they can speak your language is an entirely different matter.

The rules explicitly state that only 20% of intelligent monsters will know the common tongue, so knowing strange monster languages is actually one of the most useful skills that a player character can have. The original rules give them out like candy: you get a bunch of free monster languages for your type (Elves can always speak Roc, for example), and then award a bunch of randomly selected languages for having a higher Intelligence score.

Kids love being the special one who can talk to something weird. (Our player who's fluent in skeleton has used it for all kinds of shenanigans .) Just take all the monsters you're using, throw in a few weird languages to give you future material, and give them to players randomly. (I put mine on slips of paper and had the kids pull them out of a big manilla envelope. It was a smash hit.)

Only give experience points for gold taken from the dungeon to the surface world

This is the default in the original rulebook, although it states that the referee can give XP for combat at their discretion. I don't.

Only awarding experience points for treasure retrieved from perilous places keeps players from developing the sociopathic inclination towards mass murder that marks so many video game RPGs, and keeps player motivations more aligned with adventure stories: don't risk your life if you don't have to.

It also makes for much easier and more satisfying calculation: you add up XP once, at the very end of the session.

How much treasure did you escape with? That's how much XP you get.

Be slightly amused by the fact that kids have longer attention spans than adults

Since attention span is no longer a factor of age but rather exposure to smart phones, don't be surprised if your adult players have the least patience of anyone at the table. The good news is that you don't have to placate them: as long as the gremlins are having fun, you are doing a great job.

Fight on

Here’s how the original creators signed off on what was to be a world-changing creation:

There are unquestionably areas which have been glossed over. While we deeply regret the necessity, space requires that we put in the essentials only, and the trimming will often have to be added by the referee and his players. We have attempted to furnish an ample framework, and building should be both easy and fun. In this light, we urge you to refrain from writing for rule interpretations or the like unless you are absolutely at a loss, for everything herein is fantastic, and the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way! On the other hand, we are not loath to answer your questions, but why have us do any more of your imagining for you? Write to us and tell about your additions, ideas, and what have you. We could always do with a bit of improvement in our refereeing.

In such a spirit, here’s all of my files as editable Word documents. (Except for the character sheet and inventory sheet, which are Google Docs. Just make your own copies.) Want to rename a bunch of stuff, undo my simplifications, give players that Q'zaxnrv* character type no one asked for? Go for it. It’s your game.

*Please just call him a bug man. “Bug man” is a player fantasy. His chitin exoskeleton gives him free medium armor. There you go!**

**Better yet, put a clan of bug men in the dungeon and make players find and befriend them before they can play as one. Now it's an adventure.

PS: And if you just want the PDFs, here they all are in one convenient bundle.

PPS: The adaptations, abridgments, and house rules I used were heavily inspired by two blogs. If you absolutely, positively cannot let yourself play the game without doing some research, here they are:

Delta's D&D Hotspot, written by a much better mathamatician than I am.

Dredged from the Gyoll by a blogger known only as Gucci Fuligin Cloak, and name I find so infinitely amusing that I'm genuinely upset I didn't think of it first.