Halfway through kindergarten and my daughter’s reading is good enough to level her up from the easy triangle to the middling square character sheet.
Differences are:
* an adjective tacked to the front of her character noun: now she’s a sneaky superhero (+1 Fast)
* she wrote down her superhero’s knack and knows how to use it (I think it was formally available at triangle but she’d never actually read the power before)
* her companion gets Treats (an economy for cycling Cyphers) and its starting Cypher (cool companion power, awful name, do we really need to market the Cypher System brand at 6 year olds?).
And I think that’s it! The conversion tired her out though so we’re not playing again today. :-/
The character levels up along with the reading level?
Kind of; there are 3 complexities of character sheets that tack on additional bits.
Fraser Simons there are three grades of sheet that escalate the complexity of the game while being internally compatible. So my wife plays circle and my daughter played triangle and they intersected with the game in the same way.
The practical effect of leveling up your character sheet is gaining more cool stuff. It’s pretty motivating! My daughter was feeling salty that mom’s robot dog companion could do stuff and her pretty pony companion could not.
It’s the killer app of the game imo.
That is really damn cool!
I’ve been dreaming of ways to make that available and workable for adult games. Some folks just (don’t) want the extra overhead.
Other kid friendly tech: stats are spendable tokens so preliterate players can participate, resolution is a d6 against an arbitrary target, no modifier bigger than +1.
(Should really look into this for my son. I think it’s on the hard drive somewhere.)
Brady Hight was/is working on a game with varying levels of complexity, depending on what the player wanted.
I also am thinking of using bloody versus instead of Fight! in Burning Wheel. Hub vs spokes, I guess.
Jesse Coombs ooh yeah I do that all the time.
This is awesome and heart-warming.
Jesse Coombs You are correct! I like the idea of more or less complex rules for different players in the same game depending on their preferences.
I was thinking of starting my son in the middle, but reading this suggests I should maybe do a session at triangle first.
Lester Ward totally depends on the kid, yeah? I think the game itself has age recommendations as well. I decided to go for it because of the power-up motivator (she loved it), her reading, and her patience for the process.
Did you handle “try harder” pre- or post-roll?
I let her use Awesome after the roll. Works great, uses it up faster, gets her engaged with the Fun token economy.
Other rolls she has to spend a token beforehand. She never even thinks about it, and probably just assumes that’s the cost of rolling a die.