Fudge for Young Kids
The kids are at home and they're bored. They play "Let's Pretend" and end up running to Mom and Dad because the they can't agree on the some outcome in their game. Now's your chance to nurture that natural habit of roleplaying, sharing the fun hobby that you already love -- and what better way to do it than with Fudge? Find out how to ease them into it with the gradual introduction of all the tools of the gaming table. Soon, you'll be gaming together.
Introduction
One of the first things I thought of after discovering Fudge was, "Wow, this would be great to play with the kids!" (The very first thing was probably something like, "Hey, you could make any kind of character you wanted in Fudge.") But since at the time my kids were approximately four and zero years old, it was still a little much for them; and by the time they were old enough to play, I had already hauled out my old TSR Marvel Super Heroes stuff for my son.
That game was pretty fun for kids -- it had neat dice (d10s), a colored Universal Table to resolve all your actions on, and best of all, lots of full color cards with the characters on them -- not to mention the giant maps. I'd never been a miniatures kind of guy myself, but while watching my son play with the little cardboard standups of Iceman and Dr. Doom, something kind of clicked.
There is already some advice online for gaming with kids. The kids-rpg mailing list run by Sam Chupp has some good info in the FAQ and is a great place to ask questions. My suggestions are geared specifically towards two things: gaming with younger kids (rather than teens or pre-teens), and gaming with Fudge.
Playing the Game
Rules can be tough for pre-readers. My attempts to get my six year old son to make his own characters never really got off the ground. But role-playing, they understand. In fact, most of the games my daughters play on their own are pretty similar to LARPs, but with conflict resolution mechanics that boil down to 1) yelling at each other and 2) ask Mom or Dad for help. Most of my gaming with kids has really just been adding rules to "let's pretend."
First of all, I found it was helpful to start out with some of my daughters' toys, using them in the place of miniatures. There's a lot of stuff out there you could use: we used a My Little Pony once, and we've used Lego minifigs; but we mostly use Polly Pocket. Barbie seems a little too big for tabletop play, although that scale would open up the world of action figures.
Rules
Along with the toys, I came up with a very simplified version of Fudge. Characters come up with their name and description, then they get three Skills and one Fault. The Skills are at Good (+1), with everything else being treated as Fair (+0). The Fault could be a Skill that the character is somewhat incompetent in (it's at Poor (-2) rather than Fair (+0)), or could even be something like "Doesn't like to play sports" or "Allergic to flowers". The GM should try to make sure the Faults come up in play. Action resolution was just fudged all the way: the player would roll the dice and add their Skill level (or subtract it if one of the character's Faults are involved in the action), then as GM I just adjudicated the level of success. We later evolved to using Fudge Points, starting with three that regenerate every session. One Fudge Point can be used to get a re-roll or dictate a detail of the setting. For example, one of the players might use a Fudge point to say that the Wicked Witch had left the oven door open behind her.
Since I only had one set of Fudge Dice, I also printed the 3d6 and d% charts from Section 3.22 of the Fudge rules on Other Dice Techniques. My son (who is older, eight to ten years old while we used these rules) seemed comfortable with all three dice methods (Fudge Dice, 3d6, or d%), but my daughters seemed uncomfortable with the subtracting needed with the Fudge Dice. (I think it may have been the negative numbers they didn't like.) They liked counting the pips on the six-siders best. Since that took nearly a minute, the table lookup didn't add much time. I also had relatively few rolls compared to what I would do with an adult group, saving it for either direct character conflicts or to add suspense to an important action. Even combat was usually resolved with only one or two rolls rather than with the damage track.
As the kids got older and more experienced with the rules, I added more to them. First we got Attributes (Intelligence, Magic, Strength, Agility, Stamina, Will -- I had to define about three of those terms for the kids.) Then we started using wound levels, though the characters still weren't getting hurt very much. Eventually, for the Fudge Harry Potter game that my son and his friend were in, we were using rules for magic too. We used a very heavily modified version of "The Gramarye". I found that the kids were able to handle and remember more rules than I first thought they would be able to. After reflection, I remembered that they can also list off the vital statistics of all four hundred Pokemon. So the magic rules weren't much of a stretch.
Plots and Complications
With the kids, game play was pretty simple and straight forward. I usually didn't have wildly branching plot lines or multiple NPC factions. For Marvel Super Heroes, I almost played it as a super-hero combat game: this bad guy is here, these good guys are here, they fight.
With younger kids, it's even easier -- they love repetition. You know how a three-year old can watch the same video six times a day for a month and a half? They don't mind if you recycle their favorite fairy tales as gaming sessions, either. That's what they're into. It's like playing Star Wars d20 with Star Wars fans. A lot of kids' books and entertainment is surprisingly gameable. It tends to have clearly labeled problems or antagonists, and coming up with solutions to them is easy for the kids, too.
For example, my daughters love Polly Pocket, who is a little (about 2" high) doll with rubber clothes and some cars and a bunch of friends...kind of like a mini-Barbie. So when they wanted to play some Fudge, we got together a couple of the dolls, made the character sheet, and started playing. It was pretty similar to their usual play with the toys, except that instead of fighting about who got to do what, we rolled Fudge dice for it. The first plot was just a Hansel and Gretel rip-off where an NPC friend of theirs was captured by the witch, and the girls also had the help of a magical pony.
Later we had a Fudge game using Lego characters, where the characters were just quickly designed on what they looked like. They had four stats: Attack, Defense, Ranged Attack, and Toughness...it was mostly Fudge as a wargame. The wide variety of Lego available (we had Space people, Ninjas, kids from Hogwarts, some Arctic explorers, and one guy who looked like Indiana Jones) made for an interesting session. For the next one, we brought in a few small Pokemon figures, too.
How It Worked
Overall, my son, who is older than my two daughters, was the most interested in Fudge. The girls liked it too, but the younger one (who was only three the first time we started playing) would sometimes be very disappointed if she missed a roll. She didn't usually get like that if she rolled low or missed a turn in a board game, and I wonder if possibly the greater investment in her Fudge character might have made setbacks more disappointing to her.
My son was also more interested in the combat and action parts of the game, so he ended up rolling more dice. My two daughters seemed just as happy to play with their "miniatures", with only the occasional dice roll and me playing the part of the antagonists making it any different from their regular pretend play. I also noticed that of the three children, my oldest daughter was the most interested in adding things to the game world, suggesting new ways for the bad guys' powers to work, or new plans for them.
None of the kids used Fudge Points very much. I reminded them about them a few times, and twice we even used small glass beads to represent them. In retrospect I think this may have been due to my tendency to take it easy as a GM -- the PCs were mostly successful in their actions, and rarely even got injured.
For most of the games, I didn't even use Experience Points or any other form of advancement. A lot of the ones with the girls were one- or at most two-shot games and didn't need it. The Harry Potter Fudge game was an exception. I followed the guidelines from section 5.2 of the Fudge rules, but I think I may have handed out too many points, since the characters were powering up in their most-used abilities a little too quickly for comfort.
We also tried using music twice during the Harry Potter Fudge game, playing the sound track to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It added a little bit to the atmosphere, but I didn't really miss it after we rearranged things so that we couldn't play CDs in the gaming area any more. The kids didn't have any comments about the music, either.
Most of our gaming sessions lasted for between one hour to an hour and a half with the younger girls, to up to three hours with my older son and his friend. Like with regular players who you don't have a long history of gaming, you just need to watch for signs of flagging interest and wrap it up before it gets boring. The youngest daughter often didn't even last that long, wandering off part way through the game and leaving her older siblings -- but that was also something we'd accounted for in-game.
Ultimately, Fudge was a good game to use as an introduction to roleplaying games for my two daughters, and it's one we'll return to in future.
Some Untested Ideas
Some recent Fudge Factor articles have suggestions which seem like they'd work really well in games with kids. "Building Stories on the Fly" would be great with kids, especially since lots of times they'll never have heard of the story you're borrowing from in the first place. I also think a simplified version of "Fudge On the Fly" would work well with kids -- getting right into playing rather than spending a long time on working up a character is definitely more appealing.
While I haven't tried playing Fudge with any children that I didn't already know fairly well, the simple rules are easy to explain to even the pre-readers in our group, and there should be no problem with any kids that are old enough to sit down and play a board game. Using toys as miniatures seem to help with the younger kids, but may be unnecessary with the older kids.
