This post is a continuation of my ‘musings’ on the topic of why I am focussing on 4E for my role-playing, and in this blog, begun here.

A second reason is that I’ve used 4E to get into role-playing with my kids: an 11 year old (10 when we began) daughter and a 9 year old son. This happened by chance. As I mentioned in the previous post, I’d started role-playing again with an old school friend (Ian) This unfortunately wasn’t regular, as he lived on the other side of the world from us! But when we were playing, my son would hang around, copying the maps Ian made as he explored, rolling some of the dice etc. Basically he was pretty interested.

So, sometime later we rolled up a character together – a Dragonborn Ranger! (don’t think Character Builder was out at this point, so it was old-style!) I put together a few quick encounters, and off we went! He loved it! Then, a bit unexpectedly, my daughter also wanted in on the act (not unexpectedly as a girl, just that she hadn’t shown much previous interest). So out came the dice again, and we had … An Eladrin Ranger! Both Beastmasters (drake and cougar respectively) also btw – both kids love their animals!!

I added a couple of NPCs to round out the party roles, and off we went on our first full adventure (actually i also tried to get my wife involved at this stage, but that didn’t quite work out… RPGs don’t seem to be her thing). With busy family lives, we don’t seem to get to play as much as I’d like, but they’re pretty much at 3rd level, and are really enjoying it. I’ve kept it reasonably simple – we haven’t worried too much about backgrounds, or much ‘world’ data at this point – but the role-playing aspects are coming along, they’re cool with skill challenges, even if they need a bit of hand-holding, and my son can’t get enough combat in!

The 4E rules/style really seem to work well for kids – the consistency of the rules really helps them, as does the visual nature of combat I.e with battle maps/tiles and minis/tokens. They’re getting better at thinking tactically and working together – took a little while to get them fully in the sense of not being competitive with each other!

In short, we having a great time with 4E!