Fiasco with 7-8 year olds? What could go wrong? ;)
Re:Ask HN: Tabletop RPGs for 7-8 Year-Olds
by Jtsummers on Thursday June 14, 2018 @01:30PM
(#17313466)
Well, if you use the standard playsets, hopefully a lot! Fiasco games are boring if the plans go right.
Oh, I know! I was just thinking of just how horribly and disgustingly wrong my games with adults have been. Such a great game. I do think you'd need to simplify some of the setup and game dynamics. Even with first time adult players, it usually takes about an hour for me to get everyone grokking the rules.
D&D 5th Edition does streamline a lot of things compared to 3rd and 4th edition. It also brings D&D (to some extent) back to its roots (your characters aren't veritable superheroes out the gate like a lot of them seem to be in 4th, for instance, and you aren't selecting from tons of classes across the various splat books like in 3rd).
Castles & Crusades is a D&D-like system that's fairly light and meant to call back to 1st and 2nd edition. No skills, no feats. No THAC0-like complexity in the rules. You have a target number to hit based on your primary stats, and modifiers based on the situation and abilities. A fair number of published modules of decent to good quality and if you have experience with making your own it won't take you long to come up with new adventures for them.
Fiasco (though you'll want to use different playsets than the book contains) is a very light but fun story-focused system. The main playsets are not at all kid appropriate, better ones for that age range are available online. It also has a stronger focus on imagination and storytelling versus mechanics (really, the mechanics only exist to set up the scenario and resolve a few things at two points in the play).
http://fiascoplaysets.com/genre:kid-friendly - I have no experience with any of these, so I can't comment on quality and actual kid-friendliness.
Dread is technically a horror game. But the mechanics are ludicrously simple. As the game master you talk to the kids and help them develop characters, and relationships between the characters. Then you put them in a situation. Whenever they do something challenging, they pull from a Jenga tower (7-8, this may be more difficult for them to do well, but there are other variations). If the tower falls, the character is out of play (in most Dread games this means dead, catatonic, severely wounded; with kids you may want to bring them back in but have the character unable to do much for a few rounds). Kids would probably have fun with it as the tension rises with the tower.
Both Dread and Fiasco can be used for any genre, fantasy, contemporary, horror, scifi. Just steal the mechanics and fit the experience to the kids interests.
Also check out https://rpggeek.com and https://reddit.com/r/rpg. Both are good sources for information like this.