Unrelated but I wanted to share...

So my little girl turned 5 and wanted to play "gaming" with daddy. She wanted to be hawk girl, we made her a character and started playing. She liked it it was like super-secret reading and math exercise as she had to add things together and tell me which was bigger. It made learning fun for her and I realized she was better at role playing than half the adults I knew. The kept touching her ear and talking to John "John I need help, john they have guns, John I need paint." type stuff. Her first adventure was someone was steeling all the color from the city. After beating them, she decided to paint the city so people had a nice place to live. Each adventure took only 20-30 minutes. But she was loving it, and having to read the names of the villains or her character sheet helped reinforce her sight words.

Excellent. Very cool. Kids tend to be really great roleplayers because they really want it to work and we really want it to work for them. Most of us would probably rather not reject an idea a child gave us; we'd build off of it, in order to encourage them.

Hero Kids is a cool rpg with just this kind of stuff in mind. <a href="http://herokidsrpg.blogspot.com/p/hero-kids-overview.html" rel="nofollow">http://herokidsrpg.blogspot.com/p/hero-kids-overview.html</a>

I'm a fan of some of the simpler RPGs made with kids in mind. There's one, I'll have to find the PDF for, that I found on Penny-Arcade a while back during their first venture into the Lookouts series, which basically is a very simplified D&D style encounter where the Players are characters with simple stats and two moves learning combat by fighting beasts that their teacher lets out of cages two at a time. Quite fun for a first-time session with the kids, and actually not too boring for the adults.

Good stuff. I have seen kids come up with a lot of cool ideas. Our local area has a D&D group we started for 9 and ten year olds. Lots of times the adults are amazed at the out of the box solutions kids come up with for a story or scenario challenge / problem. Rock on.

Cool, I did not know there were so many kids focused RPG's already out there. Looking at them, I think they look cool. I will let my daughter pick one of them. (She likes being allowed to make decisions). And you are right about thinking outside the box James. It makes me wonder why we try so hard, when some ideas seam so simple to her, and I think "Yeh, that would work".

yes. Because they are not fixed into go to work, pay the bills "practicality."

100% agree. the kids we play with are from the other gamers who want to teach them so that in years ahead they can join the D&D group.