Initial Thoughts #

I’m 95% sure this idea came from an episode of the Play;Write podcast though I can not find the episode by searching the blurbs on their site. Whatever their idea was, this one has been occasionally bouncing around in my head as either a video game, board game, and now a role playing game.

The elevator pitch is that you run a daycare and send the children into a dungeon to gather loot for you. No one will suspect anything as long as the kids don’t get too hurt, but if too many kids get hurt then your scheme will be discovered and you’ll get shut down. I’ve been on a bit of a Solarpunk ideas kick lately, so this scheme may not be “secret” and just be how daycares are run in this world and have the theming / genre lean into some of those aesthetics

Party Comp and Dungeon Style #

Right now I’m picturing having parties of 4-5 kids you send on a trip into the dungeon and then something brief happens to resolve how well they did on that trip. You wouldn’t RP a full excursion like you would in D&D with a full party. Two possible thoughts for how this happens:

(a) A few rolls for the full dungeon adding party buffs to the final outcome.

(b) A hex crawl style where you roll for each square / room.

I’m leaning towards the hex crawl style right now because I think it’d be fun to have a massive dungeon to slowly explore and would allow for more base building in the game (which I am leaning towards a lot of in this game).

Kid / Child Leveling #

As for kids stats, I thought it’d be fun to have their “age” be how big the dice you would roll for them. So the youngest children would be d4s and the oldest would be d12s (with d20s reserved for special things). This would give you 5 “years” the kids could be which would line up with elementary aged children (1st thru 5th grade). When kids complete a mission or a run or some quick milestone they’d level up by gaining new feats to help buff their rolls. They age up each “year” with a year / season having a limited number of trips you could send kids on. They keep their feats as they age as a way to indicate experience. Older kids that come into the daycare won’t be as good as their peers who have been around as long. This would also encourage having mixed aged parties to try and get younger kids experience and still be successful.

Skills, Feats, ect. #

The main power of the kids comes from a (hopefully) big list of feats they’ll be able to grab that will give them boosts in different contexts. I don’t know if I’ll have a point buy system where they can spend XP on 1 BIG feat or like 4 little feats. I also like skill trees that don’t tie down future choices too much or that let you make wide characters without making them useless.

Abilities #

I want a low number of abilities that need to be worried about since there will be many kids at once that need to be managed but I keep coming back to some variation of the 6 found in D&D / Pathfinder. I am thinking that having 3 might be ok and then have feats that would help in scenarios where dexterity or strength would be different things. GURPS’ 4 primary with derived stats is pretty enticing too.

This Game’s Abilities #

I like a generic Luck ability and want something like Charisma for leading / convincing skills. I think a Strength or Attack ability would useful, but kinda want to separate lifting a tree and hitting someone well. Defense and Health make sense together. Intelligence and Wisdom make some sense combined because these are young people.