Awhile back I got my 9-year-old sons the starter edition of D&D 4e. One of them really took a liking to it but the starter edition is...thin...on rules, options, etc. That said, I liked the way 4e set up the powers and rules for a younger kid to be on top of everything and play.

I'm looking at getting him some of the books for Christmas - what's a good list of purchasing priorities for 4e rulebooks?

Aeolwind wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2013 at 1:48pm:


See, that was my impression of it as well as what I'd seen everyone saying. But my kid was literally begging for it when he saw it in the store so I got it and frankly...it really is a good D&D PnP game for younger kids. You can pry 3.5 out of my cold dead hands but I'll play 4e with my kids as they definitely enjoy it quite a bit.

Just need to find out what books are absolutely mandatory and which are nice add-ons to decide how much to get for Christmas.

Great! That's really what confused me the most, the presence of multiple PHB's, DMG's, etc. Wasn't sure if the extras were needed or just nice.

I'll definitely look into getting some modules too. I'm a piss-poor DM so all the help I can get I'll take.

That sounds really helpful. Honestly they're familiar (sort of) with parts of FR just from playing DDO. I'd be half-tempted to toss them into somewhere around Eveningstar just for a tie-in, especially since one of them is less into PnP than the other but he's the one that's big into DDO. A tie-in there could really pull him in whereas the other one doesn't need anything to draw him in.

I don't really have to worry too much about overarching storylines. Tbh, the crappy little adventure in the red box set was good enough to keep them riveted for hours. Only bad part is that I think that adventure was designed with larger groups in mind. Even with me running an NPC to help them the fights were kind of ugly. I had to DM-down the difficulty at points for them to finish.

Darkrok wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2013 at 5:43pm:

Also, retreating to 'safety' then returning is a good idea & skill to impart.  You just spread out NPC's to fill in the spots, if it goes on more than a week though they should get 'recruits' back in the dungeon.

Yeah, this was something where even using strategy and tactics they were overmatched. Their characters had less hp's than the enemies, less special abilities, and were outnumbered 3 or 4-1. I just stepped down the hp's to a reasonable level to give them a shot because it was obvious that they didn't have a shot. We also had quite a bit of retreating too.

How is Pathfinder for kids? I know they talked about streamlining some things (which I like) and boosting single-class to make it viable (which I also like for these purposes) but I will say that for having 2 new players that were 9 years old 4e was really good in that regard.

http://www.dndclassics.com/

It's a site where WotC is selling .pdfs of various published D&D materials from all editions, including 4th.  It might be a bit cheaper than buying them at a bookstore or hobby shop, and you can print off as many copies as you need.

They also have a bunch of old, hard to find stuff from previous editions that you can adapt into your new campaign.

They also give stuff away for free from time to time, so it's totally worth checking out.

If you're combining 4th edition and kids, check out:

http://jamesstowe.blogspot.com/2011/09/dnd-for-8-year-olds.html

and his site (webcomic/game/blog):

http://sidekickquests.com/

I just spent about an hour on his site...looks like he's really close to a release date on this too. I think for the time being we're going to replay the redbox with characters that guy designed, though I'd still love to get a look at DND next as well.