It is no secret that the majority of the gaming that I do is with my daughter and her friends. With few exceptions I am the referee or game master and as such we typically play S&W core or Whitebox or some amalgamation of the two that I happen to be experimenting with.
However, there is another game that I play with my my daughter, one removed from the dynamics of the system created by the world’s first fantasy roleplaying game. At first this game was an experiment in an of itself to find a game that my than six-year-old daughter could understand. At the time she was having problems with all the different dice (still does sometimes) and knowing which dice was for when and what. The other system, a streamlined variant of the West End Games system (now known as d6), took away all the dice and was small and simple enough that I learned it in an hour and started to think of ways for my daughter to enjoy it.
Mini-Six “Cinematic Roleplaying Game” by Antipaladin Games is fast. Character creation can be done in two minutes and play is quick and seamless. Each of the provided settings has a number of premade enemies and monsters taking away the problem I have with Open 6. Likewise there are a number of premade spells and powers, again taking away the problem I had with Open 6.
So from a Game Master side the system as printed was a wonderful quick thing that I can have set-up for my daughter in under five minutes or right off the cuff (which is how my wife enjoys my game mastering). The best thing about Mini Six, however, is that its premade settings are very popular settings with the serial numbers filed off.
Perdition – Firefly
Farnsley’s Phantasm Investigations – Ghostbusters
Imperium in Revolt – Star Wars
Best though, is the separate setting available on Antipaladin’s website known as “The Door to Infinity” which is basically Doctor Who. Doctor Who, my daughter’s favorite TV show. The first night she asked to play “That Game” (“That Game” being any roleplaying game) and handed her and her mother new character sheets and plopped them into a museum overrun with
cybermen was one of my favorite moments in gaming. My daughter’s eyes went wide, she looked up at me and then looked back at her mom and whispered “at least they aren’t Angels.”
So why am I bringing this up? Because today, after not spending her allowance in nearly a year, my daughter begged me to take her to the comic shop. I waited outside in the car as her brother and sister slept in the back seat for nearly an hour. When she came out of the store with a huge bag I was worried and then out from the bag she pulled a sonic screwdriver flashlight and “Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space” . She wants to play it tomorrow night. She wants to run it … and truth be told I’m going to miss our old Mini-Six version of the game.
Sniff.
As a final side note, Antipaladin games also has a number of free OSR projects.
