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Old School Essentials House Rules when playing with kids

Aug 19, 2020

Been running two adventures this far with my young son (almost five years old) with the Old School Essentials rule system. It’s a modern layout of the old B/X rules.

Its been working great this far and we have played both Winters Daughter and the one-pager Please go to sleep, Arthur Cobbleworth.

We added some minor house rules to make things extra fun:

  • Crits: On a natural 20 on an attack dice we double the damage roll (we thoroughly enjoy the mini celebration every time you get that sweet 20 on the dice)
  • 0 HP: When a character reaches 0HP we do not instantly kill him. Rather he passes out and we make him permanently injured by loss of an attribute point.

I will add to this list as we discover more things we’d like to tweak.