I’ve been running a D&D 5E game with my daughters, and they’ve been enjoying it, but when the dice are not kind, they can get frustrated – my youngest especially. I bought them their own dice at Gen Con, and my eldest really wanted to get into using them with D&D. We got back into our game and my youngest was once again getting frustrated. I was rolling really well and she wasn’t doing so well.
I decided to shift gears. I got down Kiss My Axe from the bookshelf and started porting the characters over, asking my daughters what they wanted their characters to do, what was important about the characters they had been playing. Kiss My Axe was already every much like Nefertiti Overdrive when it came to action scenes, and the system is loose and easy, but I did hack it a bit to make it even easier.
Man, they took to it like martial artists to a bar fight. My eldest, especially, got into describing crazy scenes and the silly things that happened to the villains they were beating the heck out of. Failures abounded in D&D. There were only three failures after I took on KMA.
I made a few changes to how we played, because KMA uses Sword Noir‘s basic fight system in which initiative is gained and lost, and if you lose initiative you’re in big trouble. I went with Nefertiti Overdrive Quickstart style of fights – the villains can’t really hurt the heroes, just annoy them with problems. The girls got penalty dice for failures, which they could shrug off by rallying themselves in the fight (another success in combat in which they didn’t actually attack the badguy).
We had an absolute blast. I’m in the middle of jotting down the hacks I made as we played. We’re playing again tomorrow (I wanted a couple of days post-Gen Con do be with my family, so I have time off), and the system will be slightly tweaked to make failures a little more possible (though not much – I want them to succeed about 80% of the time). It’s simpler than even Nefertiti Overdrive and forces them to do some math and be creative.
I’m a very happy daddy right now.
You can find Kiss My Axe here.
You can find Nefertiti Overdrive Quickstart here.