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Jump to:

• Age range
• Setting
• Your character
• Mechanics
• What did my kid think?
• Overall
• Where to find a copy

Hero Kids recommended for ages 4-10

Hero Kids is rated for ages 4-10 and has a range of difficulty (easy to hard) with their adventure modules so you can adjust based on how your child is handling the mechanics and various story elements.

Despite the age range, I did run this with my 2.5 year old kid, who had a lot of fun exploring pirate ships and messing around with the holiday adventures.  He understood the stories, understood the combat , and loved getting to roll dice.  He needed some help with understanding dice rolls mechanics at first, but I don’t believe this should be a problem for kids within the recommended age range. The Hero Kids rules fit in a small book or printable PDF, so there’s not too much to need to remember, and they are made with kids in mind.

With regards to content, there is a bit of combat in Hero Kids, but it is toned towards a PG rating, and you have freedom to describe encounters as you want, so you are fully able to moderate this portion of the content. For social situations and general premises of the various adventures, these are also geared at a PG level with elements sometimes being a little scary for dramatic effect… but not TOO scary.

Hero Kids spinning the classic fantasy tabletop RPG setting

The premade adventures in Hero Kids take place in a typical fantasy adventure realm, similar to what you would expect in D&D or Pathfinder, but they are made specifically for kids. They’re written at their level and content is currated to match what kids will probably want to engage with… and that is age-approrpiate for young players.

Adventures include the classic tavern with rats in the basement, wizard towers, pirate ships, yuletide specials, and a lot more, so you have many different options to choose from and can find a Hero Kids adventure that fits what your kid wants to play (because each kid can have way different tastes). 

There’s 13 premade adventures with a wide range of classic tabletop RPG settings to choose from, and, if you keep exploring, there are Hero Kids expansions that also branch into sci-fi and beyond.

Your heroic kid character in Hero Kids!

The core game has lots of premade human kid characters to choose from with different ability focuses (magic, defense, range, healers, etc).  From the expansions, you can play as other fantasy origins, woodland creatures (this is why my kid picked), monsters, etc who all have unique options as well. 

Making a totally original character in Hero Kids (so, not following one of the pre-mades) is pretty easy too, so your kid can play as anyone that they can imagine. It takes a few minutes to make a character and follows these steps:

• Assign 4 dice to your dice pools
• Determine what your normal attack will be (melee, ranged, or magic)
• Choose a special action that you make up or from one of the premade heros
• Choose a bonus ability from the list
• Fill your inventory from the list

And that’s it!  There aren’t a lot of stats or spells to assign and track, just a few core elements are enough to give each character a special set of abilities to make them unique. 

Mechanics in Hero Kids

Dice pools in Hero Kids: 

Hero Kids uses a d6 dice pool mechanic for all of its roles, which means you roll six sided dice equal to the value in your skill to determine an outcome.  

So, if you assigned two dice to your melee attack dice pool during character creation, whenever you attack, you roll two dice and take the highest number rolled as value you use.  

Combat in Hero Kids: 

Combat in Hero Kids was very streamlined, and my 2.5 year old was even able to pick up some of the strategy elements (albeit with a little help the first few encounters).

For initiative, all players take their turn as a group and all monsters take their turn as a group so there’s no individual initiative tracking needed, which makes it much easy for a GM who is wrangling multiple young players to manage the encounter. 

Each hero’s or monster’s turn is 1 action + 4 squares of movement, so it’s easy to quantify what you do and how far you move (no math conversions necessary to calculate from amount moved to squares on the board, and there’s no distinguishing between different types of actions).

When you attack, you roll your attack dice pool against the monster’s defense dice pool, and whoever has the highest roll wins (defender wins on a tie).  This means there’s no adding lots of dice, just an understanding of greater than/less than is needed.

Hero Kids also has options for advanced combat that you may want to introduce to older kids or kids already used to encounters; these include adding additional attack effects, combining effects, line of sight, cover, etc.  What’s good about this is it allows some scaling so you can make things more challenging as your child levels up and is ready to handle more, but it doesn’t put any pressure on young and new players to have to learn ALL the moves right off the bat.

Ability tests in Hero Kids: 

There are non-combat situations in several of the Hero Kids modules that require a skill check to get more information about the story, avoid a hazardous situation, or continue with the adventure.  

To do skill checks, your attack dice pools are used to represent part of your skill roll.  So, magic = intelligence bonus, melee = strength bonus, ranged = dexterity bonus, etc

Your skill check dice pool is created based on your applicable attack pool and inventory/special skills plus a base skill check die.  

For example, a tracking check would be: 

• Your magic attack dice pool (since magic = intelligence bonus)
• 1 die if you have the tracking skill
• 1 die for doing a skill check (all skill check get at least 1 die)

You then roll all dice together, pick the highest one, and see if that beats the number set for the test difficulty.  

This part was probably the most complicated one to explain to my kid because the dice were coming from multiple areas.  However, after he understood, it was actually a good foundation for teaching some basic math (i.e. you get to roll 4 dice because you get 2 from here, 1 from here, and 1 from here).  Like I said earlier, this is something that I think kids in the recommended age range would probably handle just fine after the first try, and that younger kids maybe just need a little bit of help from a grown up to master.

What did my kid think about Hero Kids?

My kid had a lot of fun playing the Hero Kids tabletop RPG!  So far, we’ve played most of the easy modules (since he’s a little young), and he loves the storytime parts and getting to roll dice to take on the baddies.

We did modify some areas to fit him – he has no qualms about smashing spiders or defending against wolves, but… for example, he wanted to try and talk to the giants in the Yuletide adventure instead of fighting.  We rolled with it and let him have a conversation about holiday decorations instead, and it still worked perfectly fine with the story.

While we’re playing, he’s super engaged, running around acting it out, clapping when something exciting happens, and getting excited when the encounter is won.  My favorite was when a werewolf changed in front of him… I pulled out the battle map and he yelled, “I need to get my sword!!” He ran off and came back with his little wooden costume sword standing ready to fight.  It’s been a great experience running these adventures with him.

Overall thoughts on the Hero Kids tabletop RPG:

Hero Kids was an awesome game to share something very close to a classic fantasy tabletop RPG with my kid.  It definitely fits for kids and has room to let them learn strategy and basic systems that are used in tabletop RPGs for “grown ups”. This is a good well-rounded system to start with, and has a solid set of premade adventures to let you get used to the system before making your own.  We enjoyed our time getting to check this game out, and I hope that you enjoy your time with this game too!

Where to find a copy of Hero Kids!

You can get a copy of Hero Kids on DriveThruRPG!

There’s a bundle there that is usually on a pretty hefty discount, and you can get the core rules and adventures a la carte as well.

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