I want to thank everyone for their suggestions. I’m going to reference this post in the future and will definitely use it. It just so happens that I mentioned this IRL and the DM of my game gifted me his unopened copy of Dungeons & Kittens, so I’m gonna start with that. But lots of great ideas here, I will use this to guide upcoming purchases.

It is going to come across as a strange suggestion, but Thirsty Sword Lesbians

Nothing about the ruleset predisposes itself to anything sexual in nature, and as noted in the sourcebook you can play non lesbians, non sexual, non romantic, non sword wielding characters.

The system is geared specifically toward exploring the difficulties and excitement and beauty of connections and interactions of people. You can run it in low fantasy, high fantasy, sci fi, reality, whatever you like. The rules serve to guide player interaction and foster interpersonal situations that are compelling and interesting (and, challenging, which is a great thing for developing kids minds). It does so with a rules-light, theater of the mind gameplay, which will give your kids plenty of room to flex their creative muscles and drive the story in big ways if they want to.

The caveat is that the official art is perhaps sometimes not strictly safe for kids and the flavour of some of the examples is obviously through the lens of romance/sexuality. With some mild sanitizing from your end you could have suitable character sheets and such for all ages and you can run with it from there.

Let your kids get tangled with some baddies who aren’t inherently evil, and some who are, some friends and companions along the way, all of whom have problems and worries and goals and are flawed and wonderful and human (or not).

TSL is all about larger than life, dashing heroes battling against insurmountable odds and winning, while hopefully finding family and introspection and resolution of their own internal conflicts along the way. I can’t think of a better environment to let your kids imaginations run loose.

@Weydemeyer Here’s my plug for the kid-friendly game @Janvanhouten and I released a few years ago: SODALITAS. It was crafted to play short sessions with too many teenagers, and works as fine with younger kids. Essential rules fit on a single page, and some tools come with it. If you like it, we also have 15 Adventures on a Single Page you might enjoy (there’s a bundle if you want everything).
https://jdrcool.itch.io/sodalitas

Magical Kitties Save the Day

There’s a game that I think fits exactly what you want: Magical Kitties Save the Day. It’s built as an introductory TTRPG, but that shouldn’t deceive you, because it’s got depth and sets you up for good play.

Why do I say that? For one, the game was built by Justin Alexander, who is a great GM educator. His books, blogs, videos, and interviews have educated me in TTRPGs more and better than anything else. Much of his knowledge was carefully distilled into Magical Kitties. So someone playing Magical Kitties will learn many of the fundamentals of GMing and have fun.

I wish I would’ve had this game when I was 8.

Maze Rats

Another game that comes to mind is Maze Rats. This game is also great for newcomers, but for different reasons. While Magical Kitties guides your hand so that you can GMing fundamentals, Maze Rats is a bit more like a playground that children can explore.

What do I mean by a playground? I mean that Maze Rats has less rules. It’s a bit more like there’s a bunch of toys that the players can choose to play with very few constraints. I suppose this ethos comes from how the game was created: it was playtested in classrooms with young children.

It might seem like Maze Rats doesn’t teach you to GM, but that’s not entirely true. Maze Rats has good advice that, if a GM were to follow, would result in good GMing. In fact, the creator of Maze Rats, Ben Milton, is also a good resource for learning to GM. It’s just that Magical Kitties feels crunchier and more structured.

So, which game should you choose?

I guess it’s a matter of trying either one and seeing how it goes. I’d start with Maze Rats, because the cost of failure with Maze Rats is much lower than with Magical Kitties; to play Maze Rats you only need a couple of minutes to read the rules, a couple of d6’s, a dozen or two of printed pages, and some writing utensils. If Maze Rats doesn’t work for some reason, I’d actually suggest you try Fate Accelerated (which someone else recommended in this thread) for the same reasons: the cost of failure with Fate Accelerated is quite low compared with Magical Kitties.

There’s a caveat to my suggestion to perform safe-to-fail experiments: if you or your children are exceptionally motivated and able to learn to GM in a structured way, skip Maze Rats and Fate Accelerated and jump right into Magical Kitties Save the Day. Further down the line, if you or your children are motivated and able to learn from a book, you might buy Justin Alexander’s book on GMing. This would open up the world of TTRPGs to you all, because a good GM can pick up almost any TTRPG and GM it well. However, as a default, I’d stick to Maze Rats, Fate Accelerated, or other similar lightweight systems.

I believe little kids don’t need any system. We, the adults, need the helpful structure.

In other words, pick something that inspires you and don’t worry about the kids.

Ok, one tip: Put stuff on the table. Dice, cards, minis, maps, plushies, …

Mausritter is very kid friendly!

I haven’t had a lot of experience with it, but I have found the simplicity of Quest nice. Rolls are determined with a d20 so that keeps the dice simple, and items and spells are handled with cards. There game mechanics lend themselves well to more role-playing or storytelling scenarios.

I don’t think they have physical editions anymore, just digital + printable versions. I backed it on kickstarter so I got the physical cards and books, so I can’t speak how well it plays with homemade materials. But the rule book and core deck are free!

I’ve had good luck with Amazing Tales. It’s very rules light, but has a lot of good set up for all sorts of different adventures - fantasy, sci-fi, Western, pirate, etc. My 6 year old has loved it. I also really want to try No Thank You, Evil, but haven’t picked it up yet.

The pathfinder beginners box is nice. Thing is 3 is real young. May have to help them a lot and might be good to have a gm character to give a little guidance to the party. Honestly when you use premades most of the heavy lifting is really on the gm, ie you. They just need to say I want to move to the creature or cast a spell or bonk em on the head. Hide the die rolls so you can fudge. If they like it going from there then pathfinder has a magic school campaign akin to harry potter but more in a more high fantasy setting.

Land of Eem sounds like it could be a good choice, “the game combines Lord of the Rings high fantasy epicness with a heavy dose of Muppets-like whimsy and a dash of Mad Max dystopia.” They have a free quickstart so you could try it out.

I ran hero kids for mine, started when the youngest was the same age. When I started the content was sparse but enough, now it’s got a monster manual, loads of pre built adventures and loads of extra bits. The extra bits are really important for kids they include outline drawings of the pre built characters to colour in, monsters to colour in character minis to cut out etc etc.

This helped me massively as it’s often went, I want to play hero kids now! And whilst they sorted out who they wanted to be, and even what pet they wanted, sorted their coloured dice, I could quickly select an adventure based on time and difficulty, and pretty much jump straight in with no prep. Obviously read the rules before hand

Youalso just needed to make the enemy “death” as suitable as you think the kids could handle, from the rat ran away to you chopped it in half with an axe.

I have GMed hundreds of sessions of Fate Core and I think is the best of all the systems for just getting the mechanics out of the way and having fun and letting the players go wild with their imaginations.

You can play it with the classic fate dice, or modify it to just use coins, a D20, whatever. There’s even an easier system called Fate Accelerated that boils it down that even a fairly little kid can grasp.

I like both systems because rather than try to be a “realistic” physics and combat simulator, it’s a just a loose set of mechanics for making any type of game.

Last week I ran a session that was the main characters getting ready for a fancy ball where they needed to convince the regional governor to quarantine the station against a deadly plague.

They prepared by:

• designed costumes and dresses to blend in
• invented a new makeup style to help catch her attention (that went on to become a huge trend in the net)
• organized evidence of the plague into a punchy short form video
• collected more data from the local station researchers
• planned how they would get the regional governor alone at the ball to have a few minutes word with her to make the pitch
• hacked into the station network to control the lights and music and see where everyone was

All of that played out with dice rolls using their skills.

Fate has an easy mechanic for preparing advantages in advance, so they were able to do all this before even showing up for the ball, so they rolled in with a pile of advantages like consumables they could use to boost bad rolls when trying to build trust with the governor.

At the ball they had to race against their competitors who were trying to sow distrust with the governor, stopping them while at the same time building confidence with the governor. Impassioned speeches, perfectly timed dance moves, the best etiquette at dinner, and even intimidating the lead researcher so he didn’t panic and cause the station to fall into a riot.

This isn’t even anything weird or crazy, Fate is more flexible than any other system: your players make an impassioned speech, swing from the rafters, or take the epic sniper shot. They can alter the fate of the universe with a new makeup style or the right cut of dress (my players spent a good ten minutes deciding if they should wear a princess cut or Cinderella cut gown!)

Highly recommend it for a kid’s game or adults! It’s just better for playing games that are only limited by the imagination of the players.