Tell me Veeky Forums how would you run a game where all the PCs are children?

I'd have it be a series of character arcs.

Tell the story of the PCs from childhood, to young adulthood to later life. Spending a few months on each.

>Those are combat-oriented action shlock and child characters wouldn't be appropriate for them.

>Not refluffing the combat as food fights

A M A T E U R

But what actual sorts of mechanical conflicts would apply and be relevant during the younger eras?

fuck i haven't thought about sally mann since ken rockwell trolling was still a thing on /p/

If I really need to satisfy some bizarre urge for child on child violence, I'll just play a round of Lunch Money, a somewhat bizarre and brutal game about kids beating the shit out of each other over loose change.

40k.
Juves struggling for survival on the outskirts of an underhive settlement.
Do they join established worker clans as apprentices, try out for gang membership, attempt to impress a guilder into taking them as an employee, petition the mechanicus/ecclisiarchy into admitting them, or try to go it alone and hopefully survive long enough to develope a reputation?

Should be obvious OP.

I could vaguely see it being done well. But it'd need to be a GM I had an enormous amount of trust in. That could so, so easily just turn into a boring slaughterfest trying to use that they're children to amp the shock factor of the violence and brutality of the setting, which is just overplayed by this point.

Really fun game, especially as a semi-creative exercise with friends, but even after playing it 10,000 times I wish they'd just put the rules text on the cards.

Battles with rival gangs, intergroup conflicts, in your adulthood that kid you used to fight is now the crime boss and wants a favour

Treasure hunts, investigating legends, leading to unlocking future power

Mentors that teach you magic/fighting, you get involved in their life later as you realize the fallibility of age, having to finish their lives work after they die

Yeah. I can understand not wanting to compromise the creepy as fuck art, but it does make it way too much of a headache to play. Although you can find various cheat sheets and such that make remembering what various cards do and how they interact easier.

Online, so I could pretend the other players really are children. Makes it harder to masturbate otherwise.

You need something as a draw besides just "we're kids".

Magical Burst is a pretty good example; you're magical girls so you children but also there's a lot else going on.

>You need something as a draw besides just "we're kids".
Cute lolis on an adventure? /a/ would be all over a campaign like that.

Look at Made in Abyss, which was popular lately. It had a cute loli on an adventure, and a cute shota, but there was a lot more to that. It was cute kids on a one-way trip to a mysterious place in search of a lost parent, with lots of weird monsters and monstrous people and suffering and a sort of gritty grubby not-at-all-sexy human body functionality (including nudity) creating an underlying visceral tone only periodically punctuated by full-on gore. The fact that the characters are children is important, but it is important as something that underscores and interacts with the other themes of the work.

I'm aware of it.

I'd run very far away.

I played a game at a convention a few weeks ago called D&D
It's not dungeon & dragons though, it's the short for "Doudous & Dentiers" which I could translate to "Dolls & Denture"
It's an horror game where you either have to play an old man or a kids. Most of the party was composed of children, it was tons of fun

I'm soon going to run a one shot and here's what I'm going to do
>play up on the fact that adult won't always believe what you said
>make the players trying to solves the situation without brute force as children are often quite weak

CHILD MURDERER! CHILD MURDERER!

i already do

>parents who actually love you costs xp
No wonder I am awesome but have shit parents!

Liam O'Brien did this on Critical Role, but unfortunately they all quickly got eaten by a Demigorgon and moved on to surreallismville where being kids didn't matter because all the surrealism just treated them as adults anyway.

...

They all take the Kid Hindrance?

>you all start as child soldiers and gradually grow up
lol

Exploring a mega dungeon.

My friend tried. He made a campaign with his homebrew system based on Scooby-Doo where the characters were ten year-olds solving a mystery. The campaign was ruined when someone figured out the entire plot, twist, and villain an hour into the first session.

I've played a fair bit of non-combat orientated WFRP so yeah it would work fairly well for playing as kids.

Solving puzzles, uncovering mysteries and the warhammer world is weird enough that you can add some combat with enemies that are of a suitable level for kids to deal with.

NWoD: Innocents

...

There's always the good old trope of "something is happening to the adults".

Wouldn't be too hard to use that in any setting with magic.

On other rulesets that might fit child characters specifically, Don't Rest Your Head can be added to the list.

Do tell.

I don't remember all of the details, but it took place in a modern setting with magic. The PCs were just Velma, Daphne, Shaggy, and Scooby, because we only have four people and no one wanted to be Fred, except ten years old. There was a monster running around some farmland outside of a small town, and as a joke, the guy playing Shaggy said it was the banker (note that we hadn't encountered any bankers or banks to this point, we were barely into the first session) using illusions to scare off the farmers so he could buy the land for cheap and turn it into a city. We learned only slightly later that this was exactly correct and the campaign was ruined. We defeated the banker by catching him in a trap, though, so that was fun.

All the players are the first homo sapiens sapiens, they are all kids because they are the first one and no homo sapiens sapiens reached adulthood yet

I would add even more rape.

aw man this picture brings back good memories

I had an idea for one (3.5) where the antagonist is a little girl who's been hearing whispers from a moonbeast from the far realms who plans to use her to cause enough discord to summon them into the material plane. He teaches her necromancy and she goes around surreptitiously messing up the whole town by causing personal conflicts that wouldn't otherwise exist and making people commit suicide over misunderstandings. The whole thing begins with a flashfoward of her sitting on top of the moonbeast while it and its friends rampage throughout the town and neighboring towns, calling it "snowball" or something like that because that was the affectionate name it had given to itself, which is the town's fate if the PCs don't stop her.

Basically all of the adults think she's innocent, but you and the kid PCs know what she's up to. There's also an adult priest (who's a bona fide spellcasting cleric, rare in the low-magic setting, although he isn't quite aware of it- basically he and the girl are the only spellcasters in the game save for supernatural exceptions) who sort of knows what's going on and acts like the main quest giving NPC. You have to figure out what her plans are and foil them so that peace can be maintained, while trying to expose her to the skeptical adults. It's usually low violence except in direct confrontations when she summons zombie kids and things like that.

And a metric fuckton of kids' stupidty. Seriously, she had it coming.