Ideas Kids Made Up

I am eternally charmed by the ideas little kids (ages 12 and below) make up when allowed to create their own settings and/or run games. There's a unique combination of imaginativeness, cleverness and creativity there I almost never find anywhere else, alongside the fact that their opinions of what various fantasy tropes "should" be like still hasn't been calcified by exposure to the classics. Every so once in a while people try to create a game that would feel "as if" it was made up by children but it never really works - it always either ends up looking ridiculously infantile and retarded (real kids are way smarter than that) or it tries so hard to be deep and profound it misses the point (real kids don't actually have deep universal insights, either).

Have you either ran a game for/watched children running a trpg game? What cool ideas did they have?

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>I am eternally charmed by the ideas little kids (ages 12 and below) make up when allowed to create their own settings and/or run games.
Put some of your examples first.

Off the top of my head:

* "Werewolves" are not shapeshifters but just a race of pointlessly evil upright walking wolves. And by "pointlessly evil" I mean they will actually do things for no other reason than "it's evil".
* A village of tiny gnomes which, for (presumably magical) reasons shrinks people with every step they take towards it, until by the time they arrive they're the "right" size to enter. By digging through the cave "ceiling" and dropping on top of it from above (thus not taking steps towards it on the same level) the PCs were able to arrive kaiju sized.
* It's taken for granted that fantasy worlds are planets and it's possible to fly between them in spaceships, which are all from Star Wars and have lasers and proton torpedoes because why not.
* In the far future, all humans are Jewish. The only explanation is "in the future they figured out it's cooler."
* Dragons have "50 hearts", for in case one gets stabbed through. 49 are "weak", though, so you can get more mileage out of identifying and stabbing the "strong" heart.
* Trolls don't breathe through their noses, only smell. It's not that weird except for the fact that the kid felt it was important to mention, which I found hilariously bizarre.
* Rings (presumably from the Sonic video games?) can be used interchangeably with gold coins.
* Ninjas.
* A race of ancient "Star Giants", now extinct, who were so big they were practically geographical features. A quest into a star giant's tomb required mountain climbing gear to get up a step on the floor. The main room of the tomb was so big (from the PCs point of view) THEY COULDN'T SEE THE OTHER WALL BEYOND THE HORIZON.
* The alien mothership is "twice, no, three times larger than the sun."
* Magic doesn't work in space, due to lack of oxygen.
* A race of witches (witches are a race, for once) whose lower halves are connected backwards to their bodies. The kid felt obliged to add that this does mean their "butts are up front".

>* Magic doesn't work in space, due to lack of oxygen.
>* It's taken for granted that fantasy worlds are planets and it's possible to fly between them in spaceships

This is basically spelljammer

Yeah but in spelljammer you fly around in "whimsical", "fantastic" space sailboats. This was just some kid who thought Star Wars was cool and saw no reason why a fantasy world shouldn't be able to have X-wings.

A child after me own heart

I mean, he's not wrong.

Also, the sense of scale is hilarious on the Star Giants and the alien mothership, reminds me of when I was like 9, drew a mecha and labeled it having 50km thick armor.

>A race of witches (witches are a race, for once) whose lower halves are connected backwards to their bodies. The kid felt obliged to add that this does mean their "butts are up front"
that's hilarious

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A few of these are actually interesting, like the werewolf and Gnome ones. As is dragons having redundant Organs (actually given their size they probably aren't redundant)

The magic = oxygen bit is interesting to contemplate the implications of

The rest is shit

>In the far future, all humans are Jewish. The only explanation is "in the future they figured out it's cooler."

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>* Trolls don't breathe through their noses, only smell. It's not that weird except for the fact that the kid felt it was important to mention, which I found hilariously bizarre.
This is incredible.

retarded idea slips through my mind while reading this
imagined a troll that's unable to breathe and has to eat like a small village to have the ability to regenerate asphyxiation damage

>In the far future, all humans are Jewish. The only explanation is "in the future they figured out it's cooler.

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The secret is that kids don't worry about if something makes sense or not and instead just do whatever they feel like or think sounds cool while also trying to emulate whatever fiction they have already been exposed to with no concern about how they may or may not thematically fit together. So you end up with the stuff like "the Pool Ball gang are villains whose heads are pool balls" and "ninjas live on the moon and can shoot laser out of their eyes" and "Fireslasher is a giant skeleton who has a sword that turns into fire when he slashes people with it" all in the same setting.

I'm just trying to imagine what sort of mental process went in the head of a 10 years old who imagines trolls in X wings and witches with their butts up front to think "yeah, in the future, people would figure out Judaism is cooler".

Probably something along the lines of
>"hey matza balls are neat"
>"In the future I bet everyone will be Jewish"
>"I think the Green Power Ranger is the coolest"

Actually, it was about Christmas. The kids were in the far future and had a plan (I think to attack a trade ship?) that relied (of course) on it being Christmas. The GM, a 9 years old, shook his head and replied that in the far future nobody celebrates Christmas anymore. The players asked why, and, without thinking for so much as a second, with absolute nonchalance, he replied that it's because everyone will be Jewish. When asked why, he gave the aforementioned reply.

The attack, therefore, happened on Passover, the only Jewish holiday the players knew.

Where were you when this went down, OP?

Throughout high school and college, my mother ran a day care center out of our home. On a daily basis I worked to entertain kids and ran storytelling sessions at local libraries. The kids ranged from not yet able to speak to 10-ish. Children are the least creative people you would ever encounter in your life. They are lucky if they can regurgitate things they remember from the past, let alone come up with anything new.

Children always want to be told stories, and I would have a storytelling event regularly where I would point to 2 or 3 kids in a group and ask what they wanted to hear a story about. It was never something new. Not once did I ever receive a new request or even a general request (for instance "hunting a dragon"). Every single time it was a request for a specific story they had heard before. Boys liked Transformers and girls really fixate on Snow White.

Then I would take all 2-3 suggestions and roll them into a single story combining elements from all the suggestions. I would build in a decision point. One of the characters would take an action that would reveal a new fact about the world, and I would point to a new kid and ask them what that fact was. For instance, "Snow white opens the door to the cottage, who is on the other side of the door?"

Every single time it was another character from that story. In the above Snow White example, it would be a dwarf or the witch. It wouldn't even mix and match the elements already included. It wouldn't be a Transformer, just the other characters from Snow White's story.

Kids aren't creative, they just have shit memories. If you think they are creating something new, they're really just not remembering the story they are trying to regurgitate.

Sitting besides in case the kids start fighting or something. I was a glorified babysitter getting paid extra to teach kids "how to D&D" by parents who thought it'll teach them maths or something.

The funny thing is if they were mature fa/tg/uys that would be the point where the session devolves into a shitstorm and everyone goes to complain about it on anonymously on Veeky Forums. With kids, I can totally imagine them just buying it and going like "oh, okay, yeah that makes perfect sense" and then continuing.

I miss being creative as a child

I actually feel less creative than I was a child, let alone teenager

I drew and wrote lots of shit back then

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I mean, kids don't ask how Bruce Wayne has the time to run a billion dollar company by day and be Batman by night or who repairs the Batmobile and pumps its tires either. These are questions only posed by adults. Kids just accept that it "it isn't real."

What you're describing sounds characteristic of 4-8 year olds, if I remember my college courses on child development. OP seems to be talking about slightly older children.

Am I the only one who feels like we have to write this shit down and produce a homebrew setting out of it? It'd probably wouldn't be too unlike Dungeon: the Dragoning

A little below the age mark, but c'mon, no mention of Axe Cop?

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>The alien mothership is "twice, no, three times larger than the sun."
And now you know who's behind the Warhammer 40K lore

>kids don't ask how Bruce Wayne has the time to run a billion dollar company by day and be Batman by night or who repairs the Batmobile
I find that (at least some) kids are very interested in the answers to questions like these, they just don't have the worldliness to think to ask them in the first place. It's not that their suspension of disbelief is necessarily stronger, it's that they have no frame of reference for what running a business or maintaining a car entails.

Yeah, but future humanity being Jewish? They evidently have some understanding of the situation (e.g. Jews celebrate Passover but not Christmas). Where's the sense in that?

>Trolls don't breathe through their noses, only smell.
Like fish.

Yeah, it's gold.

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When I played with my little brother, one bit that came up is that soldiers that look like WWI era ones have muskets, and the muskets fire bayonets. My brother obviously had no idea how bayonets were used but got offended when I tried to explain to him, so I rolled with it. Bayonet firing muskets it was.

Many moons ago I came up with a ‘not doom guy’ doom guy who would consume demon organs to gain their powers and gradually grew to be less and less human. Had the skellys shoulder guns and a kappa demons eye lodged in his head

Because it's something they have frame of reference for. Little Tommy probably has a friend in school who doesn't celebrate Christmas because "he's Jewish." That doesn't mean he has any other understanding of what exactly that means, and he'll naturally be inquisitive about it (as all kids are) but the explanation for what exactly "being Jewish" is will include some things that he'll nod his head at and think he understands but that he doesn't actually have a frame of reference for, so his knowledge of that concept will be a little patchwork and naturally include some leaps in logic that adults wouldn't make.

It's not necessarily that kids don't know things, it's that they don't know what they don't know.

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>What I'm imagining Little Timmy is imagining

Actually, no. The future humanity behaved the exact same as before the revelation of their religion (i.e. like Star Wars characters, with some inexplicable Star Trek influences). They were just all Jewish.

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Excellent. Like the early Ultima games. In Ultima I, you have to save a princess and then buy a SPACE SHUTTLE at the local blacksmith's shoppe. Then you go to space and shoot down TIE fighters.
In Ultima VII, there's a starfighter from the Wing Commander franchise crashlanded in a farmer's cabbage patch.

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The great common cold pandemic of 2452 devastated all people, but fortuitously could be cured by excessive consumption of chicken soup.

Incidentally the capital of 31st century Earth is megalopolis Bruc-Leen.

I wonder how the first few decades of that post apocalypse looked.

>Mad Moishe, Road Rabbi

>magic = oxygen
Wait, does that mean magic doesn't work underwater? How about enclosed spaces? Can you make a room magic resistant by leaving an open fire in it for long enough?

>>their "butts are up front"
I might just develop a fetish for this

I call bullshit on the whole story behind axe cop

A pirate with a shoulder pterodactyl, instead of a parrot. No explanation.

I've been working with children for the last 10 years, ages 7-15.
What you're talking about is complete bull. 1 in like 100 will be imaginative but the rest has the quality of the average YouTube video.
Children aren't more creative than adults. They are often less bound to rules. There is an exercise for this.. it's something like this:
What can you do with a needle?
Adults will say functional practical things.
Wright whit it, sow with it, poke holes with it.
Kids will say anything. Like boil it, paint it, play with it, hug it, kiss it, throw it.
This doesn't mean that the quality of there imagination is better than the quality of an adult.
Another example of children's imagination is that they will often stay with one thing that interest them. So yeah, it might be cool that they play race car dinosaurs. But then you find out that it's because one kid always play dinosaurs and the other kids wanted to play race cars.
And do you know what. Kids at the age of 10-12 are often so bound by rules that the only games they will play are house. Girls are mothers and sister, boys are dads and brothers. And do you know why they do this? It's how they interpret the world. By playing it out.
I think the reason OP's post triggered me it's because of the complete lack of actual work with kids.
You have create people.. some of them just happen to be children at some point. And most people aren't creative.
"Children are magical"
Guess what. All you fags where kids at one point. See if you can find some of your old work that you wrote or drew. It's all going to be things you saw on tv or found in a comic book.
And when adults try to create with the mindset of a child. You get cancer like Cowboys Vs Aliens.
Go fuck yourself!

>I think the reason OP's post triggered me
I'll give you a hint, it's because you're an asshole. Nobody ITT thinks children are innately creative geniuses, just that they conceive of concepts differently than adults tend to and that fun ideas can come out of that.

>I think the reason OP's post triggered me it's because of the complete lack of actual work with kids.
Maybe work with the entire sentence and see if you can give a proper response from that instead of straw manning me.

If anybody is straw manning it’s you, desu...

Reddit tier 2/10

This is so stupid it rolls back to amazing.

>HURR HURR YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE
redditposting at its finest

Wow. Don't know if I can handle this heavy of a retort..
let me try...

No, YOU!

ITT: HOW DARE KIDS NOT TAKE Veeky Forums SERIOUSLY

Just enjoy their contextless views on sci fi and fantasy dammit.

I'm pretty sure everyone in this thread except for this guy does. Hell, even the space Jew argument has been heartwarmingly civilized.

If being called an asshole sets you off, then don't act like an asshole.

>I am eternally charmed by little kids (ages 12 and below)
pedo alert

This

If you think 40k is bad with scale, you haven't seen anything yet. Go read some Culture or Xeelee verse "where they make entire universes, and use galaxies as projectiles" 40k is downright sane compared to that stuff.

Kids also have a tendency to go with the thought process of more is more. One dinosaur ninja is kinda cool, but a hundred dinosaur ninjas that live inside and pilot a giant dinosaur ninja robot that's also a spaceship is really fucking cool.

To their credit, they aren't necessarily wrong.

Water has oxygen (H2O), we humans juat dont have gills to separate it from water thou

You know, I could dig a setting where the main bad guy race is werewolves. Explain their evilness by them worshipping a particularly evil god.

Then give them TIE fighters because what the heck, I guess.

Man, thats literally WH40k

You are one finely cultured nigger. I thought the exact same thing.

>If you think 40k is bad with scale, you haven't seen anything yet. Go read some Culture

There's a difference between settings where things operate at a consistent level that's hard for us to imagine and settings where the author is just bad at putting their ideas to scale.

>Water has oxygen (H2O), we humans juat dont have gills to separate it from water thou

Yo, that's not how gills work, gills the oxygen that is in the water, they don't split up atoms.

Atomic fish whose gills are nuclear reactors would fit right in the setting implied by OP.

>gills FILTER the oxygen that is in the water, they don't split up MOLECULES.

I'm tired.

Good point.

This thread reminds of the time my little cousin (5 at the time) came over to my house and told me that he was actualy a superhero and we had a great big gay ol time having a superhero fight where he stopped my evil plan to conquor the world.

His powers are as i remember from fighting hom were

>being as fast as sonic.
>laser eyes that melted a tank.
>flight.
>acidic sweat.
>turning invisible((like a chameleon he says))
can walk on "anything"
>crocodile skin on top of his human skin.
>is able to turn swords into lightsabers.
>diamond teeth. whenever he loses a tooth he can pull a Smaug with it and use the lost tooth to improve his crocodile skin and can use those teeth to summon the teeth’s equivalent monetary worth in pennies.
>strong enough to throw cars around.
>gets accelerated healing and “thinking speed” from eating candy((he goes into battle with two pockets full of candy)) at the price of long term weakening of his powers.
>has a spare of every organ.
>trained as a ninja for 1000 years to get a black belt in every ninja art.
>can travel to important points in history on a whim.
>megabrain that thinks as hard as albert einstein's brain.
>trusty dog sidekick with a super howl that causes deaf&blindness/a telepathic bond between the two.
>can't be poisoned
>will never get tired

How powerful was cousinman?

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>How powerful was cousinman?
Sans time travel and lightsabers this is basically Martian Manhunter's powerset, so he'd cut it in actual capeshit just fine.

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Isn't that just Cable?

>"Werewolves" are not shapeshifters but just a race of pointlessly evil upright walking wolves. And by "pointlessly evil" I mean they will actually do things for no other reason than "it's evil".

Please tell me that all werewolves follow the whims of the "Werewolf Emperor", who lives in "Werewolf City", which has schools, amusement parks, and shopping malls, and that the werewolf army has tanks and airplanes but the soldiers fight with swords and shields. This is absolutely incredible.

Bumping for more of this glorious silliness.

All this stuff about mashing together random elements and not worrying about it sounds a lot like my settings. Am I a child?

its maybe because those kids were force dto be thier and felt compelled to interact with you,

i myself and much more creative and productive when i feel more natural and unforced

This, adults were always annoying faggots and all sense of fun magically disappeared when they started trying to be all hip and cool like kids. At least, that's how it felt as a kid anyway.

This is rad and requires no explanation honestly.

Yeah, unlike Jews in space, which Veeky Forums gets its panties in a twist about trying to explain.

>see something cool on Veeky Forums or somewhere else
>decide iI want it in my setting, stick it in somewhere random
no fucks given

Ninja T-Rex, we need your help!
>RAAAAAAWWWRRRRRR!!

I've always described 40k as a couple of kids playing pretend about their make believe civs who just keep making up more and more things to one up one another.

I'm imagining him being summoned by the Power Rangers right now

I was thinking of the original Might and Magic games, where pretty much every planet was actually a space colony, and III, IV, and V take place on "spaceships" that are giant flat plates with gravity hurtling through the void.

Maybe you're just having fun.

If you are, so am I. I bet if /wbg/ came in here they'd die.

>In the far future, all humans are Jewish

Yah because they bred the goyim into orcs and trolls

>everyone becomes jewish

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>A village of tiny gnomes which, for (presumably magical) reasons shrinks people with every step they take towards it
See, this isn't so they match size. No this is a defence tactic. Say the effect starts at 1km from the village. You cover half a Km, now you're half the size, and the half Km you have left is twice as long for you. And you haven't gotten any closer.
Also, are these gnomes made of the reanimated foot bone of a dead vampire? Are they being sought after by a cleric wishing to fulfil the ritual to ascend to heaven created by the previously mentioned dead vampire?

Very nice trips, and I laughed out loud at the "Magic doesn't work in space due to the lack of oxygen"

When I was 8 I made up a whole fantasy world. Each country belonged to a specific made up race. I patterned each country off various historical empires namelyRoman, British and Mongolian. But they had modern weapons and vehicles. I wish I had those notes. This was back in the 1980s. My prime source of inspiration was my family’s World Book encyclopedia. I would also research weapons and equipment in school Library.

I discovered RPGs thru Teenage Muntant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness and red box D&D. Building worlds since I was 8. Been forever DM since.

Cacodemon*