Is Tiny Dungeons The Best System For Teens?

A Rules Lite, 2d6 RPG System

I have recently taken on a part time job as the Teen and Outreach Coordinator for a Boys and Girls Club. One of my roles is to come up with programming ideas that are both educational and entertaining. Cue epic adventure music.

A few months ago I developed an rpg program for schools called Questers. Questers is a 4-7 week rpg program that revolves around the idea that “Everyone is questing for something.” I developed to help students quest for things like character, teamwork, self confidence and their dreams. This is where Tiny Dungeons some in.

I ran into Tiny Dungeons while scrolling through DriveThru RPG, downloaded it, and, after reading it through, I felt like this was the system I wanted to run for middle school student because of the Tiny d6 mechanic.

Students didn’t have to worry about all the other funny looking dice, just the two dice and whether they could roll a 5 or a 6 for their character to achieve what they desired. This is no shade on d20 games. I used Professor Dungeon Master’s Deathbringer for my first Questers program and it was a blast.

Other than the mechanics, here are a few other things I liked about Tiny Dungeons.

The Pre-Generated Character Cards

These characters sheets were the perfect size for the table. Not too much info and still plenty of choices, via checkboxes, for students to make these characters their own.

The Heritages

These heritages are familiar but have their own flavor. The conciseness of who the character is and what they can do are perfect for, most, teens and adults who don’t don’t want or need a 4 pages of information to play their character.

Cheat Sheets

These are clear, well formatted sheets perfect for scanning and picking up the rules. To be honest, I did not hand these out mostly because the students grabbed the gist of the rule quickly and because I forgot (Doh!)

One more thing, the core rules for Tiny Dungeon has some great setting options and Gallant Games produces a Tiny Zine for even more ideas to build out your game.

After 4 weeks, twice a week, of testing Tiny Dungeons with a group of 6th graders and a group of 8th graders, I found the system worked exactly as I wanted it to. The rule did not get in the way of the students imagination and did not get in the way of how I adjudicated the game.

If you’d like to know more about my last session of my Questers program, you can check out here.

I’d like to know, what was your experience playing rpgs as a teeanger or do you prefer rules lite, rule crunchy or somewhere in between?