Special abilities tend to be expressed in extra damage or advantages gained ‘for one round’. There’s not a lot of system, but what there is is heavily focused on combat. My criticisms of the game are largely ones that could map to roleplaying games as a whole. All characters get a companion creature – a dragon, a talking car, an invisible friend or even a little brother or sister! These companions provide plenty of extra backup for player characters, not that they need it, heroes in Storia are pretty much unstoppable, which for kids is just fine. All the dice are rolled by the players (when a monster attacks you you roll to defend), which means the Guide is never a direct antagonist of the players. The math required is counting to eight and being able to add or subtract one or two. While neither of my kids are colour blind the components are designed to account for that. Only one of my players can read well, which was no problem. The authors have put a lot of thought into making this game accessible for kids. I would have liked to see something showcasing a different style of play though, Storia as presented in the background is basically a giant sandbox, so providing novice guides with a scenario that showed how to exploit this, and let the players travel between locations might help people take their games to the next level. The kids had plenty of fun with the first two scenarios, as did the guide (that game’s term for GM). Both of which I intentially played very much as written. Looking at it, that’s probably more of a two hour play through. We haven’t played the third scenario, but that’s a similar beast, a series of encounters in a theme park which can be taken in any order, but relate to each other. Since the scenario takes place at a party we did that one to a disco soundtrack. The second session we played used the second scenario, essentially a four room setting with linked challenges, so the contents of room three were needed to resolve room two, and so on. Character generation took about twenty minutes on top of that. We started with the first one, a super simple dungeon crawl featuring witches and a cave that took us about half an hour. The scenario guide ‘Let’s go on an adventure’ which comes in the box contains three scenarios. These are tracked with card counters which makes keeping track a breeze, even for five year olds. Tasks are handled by rolling a D6 against a target number, and things can be made easier by spending points out of characteristic pools. The system behind the game is a simplified version of the Cypher System, which I’m not familiar with. My kids got the concept of Storia immediately and started poring over the map looking for cool places to go. These appear in different areas of Storia, are fleshed out with some background in the rules, and appear on a nice illustrated map. Spaceships, dinosaurs, castles and haunted houses all feature. The setting is broad, aiming to fit in anything kids might want in a game. Plenty of thought has gone into making the illustrations for the character archetypes interesting and unusual, giving plenty of fuel for player’s imaginations. Most popular were the cards, which cover character archetypes (with male and female versions of all characters offered), monsters, pets and cyphers – these last ones are text and so less exciting for kids. My kids loved the colourful box, and were delighted with the contents – colourful card counters, illustrated rule books and big chunky D6s. The rules are simple and scale in complexity as your children age. The game is story driven, set in the big wide world of Storia, rather than a tightly confined dungeon. The box contains a rulebook, a book of scenarios, a lot of cardboard counters, some colourful character sheets, some big dice and a lot of large format cards with pictures on them. No Thank You Evil stands out from the crowd in a few ways. That one was No Thank You Evil!, a 2015 release from Monte Cooke Games. When I started looking into roleplaying games for kids there were a number that fell into the broad ‘dungeons and dragons junior’ bucket, and one that didn’t.
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