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Legend
The Simple Imaginative Play System (SIPS)
The simple imaginative play system is a very simple but powerful RPG system designed to play with small children.
Character Creation
By default, characters created in SIPS are assumed to be between 7 and 11 years old - which may seem practically grown up to your players. The age gap has several practical purposes, among which it provides some buffer between the child and themselves so that events in the story are as much as possible seen as happening to someone else. It also may flatter the child to imagine themselves in the role of a slightly older child. However, if your child wants to play someone their own age, by all means let them and give them no handicap for doing so. Realism is not the primary goal of SIPS.
Character Attributes
In the basic game there are 5 attributes:
Smile
Body
Heart
Hands
Feet
Smile covers basically all mental tasks as well as the sort of tasks normally thought of as 'social' in RPGs. Common tasks: using imagination, making friends or cheering up an existing one, doing schoolwork, doing housework, reading a book, and planning or starting any lengthy project.
Body covers resistance to injury, physical health, and endurance. Common tasks: walking a long distance, getting up after falling down, staying awake, and continuing to do a task that is tiring.
Heart covers the characters emotional wellbeing and strength, such as courage, willpower, and empathy. Heart is most often used as a sort of saving throw, to avoid mental melt down in the face of some challenge. Common tasks: avoiding temptation, not getting jealous, being accepting of not getting your way, not panicking in a scary situation, accepting failure when things don't work out as planned.
Hands covers all tasks of dexterity, from fine motor work to throwing a ball, as well as athletic feats mostly dependent on arm strength. A Smile roll is often needed to get the motivation to carry out a difficult project, but a hands roll is often needed to successfully complete it – at least on the first try. Common tasks: Painting a picture, catching a ball, making a sandwich, carrying a bag of groceries without dropping it, arm wrestling
Feet covers all tasks of general agility as well as speed in a race. Common tasks: Playing tag, doing gymnastics, dancing, jumping, and avoiding scraping your knees in the woods.
To design a character, the player is given 5 dice - one for each attribute - a d4, a d6, d8, a d10, and a d12. These are assigned to the character abilities in whatever order the player likes. You may need to help your child visualize what their choices mean, so gently coach them through the likely consequences of their selections by giving reasonable descriptors like 'slow feet' or 'fast feet' and so forth. Eventually, after some deep contemplation, the child should hit upon a set of traits that they deem acceptable tradeoffs. If your child has difficulty placing the d4, remember to remind the child of the most important rule of RPGs - "No one can be good at everything." - and help ease the pain of having flaws by reminding the child of what his character will be good at. If you have more than one player and they've created dissimilar characters, point out how they can help each other by using their strengths to make up for another character's deficiencies.
Advanced Rules: Mental Abilities
SIPS is intended to challenge the player to use their own creativity and imagination to solve problems as much as possible. Additionally, children will tend to react with particular negativity to describing their characters mental abilities in a less than positive light. For these reasons traditional mental tasks have been left to the player’s ingenuity and knowledge, and when tests of a mental ability become necessary are rolled into the 'Smile' or ‘Heart’ category as needed. For an older child with some experience with method acting and playing a character, you may want to use a six attribute array and introduce the attribute 'Thoughts' to cover traditional mental tasks of intelligence. This will allow you to have mechanically 'bright but shy' characters. If six attributes are used, add a d8 to the array of dice that the player has to assign to attributes.
Tasks and Challenges
Tasks and challenges are the problems that a character will face as they try to navigate the various hazards and difficulties presented by the story. Both are resolved in the same fashion, by rolling the dice representing the character ability applicable to the task and determining if it higher than a target number – usually 2, 3 or 4. The target number is set by how difficult you the GM perceive the task to be. Remember that these difficulties are seen from the perspective a young child, whose notion of how challenging a task may be might be very different than an adults. Even the ordinary tasks of life are things that require practice and patience for a child.
Tasks and challenges use the same resolution, and in general the words will be used interchangeably. They differ in regards to the risks which are faced. Challenges carry the additional risk of Consequences, which are results of the task that directly affect the character if the task is failed. For example, throwing a ball or pouring a glass of milk are usually simply tasks. The consequence of failing the task – missing the throw, or spilling the milk – may be negative and require some cleanup, but don’t directly affect the player. However, if the character was really invested in the success of the task, missing the throw or spilling the milk, might call for a simple Heart challenge – can the character control his emotions in the face of failure. The consequences of failure directly affect the character’s well-being in this case. Other examples of challenges would be using a hot stove, running fast or doing some other athletic activity concrete or other hard surface, getting hit in the face by a flying soccer ball, and really anything where the risk is one of life’s many bumps and bruises, mental or physical. Keep also in mind the social consequences as child may face, as a failed smile check may lead to a friend temporary having hard feelings or even temporary stress in a relationship with a parent.
There are far too many potential tasks and challenges to list even in brief, and difficulties are meant to be freeform and suitable to the goals of the game and not some straight jacket of realism or consistency, but the following guidelines are intended to suggest one particular approach.
Simple (Difficulty 2): Tasks that a child sometimes fails at, that adults normally fail at only when rushed or distracted. Examples: Pouring a glass of milk, doing a simple addition problem, running across a field really fast without falling down, keeping your temper when you don’t get your way immediately
Complicated: (Difficulty 3-4): Tasks that a child will often fail at on the first attempt unless supervised or have practiced many times before. Examples: A complicated multiplication problem, kicking a moving ball, catching a ball, not getting discouraged when you fail at something, preparing a simple meal, not getting lost in a strange situation
Difficult: (Difficulty 5-6): Tasks that often challenging even for adults. Examples: Solving a math word problem, hitting a thrown baseball with a bat, keeping your temper when provoked and insulted
Advanced: (Difficulty 7-8): Tasks that are difficult even for adults and may well be often beyond the ability of an adult that hasn’t had some training or is naturally gifted at the task. Examples: Applying statistics or solving an algebraic equation, recalling a specific historical fact, quoting a book, enduring real deprivation, reciting a work on the piano
Heroic: (Difficulty 9-10): Tasks normally attempted only by trained adults or where success by an adult often seems admirable and laudable even to another adult.
Even more difficult challenges are imaginable with correspondingly higher DCs, but great care should be used before introducing such tasks. First, such tasks are likely to be beyond even a chance of success for all but the most specialized and suitable character. While it is ok to give players a chance to shine with moments of awesome, be sure to spread them around. Secondly, players may get discouraged if they have a low chance of success or even no chance of success. Remember that in their own freeform imaginative play, characters can usually do anything that they want without limits or chance of failure. Using high DCs regularly works against the child’s natural inclinations for play. And thirdly, if the sort of challenges that you are presenting your players with are skewing toward the more adult and heroic end of the spectrum, make sure you are doing so to satisfy the player’s desire to engage in more grown up make believe and not your own. Threatening and stressful situations that you may find exciting, may in fact be only frightening or disturbing to the player – even if you are taking care to present them in cartoonish and nongraphic ways. Keep in mind that your players may have better imaginations than you do!
Advanced Rules: Cooperative and Opposed Tasks
Another areas of both interest and concern is opposed and cooperative tasks. Cooperative tasks occur when two players are trying to assist one another in completing a shared goal. In these situations, one player is the initiator of the group task, and the other players are receivers. A common example might be throwing and catching a ball. The thrower of the ball is the initiator and the character that is catching the ball is the receiver. In the normal game of SIPS, its best to just set static simple DC’s for tasks like this and assume that the plan to throw and catch the ball is successful if both players succeed in their simple task. But with older players, you may wish to handle joint tasks and complex plans with dynamic difficulties that depend on how successful earlier stages of the plan were. Instead of initiating a plan causing absolute failure if the first step of the plan is not successful, failure to initiate a task successfully may instead increase the difficulty of completing the task by 1 for each point the initiating task was failed by. In such cases, initiating the task should be treated as a difficult task rather than a simple task. For example, the task may be rephrased as, “Can I throw a ball very accurately” rather than, “Can I throw a ball.” and given a DC of 10 rather than 2! In this case, failure doesn’t mean that the ball can’t be caught, but that the difficulty of catching the ball increases. A player that throws the ball and gets a result of 4, now forces the receiver to catch on an 8+ rather than a 2+. This adds math and potentially reasons for blame and frustration that might not be suitable for younger players.
Opposed tasks are also very common. Opposed tasks occur when two characters are competing. This can occur when both characters are attempting to do the same thing, but it matters which character performs better – as in running a race – or when characters have opposed goals, such as one player attempting to score a goal and the other player trying to stop it. In the former case, the character with the higher result once ability, skill, and superpowers are considered is declared the winner. If there is a tie, you can either declare that the tie stands or if it seems it would make for a better story break the tie in favor of the character with the more suitable or more narrowly defined skill (a character without a called on skill is considered to have the least suitable skill). When characters are competing with opposed goals, resolve the situation very much like cooperative goals except that the difficulty of the receiver is increased based on the degree of success of the initiator. For example, if the hero attempts to stop the supervillain from stealing puppies with a good hard Hands punch, the difficulty of evading the punch with Feet or absorbing the punch with Body increases for each point beyond the difficulty of throwing a punch (in this case a simple task with 2) the hero rolls as a result. Normally this is the same or saying the higher result wins, but keep in mind that the initiating task may be harder than the receiving task (as in throwing a rock at a villain a long ways away) or conversely the receiving task may be harder than the initiating task (as in blocking a penalty kick in soccer).
Consequences
Eventually the player’s character will fail in a task and face results that are somewhat serious and have, at least from a child’s perspective, a more lasting meaning. In the game these are collectively called Consequences and they are all handled in a simple manner. After a character fails a task, the GM will create and name a Consequence and give it to a player. Common Consequences are things like Skinned Knees, Busted Lip, Hurt Feelings, Sad, Bored, Hyper, Scared, Distracted, Homesick, Booboos, Tired, Angry, Crying, Lonely, and so forth. Consequences should be things that are familiar to the child from their own experience. Mechanically, the way each consequence is handled in play, is that for each Consequence a player is currently carrying the difficulty of a task increases by 2. In general, a consequence should increase the difficulty of all tasks and challenges, but the GM may make an exception for a task that he feels is particularly isolated from that the particular thing the character is attempting. For example, if the character has the consequence, “Sprained Ankle”, and the player directs that his character sits down to rest the ankle and attempts to perform a delicate task of manual dexterity like drawing a picture, it would be reasonable to exempt the consequences of the “Sprained Ankle” from the specific task.
It is suggested that no character ever have more than 3 consequences at the same time. If more than three Consequences are indicated, the GM should choose an existing Consequence and replace it with the newest one.
While increasing the difficulty of tasks this is the normal result of Consequences, Consequences can also have other negative results, such as limiting access to the character’s super power, rendering an ally of the character unable or unwilling to help the character while the consequence is in play, or other results as the GM feels appropriate.
Encourage your players to role play out their consequences. This not only makes for healthy and mature role play, but it will help players avoid internalizing game consequences as something happen to them the player, rather than imaginary things happening to their character. It’s all too easy for a child to be emotionally invested in the results of a dice throw and suffer consequences for real! Gently remind the child that this is happening to their character and that is only make believe. Encourage them to empathize with the character and verbalize what the character is feeling. This intellectual action will distract them from what they may also be feeling themselves, and in the case of both the player and the character lead to productive suggestions for dealing with the failure.
Consequences normally go away on their own, usually when the character goes to bed and gets a good night sleep. Otherwise, to remove a consequence quickly requires the help of a friend or ally – usually the character of another player. In order to remove a consequence more quickly, another player may describe a plan that they undertake that might make things better. It’s not important necessarily that such a plan completely removes the consequence, but only that it could alleviate the consequence. A plan to remove the Skinned Knee consequence need not involve actually healing the abraded tissue (though, depending on the superpowers the character has access to, it could), but simply putting ‘ouch medicine’ and a Band-Aid on it is good enough to turn a skinned knee into a fact of the fiction that no longer has a significant consequence. Often as not, having a chance of removing a consequence requires only that another player role play saying encouraging or comforting things to another player. Give plans a reasonable benefit of the doubt, but only if the player is being creative and imaginative. Avoid allowing players to create rote or ritual phrases of comfort that are used in all situations.
Once the plan is explained and acted on, the plan is a task undertaken by the character with a difficulty equal to the difficulty of the check that originally provoked the consequence.
One plan that your players will likely hit upon to alleviate consequences is to seek adult aid. In many cases this is perfectly appropriate. In general, if seeking the aid of a proper adult, the plan to remove consequences should automatically succeed. This is called the ‘Mom makes it all better’ rule. However, care should be taken to not let players become too dependent on adults intervention. If players default to using the ‘Mom makes it all better’ rule, make sure to contrive situations where the ally is temporarily unavailable. SIPS is intended to encourage players to rely on their own resources. The presence of “Mom” should primarily be used to help players deal with situations which are distressing the player despite their best attempts to fix them.
Adult Consequences
SIPS is normally intended to be a game about children played by children. It therefore is intended to provide structured play to the sort of healthy imaginative make believe play children naturally engage in and imagine for themselves. The chance to share in this play for an adult is a great honor and a high responsibility. Care should be taken to avoid challenges and consequences which will be frightening or disturbing or even traumatic to a child. Don’t introduce consequences that are outside the child’s own experience, particularly with younger children. SIPS is intended to be a game where no failure has a lasting effect, and the characters are always encouraged to ‘fail forward’, handling consequences and then moving on to new situations. SIPS is meant to be optimistic. It is not meant to be a game of horror and tragedy. This is not a game where characters are meant to face death, even when the fiction that develops in play is one of a superheroes facing dastardly supervillains in glorious battle.
However, the consequences system is quite robust and could be easily extended to very serious consequences indeed, allowing for play that handles issues that are normally far beyond the scope and scale of childish play. If serious adult consequences are desired, like for example, ‘Broken Arm’, they differ mechanically from normal consequences only in two areas. Adult consequences may be crippling, that is the increase the difficulty of completing tasks by more than 2. And adult consequences may be lasting, that is they cannot be alleviated by simply going to bed, or by the ‘Mom makes it all better’ rule, or cannot be fully fix by plans alleviate them. “Broken Arm” can be replaced by perhaps the less crippling “Arm in Cast” consequence after a heroic effort, but even then a consequence might last many game sessions. When such consequences are in use, there is a significant risk that characters will need to be retired from play for lengthy periods or even permanently. “Death” is essentially a consequence that is both extremely crippling and usually very permanent.
Skills, Virtues, and Knowledge
Skills, Virtues and Knowledges – sometimes referred to collectively as skills - are not tightly defined in SIPS, although there are some broad suggestions to give some bit of order to the system.
Skills are things that a player can call out as being relevant to succeeding in a task or challenge. A skill has a numeric value, rank, of 1 or higher that suggests how accomplished the character is in the skill.
When facing a task or challenge, a player can call out his character’s skill and add the rank of his skill to the die roll.
For example, a player suggests that because his character is ‘Tough’ that he can avoid crying when he scrapes his knee, or can keep walking even though it is hot outside should be allowed to add the value of his Tough skill to the die roll. While skills may suggest stronger associations with particular abilities, they can be used with any ability provided it seems reasonable. Err on the side of generosity. If the child has chosen skills that seem to be called out all the time, even when it’s marginally reasonable remember that you can always up the scope of the challenges that such competent characters are facing. Appeal to fairness only if a player is trying to unfairly get all the attention by solving all the problems themselves or not using their imagination.
Try to encourage your players to initiate calling out a skill, but until this mechanic is mastered feel free to help coach the players to finding a skill that may help them in their situation.
Allow your players to invent new ideas for skills, but try to steer them toward broader categories rather than narrow specializations when possible. However, if your child insists his character is good at 'Soccer' and not a broader category like 'Sports', that's fine too. The important thing is to let your player define what they are interested in and use it to describe their desired character. If balance is a concern, and your child wants to tag his character with a skill that might be overly broad and effective (“Super Smart”, “Lucky”) in all situations, consider having the child instead make that tag his superpower (see below).
Don't steer them toward heavily practical RPG like skills like 'fighting', 'survival' or whatever. For one thing, if your child isn't picking skills like this right off the bat, then they probably aren't very interested in a game featuring traditional RPG challenges like combat. For another thing, your child's character is supposed to be a child and so should begin with a child's perspective of the world, and not as an experienced adventurer and investigator. Skills, virtues, and knowledge that the child never thought of should eventually come up in the course of play and the player can be rewarded by opening up these new vistas. Depending on the sort of story cues your child decides to follow, their character might become epic superheroes or simply really good and competent young people.
Player's begin with 7 points to put into skills and knowledge. These may be distributed into whatever skills that the player invents, but no less than 1 point and no more than 3 points in a skill. Thus, a character begins with 3-7 skills.
Some suggestions of typical starting skills are:
Animals, Art, Camping, Cooking, Compassion, Courage, Games, Grooming, Hide, Honesty, Housework, Laughter, Kind, Manners, Notice Stuff, Obedient, Schoolwork, Seek, Sports, Stories
Skills are very powerful as they add directly to whatever dice are rolled to overcome a challenge. Even a single point in a skill can allow the character to avoid the most common mistakes completely, and a high attribute score combined with several ranks in a skill indicate a child operating at a level that is competitive with most adults. A character with a D12 in feet and a 3 in sports, is a child that will leave most adults huffing and puffing trying to keep up.
Vices
Nothing in the rules insist that all skills be unquestionably positive attributes. Even in literature for children, there are often examples of protagonists that are something of anti-heroes, that have developed skill in less than savory and questionable activities and then put these skills to use against villains. Consider the how tags for a character that might be called out like 'Tricky', 'Mischief', 'Lies', 'Scary', or 'Bully'. Care may need to be taken before allowing such tags to be associated with any character, even an NPC, particularly if the players are very young. Older players on the other hand may wish test their limits by exploring mischievous or rebellious characters, and this may be allowed depending on the maturity of the player. Exploring the consequences of bad choices is an important part of play, but players may quickly find these consequences spiraling out of control - particularly if they can back up these choices with super powers and skills. Use your judgment and discretion, and be prepared to talk to players about their play after the game.
Super Powers
Every character begins with a super power. The super power can be literally anything. Let your player be as imaginative as they want to be. A super power can be as exotic as, "Shoots lasers out of my eyes" or "I have a pet dinosaur", or as mundane as, "Can make stuff", "My dog Spot", or "I'm nice."
Superpowers are balanced by the Story Teller. Each super power is assigned a dice according to how often the power can be used to overcome the sort of challenges the character will experience. The more often it is applicable to solving a problem, the smaller the dice which is used to represent it. An exotic power like, "Shoots lasers out of my eyes." may seem like a great choice to the child, but it’s really only obviously good for one thing - destroying stuff. It can therefore be assigned a large and impressive dice like a d12, contingent on the assumption that the child will face many obstacles that can't simply be overcome by destroying stuff (or writing on things with his eyeballs). A more generally useful power that is applicable all the time regardless of the challenge like "Lucky" should be assigned a d4. Very narrow superpowers may even be assigned a d20, although it may be best to steer the child away from this if possible, to avoid a child being frustrated that they can't use their power.
Like skills, super power dice may be added to the result whenever they are applicable to overcoming a challenge. The Story Teller has the final say of this, though imaginative uses of the power should be encouraged. However, unlike skills, using your super power has risks. If a challenge is failed despite the addition of the super power dice, the character always suffers an additional Consequence. The most common additional Consequence is the child loses the use of their super power dice for the duration of the play session, but the GM should be creative and try to pick the most suitable consequence. A Consequence always results of the child misuses their Super Power and attempts to use it to resolve a situation where it should not be used, such as using violence to resolve a situation where it was not called for, or using their super power to deceive, intimidate or manipulate one of their friends or family members.
Advanced Rules: Adult Characters
Adults are built much like children, but have a dice array of d6,d8,d10,d12,d20. Additionally, adults typically have 21 skill points and up to 5 points in a single skill. Youths, like a child character's older sibling, have an array of d6,d8,d8,d10,d12, typically have 14 skill points and up to 4 points in a single skill. The use of characters of this nature even as NPCs is strictly optional, as young players are likely to find themes involving older characters to be far too intense and you may also prefer to discourage the player from challenging adult characters like 'Mom' by simply implementing a 'Mom always wins' rule. You may find it preferable to leave adults without stats and decided whether they succeed based on whether it is good for the game. Use your judgement based on the maturity of the child, and the sort of themes that they seem to want to explore. If your game leans in the direction of a comic book super-hero game, a nominally adult villain with an appropriate super power dice may make a good foil for a team of young super heroes. If your children want to play a more realistic game of house, play, school, and the like, the relatively adult free world of Charlie Brown, Dora the Explorer, or Dragon Tales may be a more appropriate model.
Advanced Rules: Younger Characters
Conversely, characters younger than your player's character are strongly encouraged as objects of mentoring and protection by the player, as well as potential foils in sibling and domestic rivalry. A younger character is typically built on an array of d2,d4,d4,d6,d6 and has no skills.
Advancing Characters
The primary way characters advance in SIPS is intended to be in the improvement of skills. Skills are improved though use in play. Whenever a player calls out a particular skill to overcome a challenge, if they are successful they are allowed to place a mark by the skill. When the number of marks exceeds the number of ranks of the skill, the player erases the mark and tests the skill by rolling a d4. If the result is greater than the number of ranks in the skill, the skill improves by one rank.
A character may also learn a new skill. These skills are to be awarded to characters for exceptionally imaginative play when during a challenge and should reflect ideas that were emphasized by the play but not necessarily called out during the challenge. Challenges that were failed initially but then eventually overcome with renewed effort are great opportunities to introduce a new skill. Award the skills as often as you like, but try to make acquisition of new skills roughly equal among all players so that one doesn't feel left out. Conversely, if one player is solving problems more often, this might be a good time to give the player that is struggling new skills to call out.
Optional Rule
Super-Heroic Characters: If you desire a game with faster advancement and more powerful characters, allow the players to roll a larger dice when testing their skill: a D8 or even a D10. The larger the dice, the faster characters will increase in capability and the greater heights of power they can eventually rise to. A D6 is suitable for a campaign where mere children can face adult dangers and foes on equal terms (Harry Potter, Spy Kids, The Spiderwick Chronicles, How to Train your Dragon). A d10 is suitable for a campaign of child superheroes (The Incredibles, Kim Possible, Avatar: The Last Airbender). Increased power level not is of course essential and by no means a more powered up campaign inherently better than one that is simple, as there are many lovely stories involving kids solving problems through accessible acts of maturity and kindness and this may be precisely the sort of story your players can most relate to (Snow White, The Parent Trap, Whale Rider, Hugo, Coraline, Secret of Roan Inish). Decide based on the cues your players give you, and keep in mind that regardless of the sort of story you have and how big or broad the action is, each character has a superpower that will when used creatively allow them to have incredible impact on their world.
Optional Rule
Learning through failure: Instead of placing a mark next to a skill when they succeed at a challenge, instead place a mark next to a skill when the character fails as a challenge where they called out the skill. This makes for a slightly different game with a slightly different reward system, but can be better for some groups. In particular, placing a mark can soften the blow of failure, at the cost of making succeeding slightly less delightful and desirable. Also, learning through failure will make it particularly easy to improve a character’s shortcomings, while on the other hand make it frustratingly hard to improve the areas the player may most value about his or her character.
Optional Rule
Growing Up: In addition to placing marks next to skills, allow players to place marks next to ability dice which are used to overcome challenges. When the number of marks exceeds the highest value available to the die, the player erases the marks and tests the ability. If the result is the highest number available on the die, the ability die increases to the next highest die. This rule is particularly appropriate to a game for older players that focuses on coming of age and accepting more adult responsibilities. You may also wish to use the Super-Heroic Characters optional rule in conjunction, to represent growing into adult skill and wisdom.
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