Daggerheart is a GREAT first TTRPG for elementary school age kids

I recently finished playing a few one on one sessions of DH with my 9 year old daughter, and she is HOOKED. After playing, I feel like DH has some unique things about it that make it really well suited for younger kids, and I wanted to go over those features, and how I used them, for anyone else that wants to get their kids into playing.

First, the cards. To experienced RPG gamers, the cards may come off as a bit gimmicky, but to kids they are absolute gold. Kids have short attention spans, so expecting a kid to read an entire chapter and then fill out a form (character sheet) to make their character, like in D&D, is just not going to happen.

The cards let you sidestep all that by just letting the kid mix and match cards to make their character. For my daughter, I just organized the ancestry, community, and class cards into separate piles and told her to pick one of each and that is who her character is. Then once she picked her class, she got to pick two domain cards from the first level of her domains.

She loved this, because it immediately got her hands on the "toys" of the game, before we even started playing. And I feel like getting to the point of being able to play is usually the death knell of getting kids into other TTRPGs.

Next, the duality dice really give a nice extra layer of immediate emotional feedback that I think kids will enjoy. Rolling with "hope or fear" feels more impactful than just getting a higher or lower number. I just know that she constantly wanted to roll the dice lol. I know the rules say to only roll when it matters, but I would definitely ignore this for kids. Rolling the dice is half of the fun for them.

Finally, I think that the simple and "up front" nature/presentation of the rules helped my daughter grasp the game pretty quickly. DH doesn't have a lot of the weird "page 168 of the book" rules like 5E's bizarre you can't cast multiple spells in one turn rule. Everything is pretty much printed on your cards or your sheet. My daughter quickly figured out that she could roll instinct to see if someone was lying, and it was easy for her to extend this concept to all the other traits.

So overall, great experience getting a kid into the game. Really impressed with the elegance of the system, and the extra mile they went to make it tactilely appealing with all the cards.