As we all know, Roblox is garbage tier gameplay structured around psychological cues to get children to fill an endless pit with fake money bought with real money.
So I banned my kid from it. He used it a little bit socially with a few friends of his. What online or local multiplayer games should I help him to replace it with? (He’s 10, so please don’t recommend Diablo 4 or anything else that has quite that much gore)
He and his friends have an Xbox Series X|S at home.
Edit: keep your judgemental shit out of here. His whole social group (5 kids he knows from school) got banned on the same day. Me and the other parents are trying to be nice and replace it with better quality games so it isn’t just a punishment.
Edit2: Thanks guys. I got him Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge
You could try Dungeons and dragons. It could be fun for his friend group.
DnD is fantastic. I was planning to buy some campaign materials for xmas. Might as well get that started!
Dnd (and tabletop gaming in general) is really fun, but I can foresee problems when you try to replace the electronic gambling skinner box of Roblox with a game where the core features are math and imagination.
I’d say the main hangup with any tabletop game is availability. My family is already planning to do dnd sessions at home.
Oh yeah, DnD is a great idea, and if they aren’t into dragons (but who isn’t) there’s all kinds of variations of rpg games. Mutant Year Zero, Vaesen, Alien, Pathfinder, Starfinder, etc. The list goes on and on. And since you have mentioned you have a pc, you can use a virtual tabletop like Fantasy Grounds, for them to play where you don’t have to get them all together in the same room. I play a few different games each week with people I have only met in game. You could buy the FG Ultimate license for one pc, whomever is going to be the DM, and all the other kids could connect with the free beta license, and only the DM needs to own the books. Everyone else can just get on and read the manuals, or play the game with no expense.
Personally I have played dnd with those virtual tabletops and… they’re pretty bad. You spend about 3x as much time fiddling with it than you do playing. Plus you then get distracted by electronics when you should be getting into your character.
I wish someone had taught my friends and me how to play D&D when I was 10, but my parents were part of the “satanic panic” generation, and had zero interest in anything to do with fantasy or improv. Once you get out of highschool, finding a night that everyone can meet up for D&D gets exponentially harder, let alone finding someone who wants to put in the time to DM.
This!
My friend group would have thrived from something like that.
But our parents were always afraid of what we’d get up to in this very non-conceptual way, so instead we stayed close to home. And drank.