Thread by @delaneykingrox

#kidsonbikes is an absolutely brilliant role-playing game, I finally got my hands on a physical copy and I cannot recommend it enough.

The game is super collaborative and summons up stories like...

Stranger Things
Stand By Me
The Goonies
Gremlins
E.T.
Buffy: The Vampire Slayer

You have a small town or community where everyone knows each other, a place that the players help create by taking turns answering a list questions.

Each player then offers up rumours about the town or people in it that may or may not be true.

Players take on everyday folk- usually based on a set of tropes such as bully, plastic, mathlete, provider kid, paranoid parent or jock. (You can make your own too)

As the game goes, the town itself develops, and becomes a more detailed, richer place that the players own

Even better... the game can include a powered character... not an NPC or a player character, but shared between the players.

This is the Eleven to your Party, your Sloth to your Goonies, the Buffy to your Scoobies, the E.T, the Iron Giant.

This is just brilliant stuff

The book itself is great size for slipping in your bag, and the info of the book is pushed to the back for quick reference.

The art by Heather Vaughan is sublime. Get the hard copy for sure.

Okay, so now because I am me I do have a few notes that would make the book better. But it's just polishing a golden product.

So, here is my suggestions:

The text itself can be quite densely packed on the page, and could benefit from a little more spacing out to help digest it.

It could do with a quick overview of concepts at the start of the rules, as it gets real detailed, real quickly without introducing the overarching idea

For example, mentioning the powered character and adversity tokens up front.

Examples can be heavy blocks of text, and may benefit from using script format...

DM
Like so...

SADIE
oh, you mean like a tv script... that breaks it up!

I would also like to see diagrams showing the powered character gameplay, as it can be little verbose and detailed up front.

I would also love to see the page subject on the strip at the bottom, to help flip through to say, character creation.

I would really love to see the character creation chapter not reference an appendix, but handle the tropes, strengths and flaws inside the chapter in order. This stops flipping back and forth during creation.

Having a little art for each trope would help flipping to the page

The book is full color, so having color coded sections would also help.

The tables could also benefit with a bold title for each result to help scan reading for adhd.

17-19 INCREDIBLE (text)
13-16 EXTRAORDINARY (text)
10-12 IMPRESSIVE (text)

Etc

(I popped a moon sticker over the text here because I want you to buy the book not read it for free)

I would also shuffle the brilliant art around to match the chapters a bit better... for example...

This image belongs layer in the book, and the picture or a group of kids should go here. That ties the imagery with the subject of the page and helps navigate.

Again, this is all just polishing and making the info easier to get to.

Some nice touches:

□Adding the polyhedral die shape silhouette to the archetype profile and character sheet, about the size of the die used. This means you can place your dice on the sheet.

□ explain snap decisions first as the default roll method then explain planned actions as a variant. This will really shorten and clarify the description.

But seriously, this is a brilliant game. Two thumbs very much up.

Well done to the team!

The thing that is really cool about the game is the collaborative town building, and how this gives the players a sense of ownership. The town can develop as the campaign advances and this is definitely something that I will be using in my other campaigns.

One elegant thing is there is six attributes and these are assigned one of the six types of dice in a standard polyhedral set. So one of your attributes is 1d20, another is 1d4 and so on.

This is nice, though the d4 is more likely to explode (get a reroll) on a 4 (25%) than...

...larger dice. D6 (16.666666%) D8 (12.5%) but that is a minor niggle.

From a FEEL point of view, rolling a d4 feels weaker than a d6, and the exploding mostly helps the underdog anyway... something the game does well giving you an adversity token whenever a roll goes bad for you. These can be used to boost tests later.