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fool_of_sound posted:Yeah it's definitely fair to say 'just generate a level 5 character' or something would be a brick wall for a new player. It didn't help that he was trying to make a...Summoner I think? Solely because his initial response was literally "oh Summoner, that sounds cool!" Several hours later he was tired and cranky and was feeling like Pathfinder might be more trouble than it's worth. He wasn't unfamiliar with tabletop games either, he was a regular boardgamer who'd played stuff like Kemet, Argent: the Consortium, Netrunner, Tash Kalar, etc, but when it came time to make a Pathfinder character he was met with what I assume to be someone barraging him with all the options at once and no real help narrowing things down to a digestible format for ease of use. I had a similar instance getting someone's character made for a 4E game and this was someone who had plenty of actual RPG experience but the better way to approach it would honestly have been just to make a pregen or something instead of "okay here's the character builder but just ignore this, this, and this too, yeah ignore that, etc."
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Jun 27, 2018 02:59
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Plutonis posted:Hell even Exalted 3E has an actual pretty good chargen guide. The only real effort you make is choosing charms Ehhhhhhh it has a lot of weird dumb optimization stuff at character creation that just isn't apparently to new people. Like trap feats and similar are bad, but it's much easier to just say 'consider a different feat' than it is 'reorder how you distributed your dots and used bonus points'
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Jun 27, 2018 02:59
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Oh we're playing an 8th level pathfinder campaign? Sure, it'll take about eight minutes to create a character concept, level it seven times, then choose from thousands of feat, equipment, and spell options. E: Kai Tave posted:Several hours later he was tired and cranky and was feeling like Pathfinder might be more trouble than it's worth. He might just be super-insightful, it takes most people years to reach that conclusion. moths fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Jun 27, 2018 |
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Jun 27, 2018 02:59
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Kai Tave posted:It didn't help that he was trying to make a...Summoner I think? Solely because his initial response was literally "oh Summoner, that sounds cool!" Several hours later he was tired and cranky and was feeling like Pathfinder might be more trouble than it's worth. He wasn't unfamiliar with tabletop games either, he was a regular boardgamer who'd played stuff like Kemet, Argent: the Consortium, Netrunner, Tash Kalar, etc, but when it came time to make a Pathfinder character he was met with what I assume to be someone barraging him with all the options at once and no real help narrowing things down to a digestible format for ease of use. I had a similar instance getting someone's character made for a 4E game and this was someone who had plenty of actual RPG experience but the better way to approach it would honestly have been just to make a pregen or something instead of "okay here's the character builder but just ignore this, this, and this too, yeah ignore that, etc." Yeah that's absolutely fair. I'm thinking from the perspective of what my middle school group did, which was basically just roll our stats and otherwise use the suggested skill point/feat/equipment loadouts at first, and gradually move away from that as we learned.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:01
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To be fair once you know what you're doing with Pathfinder it probably does take less than 10 minutes because there are so many charop guides out there you can just find one that's done all the tedious selection for you.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:01
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moths posted:Oh we're playing an 8th level pathfinder campaign? Sure, it'll take about eight minutes to create a character concept, level it seven times, then choose from thousands of feat, equipment, and spell options. I was talking about level 1 characters, the sort that say, a newbie group, that we are talking about, might use.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:02
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fool_of_sound posted:I've tried to bring people who are new to RPGs into games where they're expected to contribute to the story/setting/narrative, and most of them have gotten really intimidated and lost. And poo poo, do you guys make characters in a vacuum? You don't just chuck books at your new players and say "make a dude", you say "so what kind of character do you want to play?" and offer up some basic archetypes like ranged, melee, blasty mage, support wizard, etc. and suggest feats, spells, etc. If you're a new DM you read the short descriptions of everything to have a basic idea of the content and go from there. Make characters as a group so people can go "oh hey this sounds cool for your dude!" and have fun with figuring out what you want to play and how the party knows each other. Most people don't have a backlog of Dashing Protagonists™ to lob into a game/world/story rolling around in their heads.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:02
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I have an adoration for life path creation that many do not share. I feel it is the best sort of random character creation, though it obviously has many of the issues inherent to it. Seems to be used mostly in sci fi games and few others for some reason or another.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:03
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moths posted:Nooooo - if your friends want to play elf adventures, nothing will suck the joy and wonder out of them faster than spreadsheeting a 3.5 D&D character, wading through PF's feat lists, or building a GURPS hero from scratch. Even if this were an accurate description of all crunchy games ever, my point -- that the one doesn't actually lead to the other -- would still stand. I don't really care about onboarding people into PBTA. I care about the best way of onboarding people to play co-op tactical wargames with a light garnish of elf adventures. (Which probably involves some combination of pregens and sitting down with new players before the first session to walk them through character creation.)
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Jun 27, 2018 03:03
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Newbies are going to take ten minutes just reading over the class and race sections.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:03
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AlphaDog posted:The PbtA thing can be really hard to get into if you've only ever played D&D-like games and go into them with the same mindset. The DW GM's guide is here, it fills in the gaps in the rulebook quite well: http://www.dungeon-world.com/downloads/ Still, there's no reason not grab one of the better PbtA games, Apocalypse World itself is book I'd cheerfully hand to someone who's never been a GM before and reasonably expect them to get it. Besides, "it's HBO's Mad Max series, and you're the main characters" should be an easy pitch.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:04
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Yawgmoth posted:Honestly I think a huge chunk of goons in this forum don't actually want to play a roleplaying game, they want a collective writing exercise with some dice to roll when they get stuck or need a fidget spinner. I mean that's fine and can be fun. I've run very freeform games and really enjoyed them, but they require a different kind of mindset than crunchier games, and some players really only like one or the other.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:05
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Yawgmoth posted:Honestly I think a huge chunk of goons in this forum don't actually want to play a roleplaying game, they want a collective writing exercise with some dice to roll when they get stuck or need a fidget spinner.  "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"
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Jun 27, 2018 03:05
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Yawgmoth posted:Honestly I think a huge chunk of goons in this forum don't actually want to play a roleplaying game, they want a collective writing exercise with some dice to roll when they get stuck or need a fidget spinner. Given this forum's reputation as The Place That Actually Likes 4E, that seems real dumb. Yawgmoth posted:And poo poo, do you guys make characters in a vacuum? You don't just chuck books at your new players and say "make a dude" This is honestly how a lot of the "my first elfgame experience" stories I've been told go. Just because it's real bad advice doesn't mean it's not how a lot of people, including people running organized play events, go about it.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:06
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Kai Tave posted:Given this forum's reputation as The Place That Actually Likes 4E, that seems real dumb. That said, I have been meaning to give Heroquest a try for sometime now.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:06
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fool_of_sound posted:Ehhhhhhh it has a lot of weird dumb optimization stuff at character creation that just isn't apparently to new people. Like trap feats and similar are bad, but it's much easier to just say 'consider a different feat' than it is 'reorder how you distributed your dots and used bonus points' True but they will only regret their lovely choices deep into the game and not during the few minutes they spent doing them!
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Jun 27, 2018 03:07
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Kai Tave posted:Given this forum's reputation as The Place That Actually Likes 4E, that seems real dumb. There seems to be a lot of goons who ostensibly like 4e, but then never run, play in, or promote crunchy games 
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Jun 27, 2018 03:08
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Please don't introduce a newbie to the hobby with DND. It's way more fun to try narrative systems, and DND is really the only thing that quite plays like DND.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:08
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Honestly one of the worst habits D&D teaches (and yes I've seen it in the wild) is that games should have this steep and lengthy learning curve. Which then breeds the issue of "I don't want to spend all this additional time learning this other game, let's just go back to D&D and shove some square pegs in round holes like we did before" when most games won't take nearly as long to wade through. It's pathological social inertia by way of anchoring to an outlier.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:08
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Plutonis posted:True but they will only regret their lovely choices deep into the game and not during the few minutes they spent doing them! But that's the worst time!
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Jun 27, 2018 03:09
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Yawgmoth posted:Honestly I think a huge chunk of goons in this forum don't actually want to play a roleplaying game, they want a collective writing exercise with some dice to roll when they get stuck or need a fidget spinner. Also jesus christ Yawgmoth, I was going hey, man ,maybe I was kind of unfair to Yawgmoth the other day because I was in a bad mood but nope, nevermind.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:09
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Neopie posted:Please don't introduce a newbie to the hobby with DND. It's way more fun to try narrative systems, and DND is really the only thing that quite plays like DND. Again, I personally have had five players just off the top of my head bounce when I tried to get them into a narrative system, and four of those were because being asked to contribute narratively stressed them out. Three o the five were new to RPGs. Some people are more into RPGs for the game than the roleplay.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:12
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NGDBSS posted:Honestly one of the worst habits D&D teaches (and yes I've seen it in the wild) is that games should have this steep and lengthy learning curve. Which then breeds the issue of "I don't want to spend all this additional time learning this other game, let's just go back to D&D and shove some square pegs in round holes like we did before" when most games won't take nearly as long to wade through. It's pathological social inertia by way of anchoring to an outlier. Steep learning curves are good. I'm a true gamer.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:12
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Steep learning curves are a cost / by-product of making a game where you face difficult (and thus, interesting) decisions. Ideally you try to minimize complexity while maximizing depth, but you're never going to get it for free.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:18
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Crunchy games are good and cool, unfortunately while it's not the case that "oh new players just CAN'T COMPREHEND SUCH DIFFICULT RULES" the fact is that crunchier games benefit more when everyone is enthusiastic for them instead of one person being enthusiastic and another four just being kinda "eh whatever." I wouldn't want to play Gloomhaven or Argent with a group that wasn't really into the idea of playing big, robust boardgames with tons of moving parts because A). they wouldn't be enjoying it as much and B). I probably wouldn't be enjoying it as much either. Exalted probably shines way more when everyone at the table is super fuckin into it. My experience is that some players are interested in doing RPGs or board games but aren't necessarily interested in diving headlong into a wonderland of mechanical depth and complexity and with a lot of such games diving into the complexity is what makes them tick, so "lighter" games work well in cases like that, not because those people are dumb idiots who need to be spoonfed simple concepts before their brains can handle the rich complexities of THAC0 but because they just hit their threshold of "I'm gonna start checking out now" that much sooner. Within that boundary they can be just as engaged as anyone though.fool_of_sound posted:There seems to be a lot of goons who ostensibly like 4e, but then never run, play in, or promote crunchy games The 4E PbP I'm in has passed the seven year mark at this point and may finally be on its last legs which is kind of a bummer but oh well, it's been a heck of a ride. I like and would play 4E but at this point it does have a number of legacy flaws and I wish we had more honest-to-god 4E clones out there. LANCER has been my current passion but I've spent most of my time on the discord server for it because...I dunno why actually, I guess I could start a thread for it here but I am also admittedly very lazy. Still, it's got mechs, it's got tactical combat, each new iteration continues to be real good, and I'm stoked for it. Also to be fair these days I care less about chargen crunch than gameplay crunch if that makes sense. I remember spending two hours poring over making a Shadowrun character but the actual gameplay had the depth of a puddle. I mean the GM did a good job making things engaging but in terms of tactical combat or overcoming challenges things were very rote, and all the length chargen and modifiers and dice pools didn't serve to benefit the game. This is one reason I'm increasingly a fan of playbook-style chargen even though yes, I do still like building character Legos with games like 4E or LANCER as well, but when I was younger I used to think things like playbooks, archetypes, etc. were lame and stifling but nowadays I think it's a perfectly good way to cut down on one of the more onerous aspects of playing an RPG. Like anything it can be done well or poorly, of course.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:20
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Neopie posted:Please don't introduce a newbie to the hobby with DND. It's way more fun to try narrative systems, dr-evil-how-about-no-austin-powers-gif-meme.gif
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Jun 27, 2018 03:24
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Yeah it's reasonable for people with less time to give, like most adults, to want to move away from hardcore crunch. Hell, I've done it to an extent. I really like running Strike for that very reason. Ultimately, though, an RPG is only going to work if most of the players involved, including the GM, are interested in and want to play the system. That often means that a new group has to try out a few systems and see what they like, or else over time replace players who aren't interested with new ones who are.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:24
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fool_of_sound posted:Yeah it's reasonable for people with less time to give, like most adults, to want to move away from hardcore crunch. Hell, I've done it to an extent. I really like running Strike for that very reason. Agreed. To me the more pernicious thing is GMs bemoaning how their players refuse to play anything but (usually) D&D and the answer to this should always be "hey, tell your friends you want to run something else, and if they dig their heels in and bitch about it then I dunno man, maybe you need some new friends." I've never had a problem going "yeah sure that sounds cool" to a GM declaring they want to run a new game for whatever reason.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:27
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:
fool_of_sound posted:There seems to be a lot of goons who ostensibly like 4e, but then never run, play in, or promote crunchy games Neopie posted:Also jesus christ Yawgmoth, I was going hey, man ,maybe I was kind of unfair to Yawgmoth the other day because I was in a bad mood but nope, nevermind. 
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Jun 27, 2018 03:27
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Hey so I have a story about gaming nerds. I took a late lunch today and was hanging out eating in the break room. Two guys were talking about something that sounded kind of D&Dish but I wasn't quite sure it wasn't a cRPG or something. Turns out they were talking 5e. I said hi, we chatted, told them about my long Zeitgeist 4e campaign, and they told me what they were playing (5e). We had a nice conversation and then we talked about Godbound a bit. It was nice to meet more gamers at work, and everyone was cool. The end.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:28
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My experience with TG is that I never had "an older brother/cousin" figure and all my tabletop gaming and DMing was largely self-taught. I stumbled onto GURPS Lite one day, figured how the dice rolling worked, and realized that this was something I could do. The very first game I played/DMed was Microlite20 with my dad and younger brother, which was basically D&D 3e reduced to three stats and four skills, and neither character they picked had spellcasting, so everything was going off skill checks and attack rolls and DM-may-I. I think that there's value in playing with a game that's "strictly defined", because you can refer to the book for answers and the rules spell out specific processes and procedures for you to rely on rather than having to "make something up". In that sense, D&D 3e and 4e are significantly better than 5e because the rules are actually there and can be followed and can be relied upon. In that same sense, 13th Age is not something I would recommend as a "first-time" game, because even by its own admission it relies a lot on being a "reaction" to 3e/4e and assumes that you already have a lot of knowledge to carry over. As a practical matter, the organization of the book is also not great. As far as Dungeon World (or other PBTA games), I think that the biggest thing to watch out for is the players thinking that the moves are things that they pick from and "activate", rather than something that is "triggered" as a result of their diegetic actions. I couldn't say whether this is intuitive for a first-time, but I do feel confident that I as the DM could convey the game to new players pretty well. In closing, RPGs are a land of contrasts, and it's probably better to get your foot in the door by running anything that people are interested in, as long as you're also willing to shift gears as soon as poo poo starts getting janky or as a change of pace.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:32
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dwarf74 posted:Hey so I have a story about gaming nerds. 
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Jun 27, 2018 03:33
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The best intro game I’ve seen is Call of Cthulhu. It’s simple to grasp the resolution, it doesn’t take long to set up a character, it’s good for one-shots, most of it can be understood without many gamey terms, players probably get the genre and there’s lots of modules and support. That said, start with Burning Wheel. Jump in the deep end, cull the weak from the flock.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:As a practical matter, the organization of the book is also not great. This is probably a bigger deal than anything about what actual kind of game it is. For example, much as I love them, and much as the core mechanic itself isn't that complicated, I would never start somebody out on a Chronicles of Darkness game because I've never seen a CoD book that didn't randomly slip vital rules text into the middle of whole pages of flavor text, or where by-the-book character creation wasn't rear end-backwards from how any experienced player I know approaches it.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:36
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Actually, if I were to run a game for an entire group of 100% new-to-rpgs-and-roleplay game for a one shot, I'd run something like Slasher Flick. It has simple but firm character creation and mechanics, a solid theme that everyone is familiar with, gives benefits for acting in said theme, and mostly asks the players to be reactive, rather then drive the plot.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:39
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Honestly nobody should be creating characters for the first session. I have had good success with savage words and some pre gens and an adventure I found for someone’s fallout game. Character creation is there for people who really like playing but a nice partially guided experience with minimal prep time is real nice for a first game, experienced gm or no.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:41
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remusclaw posted:Honestly nobody should be creating characters for the first session. I have had good success with savage words and some pre gens and an adventure I found for someone’s fallout game. Character creation is there for people who really like playing but a nice partially guided experience with minimal prep time is real nice for a first game, experienced gm or no. This is also very true and I do go out of my way to offer pregens to anyone who wants to join a game I'm hosting.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:This is also very true and I do go out of my way to offer pregens to anyone who wants to join a game I'm hosting. Yeah, I always offer to either 100% talk them through character creation in person/over voice, and usually give them a choice between like 2-3 options if there are a bunch at a given step.
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Jun 27, 2018 03:45
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 New blogpost is up for The Next Project!Some new/first drafts of a couple classes are now available, for the current version of the rules: the Druid, the Cleric, and the Occultist [Warlock/Necromancer] (for now) Have a look, and make fun of my grammar and sentence structure. Also, check out the ongoing playtest right here on the forums, and join the TNP Discord, if you wanna be a part of the discussion. The blog will be on break for a month -- I'll post up another link in here once it's back, around July 27th.
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Jun 27, 2018 05:42
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Yawgmoth posted:And poo poo, do you guys make characters in a vacuum? You don't just chuck books at your new players and say "make a dude" I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this is how most new players are introduced to the game. It's definitely, and shittily and unfortunately, how a lot of people I know had their first game go. I've watched some piece of poo poo GM just smugly smile and go "well, we'll find out in the game" when being asked if certain advantages would be useful to a player who had never played a tabletop game before (surprise, it wasn't!). Way, way too much of this hobby believes in a gaming philosophy where the players make their character with next to no information to make it more "natural," only to "play through" the flaws they've accidentally put into their character. "It's fun to play a non-stereotypical character!" the DM tells the new player who's wondering if they should have high charisma as a sorcerer. fool_of_sound posted:Yeah, I always offer to either 100% talk them through character creation in person/over voice, and usually give them a choice between like 2-3 options if there are a bunch at a given step. Yeah, best practice I've found is to either make the character literally with them, or trade ideas back and forth as you make the pregen for them. Game 1 with new players needs to hook them in, and you aren't going to do that with the awesome power of tables and charts. ProfessorCirno fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Jun 27, 2018 |
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