@Emrakul [patpat]

I VTC-ed this as too broad, but looking at the answer on it I think I should've gone with primarily opinion-based. Thoughts?

@Miniman I think it's fine, so long as answers are experienced-based.

@BESW I get what you're saying, but if I write an answer saying that I've used D&D 5e to teach completely new players roleplaying (note: I would not leave this answer, although it's true), there's not all that much to differentiate my answer from anyone else's.

Except that's not what the question's asking for.

It's asking for a game that teaches itself, not a game that's easy to teach with.

I've left a comment on the one answer thus far, pointing this out.

Hmmm, I guess that makes sense. So the 'best' answer here is the one whose book teaches itself to new players most effectively.

And if it supports superhero play, all the better.

Isn't this basically what all "starter sets" aim to be? (how well they succeed is open to debate)

Yup.

It's a game-rec question: it needs experts who can speak to the game's effectiveness from a position of experience.

So, while I've introduced people to role-playing with D&D 3.5, 4e, Fate, RFS, and Cthulhu Dark, the only game I have experience with people learning purely from the system material is D&D 3.5--and even that's a bit iffy, as I had friends who held my hand a little bit.

I can't in good faith answer this question.

@BESW Which is difficult... an "expert" in this instance would be a (relatively) new player who learnt from a currently available book. Or maybe someone who has played with someone like that.

Yes. It's a very hard question to answer from experience, because most gamers start under the tutelage (awesome word) of other gamers.

That makes it no less awesome a question, nor does it put the question out of the Stack Exchange scope. In fact, it makes it MORE awesome and MORE worthy of Stack attention: it's a hard, challenging question that will draw directly on the experience of our citizens.

My roleplaying introduction came from Fighting Fantasy-type solo gamebooks, then Dragon Warriors (direct from the books, along with one other friend who was learning it at the same time as me), and then D&D/AD&D (with a group). All this alongside CRPGs.

@BESW -- agreed wholeheartedly

I was mostly self-taught from the D&D 3.0 and 3.5 core books, with a couple friends (who had a very small amount of experience in OTHER systems but none in 3.x) answering my confused questions as best they could (which wasn't much).

I'm wondering if I should put my "starter set" comment in as either a comment or answer on that question... it might help the querent, but it wouldn't be a high quality answer... and if I put it as a comment it might be seen as "answering in comments"...

I'd be inclined to say something like, "Stack doesn't always give fast turn-around on answers, so if you need recommendations fast but sloppy to get something before Christmas, the [chat] could probably help puzzle something out (though it likely won't be as solid an answer as the main site can provide)."

And if he comes to chat, talk about starter sets.

...heh. Thinking back, it took me at least a year to make the connection between tabletop D&D and the one CRPG I'd ever played (Wizardry 8).

@BESW sounds like a good thing to say, especially given the nature of the question (i.e. it's hard, and a lot of people had help)

@BESW +8 for Wizardry 8!

@doppelgreener Duly commented.

@BESW good comment

I'm honestly not sure what game I'd recommend.

It'd be largely on the quality of its context material rather than the rules themselves, I think.

@BESW Ah, but you're not technically eligible to answer anyway, right? Or do you mean in chat?

In chat, and/or theoretically.

Fair enough. I know I have no idea what would work for this.

You don’t need personal experience to have Good Subjective.

Evidence of somebody else’s good experience is good too.

@BraddSzonye No, but you need some kind of experience or support.

Did anyone say it had to be personal?

Nope!

[scrolls up]

@BESW And it'd be almost impossible to have played with someone learning purely from a book if you hadn't, since you'd have had to have sit there and not helped them.

@Miniman Well, I think that's valid experience: if nobody in the group has experience with RPGs, they're all learning from the book together.

@BESW Could be inferred from Adeptus’s comment, I guess – was mainly just pointing out that it’s not paradoxically hard to answer the question.

And that's really what the question's describing anyway.

@BESW Yep, exactly. My point was that outside of that, there aren't many situations which validate an answer.

It happens that I did learn RPGs that way, using the Moldvay Basic D&D set.

@BraddSzonye ...but I'm guessing you wouldn't recommend it as a RPG teaching resource?

But I dunno that I would recommend it today.

It was pretty good for that purpose back in the day!

Considering the amount my experienced friends were helpful, I think I would be supported in giving an answer about D&D 3.x. But I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

But now it’d be tough-ish to obtain, and you could probably do better.

I'd want to recommend a game that does a really good job of being a manifesto.

I mostly learned RPGs from NWN and the 3.5 SRD. An answer based on that would be pretty terrible though.

Atomic Robo might work. Fate C/A is possible but not ideal. CoC is actually pretty good at it!

But, um, CoC is kinda niche.

PotFT is a great introduction/manifesto about cooperative improv storytelling, but it's probably not anything like what the querent's looking for.

Yeah the odd thing about this is a lot of peoples' first RPGs is D&D, except I'm on the side of things where D&D should probably not be anyone's first RPG

(I am really glad I got into other games before D&D's ethos took grip of me)

Heh. On an individual basis, D&D can work. It's the system's ubiquity as an introduction that makes it problematic, I think, and the same would be true of ANY system gaining that kind of first-exposure dominance.

Bundle of Holding has five different bundles right now! One of which is Razor Coast... anyone had experience playing that? And, how hard would it be to adapt from Pathfinder to 3.5e?

@BESW D&D 5e actually has a lot of material based around teaching new players the concept of roleplaying.

(Not actually recommending it for this purpose, mind you.)

It pleases me to know this, though my reservations still stand re: Wizards' economic imperative to define RPGs as coterminous with D&D.

@BESW Hey, even I object to that. Not to mention the claim of 'the world's greatest roleplaying game' is the worst kind of hyperbole.

For whatever reason, I'm more okay with "world's greatest RPG" than with the system doesn't matter implications that they're trying to imply with the phrase.

After all, "world's greatest" at least says there are other options.

It's the notion that D&D is sufficient for all RPG experiences that rubs me the wrong way up a tree.

@BESW Because it's an outright lie?

That'd be it, yes.

Hence why Morningstar drew my irritation as well.

Yeah, I mean, I love D&D, but I would never try to use it for anything other than "Heroic adventurers fight monsters and villains." That's what it does, and it does it well, but it doesn't do much of anything else.

@Miniman yeah, and new players won't know better. when i learned there were games that actually dealt with social interaction with high levels of mechanics, and weren't about fighting, that was kinda amazing to me.

context: i started learning about tabletop RPGs in University, in... 2010. had a lot of on-and-off experience, never got to do more than a few sessions of anything, experienced D&D 3.5e, AD&D 2e, basic D&D where you picked a race not a class, then D&D 4e, then started learning about non-D&D RPGs through this site and its community.

i am decently aware of the effects D&D itself was having on me, and a lot of the D&D questions on this site are like a reflection of possible situations and struggles alternate-reality me would have been in if I had not found this site.

@doppelgreener -- here's my problem: what I see is that either you get combat-centric RPGs like D&D, or social-centric RPGs, but I haven't seen much at all that explores the use of metaphysics mastery to solve problems -- and that approach fits into neither combat-centric play (because it causes issues of the 'potato tea' variety) nor social-centric play (because it tends to bypass the limitations of other characters as information/assistance/... sources)

Heck, I've run many games in systems where there's one mechanic for EVERYTHING, and I still have trouble wrapping my head around it.

@Shalvenay You've seen Ars Magica, right?

@BESW What was Morningstar's unreasonable claim?

Hm, I don’t think a manifesto is really ideal for a gamer’s first RPG.

@BESW -- heard of it through this site -- my main concern with it is that I'd find the metaphysics too easy to catastrophically break

(due to being based on a world model that shouldn't really have existed to begin with)

@BraddSzonye I believe every RPG is a manifesto. The rules and mechanics are a declaration of what creates interesting play. Some are just better at conveying their beliefs.

@Shalvenay so you have seen an RPG that uses metaphysics mastery to solve problems c(:

New gamers don’t have enough context to get the “manifesto” stuff, they just want to learn how to play a game.

@Shalvenay You can get an older version as a free download. If you're at all curious, you can give it a thorough read-through.

@BESW Unless you mean that in the way that a lot of people mean “every RPG is a story,” I don’t think that’s true.

@doppelgreener -- I mean that I haven't seen it in enough detail to speak about how well it fits into what I want

I think a great first RPG should be a tutorial, or at least have a great tutorial right up front in it.

@Adeptus -- I may have to do that sometime or the other

@BraddSzonye Yeah, you're defining manifesto a lot more strictly than I am, I think.

Terminology clarification time: what do you define as a manifesto in the RPG context / context of this conversation?

A document laying out a policy and arguing in favor of it.

the policy of "what makes a fun game?" is implicit in the ruleset

Although I guess the justification part is optional.

Manifestos are not implicit, they’re very explicit about the policies they propose. It’s sort of the point of them.

@Adeptus "Most adventures can be run effectively with any ruleset."

Typically, they say “this is the true way, and this is why you should believe me”

So, that’s sort of the thing I don’t want in my RPGs.

I have a similar definition, but I'm looking at the RPG manual in a different light.

But it’s good stuff for a blog.

I see the rules themselves as being an explicit declaration of policies.

Yeah, I prefer to see them as rules to a game. ;)

And a good RPG will tell you how and why those rules are good.

An RPG is an argument for itself.

And thus, an argument for the kind of experience it wants to provide.

Eh, to folks who like to talk about game design and philosophy and stuff.

@BraddSzonye Please don't be dismissive.

To most gamers, I think that sort of thing is a big distraction. They just want to know how to play.

@BESW I am a person who likes to talk about game design and philosophy and stuff.

@BraddSzonye I'm getting to that.

A good RPG does this transparently. It doesn't talk philosophy, but it talks about goals and tools.

My favourite RPG to read is Call of Cthulhu.

I have way too much of a headache to argue today.

I'm not trying to argue.

I think we're saying the same thing.

It’s possible.

@BESW Ah. Yes. Reading the rest of that paragraph, I don't think they mean it quite how they wrote it. My reading is, they meant "our tool is useful even if you're using unsupported rulesets". Which may or may not be an accurate claim either.

I don't think I'd ever play CoC, but its section on the role of the player and the GM and the kind of game the authors are going for is brilliant.

It's not naval-gazing or theory, it's practical discussion of how to make the game work.

Dunno that any of that makes sense without the context of having played other games, though. It’s not new-gamer-tutorial type stuff.

But it's also absolutely a manifesto.

@BraddSzonye Now, that I'll disagree with: new players aren't blank slates, they bring their culture with them. Not having played other games doesn't mean they won't bring ideas--conscious or subconscious--about how games are played.

It's important for everyone to have similar notions about what the game's gonna be like.

@BESW -- yeah, or else you wind up as me -- someone who has a habit of redefining every game he walks into in ways that people simply aren't expecting to deal with

This can be conveyed in gross or subtle ways, through text or through the GM, all kinds of ways.

But it should be conveyed, perhaps especially to newcomers.

@BESW naval gazing: trying to come up with an entertaining explanation of this typoed term

That's the sort of thing I'm thinking about when I say a good RPG is a manifesto: it's clear about its terms and goals and tools and probably is good at showing you why they're good.

\o Also, gonna chime in here, as a new and learning player, Fate explaining its philosophy and talking about its own rules was really really helpful in understanding how to play. This was before I started seriously looking at the game from a designer perspective.

I find I still don't quite have the Fate Accelerated rules and philosophy matched up yet -- then again, my game hasn't gotten into really any sort of conflict scene, yet

D&D didn't talk so much about its own rules, just said how things were and then said go, and that was okay, but a very different experience. (But then again it's also D&D, so that was a different experience on its own.)

@BESW that'll do

@doppelgreener I was actually suckered in by some bits in the 3.5 DMG which told me that all I had to do to play a political or psychological game was apply Oberoni.

D&D rawks and everything else is suxx0rs

I'd probably still have 3.5 in my game rotation if I hadn't spent all those years trying to make it do things it really wasn't built for. It's got a sweet spot that I can value.

@JohnP no u take that back

@JohnP :P just wait until you try to force-fit a natural lycanthrope paladin into any D&D edition other than 3.5 -- fantastic system-breaker character concept if I ever saw one

dungeon world gr8est

at least in the realm of high-fantasy things

* > D&D > poop lol

(i am joking)

One of my friends ran a paladin werebear in 3.5, shortly after I'd left that group. I hear it was amusing.

@BESW -- Sir Bearington :D

@Shalvenay i still want to try a paladin pony

@doppelgreener -- hrm -- centaur paladins?

@doppelgreener ...Royal Canterlot Guard unicorn?

@Shalvenay nope, pony paladins

using a war pony monster race + a divine class

xD\

probably followed by much confusion about what to do about the paladin's mount

Besties!

Actually--a pony with supernatural power and the ability to appear and disappear for no apparent reason? Paladin's mount is totally Pinkie Pie.

@BESW haha oh no, that actually makes sense

@BESW that'd do it

I'm actually working on an 8th level char for a Pathfinder campaign.

Or, I would be if my 11 week old would stop fussing...

o/ @Grubermensch

[stagger]

It's me...

@Pixie What are those?

@Miniman Galaxy print bat plushies from BeeZeeArt.

Unfortunately, I think they're all sold out. D:

> ...it takes sandbox games to the level only found in Ed Greenwood's basement. Not the one full of redheads. The other basement. - from a review of Razor Coast

HP Lovecraft on what his post-apocalyptic stories might be like.

Hague Mermaid has been ordered. We will see in a couple of days whether it is the source of nightmare fuel sea witch (assuming they actually send me the right edition).

@Pixie Oooer.

It's a good candidate. Post-1989 is likely enough; Disney's film would have increased interest in the story, and recent picture books would have been more likely to end up on my shelf. Due to the earliness of the memory, it can't be later than... I'd say '96 or '97 probably, but likely before then. Amazon has a list of editions, and while it's unlikely to be complete, there aren't a lot of other candidates in the proper date range.

Also, debating buying the M&M 2e bundle before it's over. I'm not sure. I'll have to compare the editions.

The Dungeon World bundle is a good deal as well. I'm only vaguely interested in DW, but you really can't go wrong with the core and several expansions for $7.

[sigh] Stack is, to the best of my knowledge, not a site interested in the speed of its answers.

@Pixie I would be interested to know if it turns out to actually be the right one

(and to see the image in question, cause that sounded pretty freaky)

This needs to be vtc'd

(source)

Anyone knowledgeable about the lore and etc of martial disciplines/maneuvers in D&D 3.5?

Good morning

@TheOracle That's actually a really interesting question.

Gah, trying to assign spell schools to martial disciplines...

I'd put it as a question but it'd be mostly opinion based...

@Dorian If you word it right you could ask it.

Hello peeps

Hello

How goes it?

Blarg

That good huh?

Bored mostly.

Ah

I finished designing the BBEG for my game, Finished building a few special creatures.

Can't get on Roll20 to design the map or I would do that.

I am going to be starting a Hunter: the Vigil campaign this Saturday, so I still have a lot of planning/writing to do.

I am unfamiliar with that system?

it is a World of Darkness theme.

Hunters: Mortals who fight back against supernatural creatures essentially.

Ah so like Van Helsing

Yea, that would be a pretty good comparison.

Or exactly like Supernatural, if you've ever seen the show.

I have.

HR person just walked up to my desk and asked me if Obi Wan was a good guy... Incredulous: "Have you seen the movies?"

Obi Wan was a horrible teacher but not a bad guy. He just expected more from his apprentice than he should have. Right? (I have only seen movies once.)

@Aaron depends on which series you're watching. He was a quick father figure/mentor/quest giver to Luke. He was a young and brash head strong student, cocky teacher to Anakin

@waxeagle Talking about him as a teacher

@Aaron yeah, I need to re-watch AotC and RotS again, been a while

Browsing thru Amazon for gift ideas - saw that the 5e DM Guide is #70 top seller (updated hourly - not sure what the exact time period is). I'm impressed - who knew that a 40 year old roleplaying game could still make the top 100 list?

@RobertF the PHB was #1 for a short time after release. It was pretty awesome

they've gone on record a few times talking about how thrilled they are with the 5e sales numbers so far

Goes to show that repackaging a product with better art and more streamlined rules pays off.

Yeah, doesn't hurt that they've marketed the hell out of it.

I bet Mike Mearls & Co. feel vindicated.

I'm sure they do to some degree. I think they also have to be a bit relieved.

LOL: 'HR person just walked up to my desk and asked me if Obi Wan was a good guy... Incredulous: "Have you seen the movies?" '

You should have told him Obi Wan was the bad guy, Darth Vader was the good guy, defending the Empire from the evil Rebels.

Oh wait - maybe not good to call Rebels evil where you live ... :/

@RobertF lol she's too sweet to do that too :)

@waxeagle sigh, I search the tags I would use, cleric/DnD 5E, don't see the question, ask it and turns out it's a duplicate of a question with no class specific tags. It's annoying.

@Korack quite all right, duplicates are useful

a limited number of duplicates do exactly that, improve searchability

thats why we treat closed as dupe completely differently than basically all other close types

Just don't like looking like I didn't try to find the answer first.

and I knew it existed because I'd asked it already :)

:-)

all that said, if you're searching for something and you can't find it, ask it. If it's closed as a dupe, no problem, you've just improved the site for the next guy with the same question.

Does anyone else play pathfinder who is on?

Thinking about making a stout halfling totem (bear/wolf) barbarian 7 and assassin rogue 13. Just seems like I'll need 3 stat rolls of 17 or higher to make it exactly how I'll want it.

@Aaron sorry, just Pathfinder Munchkin.

@Korack Pathfinder Munchkin?

Munchkin is a card game. The original game is DnD/fantasy based but now there are versions for pretty much every genre.

Ah. I know the card game. I hadn't heard of the Pathfinder version.

Yep, there's an addition to it as well, but I don't have that yet

@waxeagle No one ever neets to rewatch attack of the clones or revenge of the sith lol

I wonder if your group would find it an interesting break to play in between campaigns...

Well, heading out. Take care all.

@JoshuaAslanSmith eh, my kinds haven't seen them yet, and I figure they need to understand why episode 7 is such an exciting proposition to me.

@Aaron - I have the Pathfinder core rulebooks but have only played in one PF Society game.

@RobertF I was trying to figure out if you could attack two handed while unarmed.

Like a haymaker. Putting your hands together to hit harder.

@Aaron - The Captain Kirk style of fighting :) - don't know, I'll have to check the rules when I'm back home

@RobertF I don't think it is rules legal just thought of it and I sometimes chase my random ideas like a dog chases it's tail.

What is the optimal way to fight hand to hand in PF/3.5, BTW? Between humanoids I mean. I've read that tripping is a handy action to pull off, but lots of people don't think much of grappling.

@RobertF If your DM doesn't throw you against the massive enemies Grappling isn't that bad.

Same with tripping

Against a heavily armored opponent I can see that grapple damage bypasses their AC. Damage inflicted from grappling is low but that's to be expected.