I’m thinking about getting my g/f some sort of tabletop pencil and paper RPG or collectible card game for Xmas. She’s likes games and she likes math so I think it might be worth a try (hey, I’m getting involved in all her things). The problem is, she’s never played such a game and, in truth, neither have I. What would be a good game for a beginner to the tabletop gaming genre?
Well. There are a myriad of systems out there… ranging from “Oh yeah. those dorks in high school played that.” And “What the crap are you talking about.”. Well most well known is pretty much wizzy’s Dungeons and Dragons, currently at 3.5 Editon, becvause they wanted to make more moeny. In any case, a quick overview of what i know is in order, i guess. Just a little warning, I’m fairly rambly. As a first note, you’ll need dice. which ones you need depends on the system your going to use. But, you’ll always needs the good old six-sider. You may als oneed 10 siders for white wolf’s system, or a bunch of differnet sided dice for the d20 system.
Dungeons and Dragons, 3E-3.5E (d20 System): This is probably the most well known Table Top RPG out there. At least, I think so. The books are pretty well organized and it’s pretty new guy friendly. It’s a high fantasy game, so uh, It’s fairly generic. But, it uses the d20 System, which most compaines publish supplements for, and it’s fairly easy to learn. Problem is, Wizzy wants your money, and there are 3 books in all just for the core set. So you’ll end burning a fair amount of cash if you get started, and theres a ton of supplements published by wizzy himself and from other 3rd party comapanies too, just to warn you if you’re the “Must complete collection” type. Though, that’s pretty true of most games, so uh, yeah, if you’re new to this stuff and want/like high fantasy, this is for you.
d20 Modern (d20 System, Obviously.): d20 Modern uses the d20 system, but it’s a spin on the old 3rd edition version and not the newer, more uh, “balanced” 3.5E edition. As you may note from the title, it’s a game in modern day era setting. It works, but there’s less mindless fun you can wreak with magic items and the like. I personally do like it because it has much, much lower magic power in it. It’s also fairly new guy friendly as it’s published by WotC and they tend to make things fairly straightforward. A good point in modern is that you really only need the one d20 Modern book to play it. It has a mix of the 3 core books of the monster manual, players hand book, and dungeon masters handbook of D&D. WotC did publish some supplements for it, most noticably, the meance manual, d20 Past, d20 Future, and d20 Apocalypse. It’s a good game if you don’t mind something set in present day, and you really only need to buy one book.
A Note for the the above, techincally you don’t need any books because wizzy released the “SRD” which stands for SYstem Resource Document, which is really all you need to play, but it’s not as easy to learn from, I hear.
Vampire the Maquerade (White Wolf’s Story teller system): This is a setting heavy system. What makes it great is the background, and darkish setting thaty may scream emo to some people. I personally like it, but the rules aren’t that great. It’s ruleset is meant more to guide roleplaying then as a end all mechianc. It’s really a rather good setting, and it’ll work out well if you’re a bit more experienced or like drama class as it is much more of a story driven system than D&D which is pretty combat heavy. So if you like making up chracters and preteneding to be them (role-playing is called that for a reason, y’know.) this game type is for you. It’s not very dice and math heavy. The rule book details the setting before the any actual rules, so it’s fairly well organized and easy to follow.
The New World of Darkness (White Wolf’s new story teller system.): This includes Vampire the Requiem, Mage the Awakening,and Werewolf the Apocalypse. It’s pretty much the same as the old games, but with a slightly different flavor and more unified ruleset. I find it to be fairly well organized releatively friendly to beginners, and just like white wolf’s old world of darkness games, more setting heavy than rule heavy.
Shadowrun, 3rd Edition (Er… Shadowrun’s system, whatever it may be.): This is a cyber-punk game with magic. It’s a good system if everyone knows it and you have a good dm who knows the rules. That said, the rules are a horrible mess of stuff. It’s fairly hard to find information because it makes you junk around the pages so much. It don’t think you should try this as your first system, but if you feel like it, no one’s stopping you.
The Silhouette System: This is published by Drema Pod 9 for their various rule playing games, most of which include giant robots. They have a “Core system” book which has the basic rules and the setting books to flesh things out. They publish “Heavy Gear”, “Jovian Chronicles”, “Gear Krieg”, “CORE Command”, and “Tribe 8”. If you like robots, take a look at the Silhouette core rules and either the Heavy Gear or Jovian Chronicles line, both of whihc include them. Tribe 8 is a post apocalytic setting, and Gear Krieg is a alternate history setting of World War II.
THe TriStat System: Orginally developed for BESM (Big Eyes, Small Mouth) it was a designed to simluate Anime. They’ve expanded a bit in their new lines and made Ex Machina and Dreaming Cities, alogn with a free downloadable “Tri Stat dX”. It uses different sided dice dpeneding on the power level of your game, and it’s a fairly nice and well organized system, but also twinked out death machines fairly easily if you’re not careful in what you allow. The rules themselves are a nice and easy system, pretty much. It’s a little confusing at first but stick too it and it should make sense in the end.
There are multitude of systems and settings i don’t know, and you may want to try them out. There’s GURPS (Generic Universal Role-playing System, I think), Rifts, the other Pallidum RPGs, Legend of the 5 Rings, Ars Magica, 7th Sea, Hackmaster, Rolemaster, and other countless systems floating around.
I’d like to add the Legend of the Five Rings (formerly d20, now it’s own intricate and perfectly balanced system of goodness, to give a completely unbiased view, of course) to HH’s mix.
However, for a beginner I suggest Vampire: The Masquerade (not too tough to understand, cool setting) for someone who likes dark fiction with some ‘real-life’ mixed in, Shadowrun or Traveller (is it even still around?) for a sci-fier, d20 modern for a realist, and Dungeons and Dragons for unbeatable classic fantasy. Legend of the Five Rings is strictly for asiapheliacs.
By the way, Shadowrun’s gotten a big 4E upgrade now, yo. No good, I think. Fucks up deckers. That’s not the point, though. Buy third edition while you can, or earlier if you can find it. Shadowrun keeps going worse and worse, if you ask me.
<a href=“www.returnergames.com”>FFRPG.</a> Based on Final Fantasy, not horribly complicated (the hardest part is really making a character).
Well I read this post before anyone had replied this morning, but I had to go to work and stuff. I was really looking forward to helping out with this topic, but most people have covered the main points. But there are a few things missing…
For starters, if neither you nor your girlfriend have ever played an rpg before you must either: 1.) find a group to play with, or 2.) buy the stuff yourself and learn the game and find some people to play with you. I really wanted to try D&D for the longest time, but because I went to a small private school and didn’t know people in the local gaming community it was impossible for me to get into a game. I now work at a card and comic shop and I see the guys that play these games and am thankful I can now pick and choose who to play with, cause alot of rpg players are total tards, no offense to anyone here, I’m sure you are all cool. The second option is more viable if you have a group of friends that have similar interests to yours, that way you can all share a beginners campaign together, learning as you go. But you still need to drop the cash. *1(exception at bottom)
Secondly I must address some of my beef with the d20 system, not to rag on the players or anything, but to inform our inquisitive newbie. d20, in my opinion is not very realistic, sure it is often a very combat heavy type game, but that’s not always bad. I’ve played a few sessions of D&D, a bit of Star Wars, and I helped playtest a couple WARS campaigns my buddy was putting together to promo the game at Gencon Indy(all d20 system games). And all I can say is that they were all very, very similar. The WARS campaign was made to get away from the combat, but that’s all the system is good at. I now play the d10 system for Legend of the 5 Rings, and it is a great change, but it depends on how realistic you want the fantasy to be. that’s it, no more rant on d20 I promise.
*1 The exception to the cash rule, I’m not sure if cala was linking to the ffrpg by returner games(it didn’t connect to anything for me), but www.returnergames.com is home to a FREE p&p rpg based on final fantasy, it uses, to the best of my knowledge, a percentile system that is similar to a modified d10 system, kinda. Looked pretty balanced between combat and role-playing when I checked it out a couple months ago, I’ve not played it myself, but if your girlfriend in any way likes ff this might be the way to go. And it’s free!!
you also mentioned card games, tcg’s, ccg’s etc. well I’ve played:
lord of the rings, magic:tg, star wars(1st one), Anachronism, wars, VS. system, pokemon, .Hack/enemy, Legend of the 5 Rings, and doomtown.
I also know how to play:
Full metal alchemist, Inyuyasha, Star Trek 2nd ed, 7th sea, and a few others that I can’t remember.
Out of all those only magic, l5r, fma, Anachronism, pokemon, VS, Inyuyasha, and possibly 7th sea are still being made. If your girlfriend has a thing for anime, which is highly likely since you post here, I would recommend Full metal alchemist, it’s a bit more complex than say the base level game like magic or pokemon, but the learning curve is not too steep, it is fairly new meaning there won’t be a large pool of cards that you have to get to be competitive, if that’s your desire, and they give out some of the coolest promos of all card games. the company that makes it is called joyride entertainment so if your local card shop doesn’t carry it bug them till they do. (bugging small business owners does work)
I hope that helps.
if anyone here plays munchkin raise your limburger sandwich!
OK, this has been very helpful, now that I know what’s out there, I can narrow down what I want. I don’t want to spend a lot of money, because I’m not sure if she’s going to be into that much (last year she bought me ice skates, I never ice skated before, Ive only ice skated twice since I got them). I also don’t want something with a very high learning curve. Neither of us have the time nor inclination to read a hundred page book of source code. She is into some anime (her favorite is Love Hina), but only after I introduced it to her. She likes more sci-fi future than fantasy, I think, because she likes Dean Koontz, Dark City, Star Wars, Xfiles, etc. She also likes Westerns and a lot of chick flicks.
How many people do you need to play a game like this? I think Ive played an RPG a long time ago with just two people (myself the player and a dungeon master)
There is nothing that says you have to have more than two people to play an rpg, but generally they are supposed to be social games. I’ve played various ones with 3-6 people, depends on the game master. I could see this being a problem for your girlfriend because there are alot of rpgers out there that would probably creep her out. your Best bet is to find a group that plays Star Wars, usually the older the players are the more even-keeled they are too. Star Wars is a good choice because it is so mainstream and so you won’t look like a weirdo for playing it, plus you most likley already know a bit of the story, the background and some general info about the SW universe so you won’t have to read a whole lot to be able to get into your characters. Try your local comic shops if you’re interested in getting into a game or buying the books, or you could check out used book stores or flea markets to get older books if you just want to rp together. But the thing that makes a rpg work is the GM and the thing that makes the rpg fun is good players to play with, you can’t buy those.
note on card games. usually you will end up spending more on card games than you will on rpg material.
Well you still haven’t decided on a game, but a group of 5 is the general number. You can have more or less, but in general, they’re designed for 4 players and a DM. I think, anyway. Also. You said Realism. AHAHAHA!
realism, as in if you don’t kill anything you can’t increase any skills, many of which are not used in combat anyway. sucks for the group of players who like the R ole P laying part of these games more than the “lets kill a dragon” part. Also the 5% chance that your character, no matter how skilled with a weapon or an attack, will critically miss any given attack. sorry, just had to clarify.
Yea, I meant RGi. Dunno why it put the Agora in there too.
All of FFRPG’s source material is avalible for free online, too, which is especially nice for the perpetually-broke gamer like myself.
Everything is available for free online.
FFRPG is only available for free online. it’s not available anywhere else due to the fact that if they ever published a book or made any money off it square would sue them.
Rhaka, what does the KKK stand for? it’s a bit disconcerting.
Possibly Klu Klux Klan?
That is certainly a possibility, and the most common occurance in western vernacular for that particular acronym, but I hoped to be made aware of Rhaka’s true intentions. We shouldn’t always assume to worst.
kill all minorities rarara
That must be (still not assuming the worst) either a joke made in very poor taste, or a sad truth. If a truth it is, then it saddens me to admit that I can trace some of my ancestry to a land that apparently fosters that kind of ignorant hatred.
It also concerns me how RPGC has allowed this extremist group to apparently become associated with them. When I signed up on this forum I was not aware that there was a RPGC KKK.
White Power, Mother fuckers!
Oh god you people are stupid.
No, You are the one that is stupid! Do not ignore the power that is WHITE POWER! We shall mother fucking cleanse the earth of the mother fucking shit!