I used to get really needled when TV shows and movies portrayed D&D as some kind of hilarious degeneracy Gollumlike people get up to when not lusting after cheerleaders or hacking the Pentagon. Then I grew up, moved to the relatively open and pressure-free environment of college, and found out the surprising truth: the takeaway of most non-nerds had been that the dragon game those bespectacled clowns had been playing had looked pretty fun. Go figure.<\/p>\n
So that’s not my least favorite myth about RPGs anymore. My least favorite myth is that playing them is hard.<\/em><\/p>\n Truth is, if you have a quarter of a brain, want to pretend to be a barbarian for an afternoon, and know a few people with similar inclinations–and you have a stable enough internet connection to read this paragraph–there is basically nothing stopping you. You do not need a sponsor. You do not need a coach. You do not need seven hundred dollars of special equipment. If you and your buds get a wild hair, I promise you that you can be up and running with some <\/em>kind of tabletop experience in actual minutes. If you want to run the most common systems, it will require anywhere from two to six hours of research to have a really good <\/em>start.<\/p>\n There are more great systems to play now than ever before–which brings me to the one part that really is difficult for a newbie, which is figuring out what<\/em> to play. While I’m sure someone out there has written a dynamite guide for setting new players up with the right system, I haven’t encountered it. Mostly I’ve encountered either squawking narcissistic slapfests explaining why everything north or south of a treasured game is terrible or very vague guides that are approachable at the expense of being educational or substantial.<\/p>\n Here’s the thing: there is no best <\/em>game for beginning players. It really depends on who you are and what you want to get out of it.<\/p>\n Let’s start with Dungeons and Dragons<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For people who play a lot of tabletop games, D&D <\/em>has a very complicated status. It’s a big classic game beloved by countless players and is tied to the DNA of pretty much all interactive entertainment out there. It’s also carrying around forty years of baggage and sacred cows from the pre-Nintendo era. It’s not hard to find dedicated groups of roleplayers who play D&D<\/em> exclusively and it’s not hard to find groups that won’t play it under any circumstances.<\/p>\n Here’s the thing to get out of the way right up front about D&D<\/em>. It is, and always has been, all about the bullshit.<\/p>\n What is “bullshit?” Let me put it this way:<\/p>\n If you want a game system that tells you exactly what happens when you attack a monster, I can point you to a hundred.<\/p>\n If you want a game system that tells you exactly what happens when you attack a monster with an axe, I can point to several dozen.<\/p>\n If you want a game system that tells you exactly what happens when you attack a large undead monster with a freezing greataxe and you’re a barbarian of middling expertise in decent shape except you’ve caught a touch of dwarf pox and also you’re really only good at using spears, the list basically narrows to D&D <\/em>and a few systems almost as good as D&<\/em>D<\/em>. The point of Dungeons and Dragons <\/em>as a game is not that it’s the best game for telling stories and certainly not that it’s the fastest game to learn, it’s that it’s an in-depth repository of rules for how to conclusively <\/em>resolve Heroic Fantasy Situations. It’s rejected by groups that don’t want to track and dignify all of those petty details, and with good reason: it is <\/em>those petty details.<\/p>\n When I talk about which editions I’m recommending, I’m really boiling each edition down to two questions:<\/p>\n 1.) What kinds of Heroic Fantasy Situations did the developers want to create?<\/p>\n 2.) How good a job did they do?<\/p>\n Without further ado, let’s talk about my recommendations:<\/p>\n Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition <\/strong><\/p>\n This is probably the simplest version of D&D <\/em>I’m going to talk about today.<\/p>\n Some people reading this are chuckling darkly, so let me hasten to say that this game is not at all intuitive.<\/em> Later editions of the game try to make it so that understanding one of the game’s little subsystems (your character’s skills, your character’s ability to resist poison, your character’s ability to break down a door) allows you to understand how to do basically anything with any character. 2E <\/em>is not that sophisticated, but it’s not that ambitious, either.<\/p>\n 2E <\/em>is one of the last editions to really lay down the law. Sneaking? There’s rules for doing that–if you’re playing a Thief. If you’re not, the game makes no attempt to help you.<\/p>\n Getting really good at a particular weapon? The game has rules for that–if you’re playing a Fighter. If you’re not, the game makes no attempt to help you.<\/p>\n Want to play a Dwarf Mage? Then you want to play a different system.<\/p>\n But once you’ve learned some of its more charming idiosyncrasies (lower armor class is better, there’s specific percentile rolls for almost every application of strength) it’s also one of the easiest rules systems to apply. Leveling a character in a later edition can take take anywhere from five minutes to an hour, depending on how juicy your choices are and how much math you have to do; leveling a character in this edition generally takes about thirty seconds. Combats are resolved quickly because options are limited to the obvious. Many situations are simply left to the DM’s discretion–instead of rolling to see how the Duke reacts to the proposal, you’re encouraged to just figure it out yourself. As a DM, it’s actually pretty breezy and relaxing to run once you’ve gotten the hang of it.<\/p>\n The biggest drawback of 2E<\/em> is also its biggest strength: it is classic. <\/em>Playing this game is a return to the fantasy of the late 80s, where life was cheap, treasure was king, elves were pretty, and dwarves were dour. Take a walk through its illustrations and you’ll find it strikingly different than modern fantasy–it looks less like a modern computer RPG and more like the lid of a hippie jewelry box.<\/p>\n Okay, so let me skip over about a decade of history in one sentence: the next major edition of D&D<\/em> went through several big fiddly revisions, the last of which was actually undertaken by a third party. The final result was a game called Pathfinder, <\/em>and if you’re coming in at this point, it’s probably the only iteration on this theme worth worrying about. It has the added advantage of being totally free <\/a>along with just about all of its supplemental material.<\/p>\n Pathfinder <\/em>is different than 2E <\/em>in two ways which deliberately balance each other out. On the one hand, it has a farther reach–it can and does try to tell you what happens when your fighter attempts to sneak, your wizard starts swinging a sword, or your dwarf starts studying arcana. It can even let them all become good <\/em>at those things. One the other hand, it unites most of the game’s rules under one basic and elegant mechanic so all this added complexity doesn’t become overbearing. When you factor in all the little variables and modifiers and character development choices you can make, it all averages out at slightly more complicated than 2E <\/em>for a lot more flexibility. You’ll spend more time fussing with the rules and less time wishing they existed, if that makes sense.<\/p>\n The result is also a less laser-focused and on-the-nose fantasy milieu, but that’s kind of the point. It offers more freedom to style the setting and action to your group.<\/p>\n While this isn’t the system I’d recommend to all <\/em>new groups, this is the system I’d recommend to most <\/em>of them. Just know you’ll be spending a little more time nose-down in a book before you get started.<\/p>\n NEXT WEEK: 4th and 5th<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I used to get really needled when TV shows and movies portrayed D&D as some kind of hilarious degeneracy Gollumlike people get up to when not lusting after cheerleaders or hacking the Pentagon. Then I grew up, moved to the relatively open and pressure-free environment of college, and found out the surprising truth: the takeaway […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Third Edition<\/strong> Three Point Five<\/strong><\/del> Pathfinder<\/strong><\/p>\n