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Greenhorn
Ok, so I will soon be running D&D 4th edition with a friend, for an indeterminate number of players, all of whom have never played before. I haven't played any RPG before, and neither have my friends. I've done research, and I understand that D&D is incredibly similar to videogames, and the contents of the box I've reviewed so far have convinced me that the rules are easy and combat-oriented, which, is ideal. I know all of you have some nerdy hate boner for D&D, which is cool, just don't touch me with it. I have Burning Wheel. I bought it. It is in my future already. What I'm going to ask now is: what do I do? What should I do to introduce the rules to players; and what should I do to make our real campaign? How feasible is creating a campaign from scratch? Do I need to buy the other supplemental materials? I know little. There is fan crafted content that people have posted- How difficult is it to do what they are doing? I may have more specific questions at a later date, possibly tonight.
I own the red box that comes with dice and has the manual that works like a choose your own adventure- and it does emphasize that it's an adventure and NOT an instruction guide.
I own the red box that comes with dice and has the manual that works like a choose your own adventure- and it does emphasize that it's an adventure and NOT an instruction guide.
Comments
D&D is not "incredibly similar to videogames", but if you think games like Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age: Origins there is some little similarities. In my understanding the new Red Box should have been designed to be easy starting point for new players so you should have all the tools you need to run a game of D&D with you. Only additional thing you need is imagination and lot's of skills that come with some training and just playing and running games.
As I see it a traditional D&D campaign might be something like this: A group of people (player characters) run around the world and for some reason stop to help people in their troubles, usually involving some kind of dungeons and lots of monsters to kill and maybe advancing some greater plot while doing this adventuring.
Also as a extra candy on top, free of charge an idea for a adventure. There is a small village called Albera while passing though there, maybe stopping by it's great, although smallish inn, the adventuring party hear about the village's troubles. In the depths of close by woods there stands a menacing tower and in that tower lives immortal elf Remulus de Perez and every now and then, always on full moons Remulus sends some of his minions to capture some of the children of the townfolk. The party is asked to go to the tower, find the missing children and put a stop to the elf's evil.
In the tower there is traps, monsters and combat encounters, have fun.
In the case of D&D 4e, they have a weekly encounters program on their website. You can search for a local game, and go participate in a session. I don't think these really qualify as a full-on roleplaying game (it's more of a tactical skirmish miniatures game), but a single session with a more experienced group should let you quickly grok the core combat mechanics of the game. It will take approximately four hours of your time to play, once you've found out where and contacted the GM. Even if the game is terrible, you will probably get more rules knowledge faster this way to start.
There are an overwhelming number of different core components for any individual to take on immediately. I would recommend only taking on one or two core components in any single session till you start to feel confident.
Generally I think most groups start one of two ways...
Character Construction: Pre-Gens & Combat The big meta question after you have basic rules understanding is to figure out "why are we playing", and from there solve what people want the game to be. This varies from group to group, and while I think it's the most important question to answer, it's also complicated as hell and you really don't need to dwell on it until you've played a little. Asking your players about what they liked and disliked and what they wanted more of will give you a whole lot more information than asking them what they think they want beforehand.
Also, Hit up the wizards website, and if you don't have it already, somehow acquire a copy of the DM's guide. Both have some pretty good advice on the topic.
It is impossible to underestimate the ability of players to act upon clues, don't rely on the plot moving forward at the players action.
Watch this for some grade A GM:ing. Note the obviousness of the plot, and how the plot advances.
EDIT: These are good things.
Personally, I "want" to play and run games that are heavily about story telling and creative excercise, but I'm versatile and can enjoy a pretty wide variety of other focuses. And the biggest thing to me is getting the whole group to buy in to a compromise that satisfies the group.
I'm just trying to cut off any of the sort of elitism, "Bad wrong fun", and "you're doing it wrong" thoughts about gaming in general. And on this, you're right for most cases and most types of games. I think it's also important to note that there are absolutely types of games that depend intrinsically on the players moving the plot forward. Right now I'm running a fairly open sandbox campaign, which is very-much a hybrid of site based, event based, and player based mechanisms.
Also it can swing both ways. I've had players intuit huge amounts of plot (not necessarily the one I had in mind either) from small hooks, details, and nuances. If I were trying to teach an actual GMing class, a whole section of it would be devoted to listening to my players interests and allowing the game to be shaped by their expectations (both in the negative, the affirmative, and with all sorts of twists and such). That's the one thing I really like (and dislike) about Burning Wheel as a game - that the actual game mechanics exist to be driven and shaped by such things. As for why I can dislike that at times, there are certain players that inherently dislike those kind of mechanics and there are times where I also sort of benefit from having those sort of tricks be something entirely "behind the screen". Both methods have merits... once again.
I am the grayest gray-person ever sometimes.
How many RPG player's love to engage in meta-talk about a session? "Oh man, this one time, my paladin was at like 5 HP, and I got this streak of 20's and just annihilated the front line of this invading force of orcs!" That's also a story.
Different games focus on different kinds of stories, and different ways of generating and telling them. But it's all storytelling in the end.
Does that sufficiently clarify my statement?
Also, don't be afraid to let the players mislead themselves. I recall one long campaign, where I had the players do just about everything right, they saved the day from the Villain, everything was going well, they handed over the keys to the kingdom...To the real villain, because they'd just guessed the wrong guy was the villain. They had every bit of evidence they could possibly need to find out the identity of the mysterious main villain, but they fitted evidence in to lead to the conclusion they already "Figured out" rather than the other way around, and I let them roll with it. The follow up campaign was trying to sneak in, raise an army/resistance, out-manuver the big bad politically, and then overthrow him to put someone who was somewhat less of an affably evil death-lord tyrant kinda guy. And since they'd spent the entire last campaign regularly reporting to him, he knew how they worked, and was often a step ahead of them.
Another pointer that may or may not need to be spoken: it's generally useful to always have extra tools on hand. At any given time I've got a couple monsters/traps/locations/characters in my campaign folio's just for filling in blanks and controlling tension/pacing/timing. I realize that it's expensive to spend time developing things that won't be used for practical purposes, so that's not for everybody. And similarly, it's commendable to cut your losses and pull anything that's not working out.
But even the most stereotypical D&D game, with a town and a tavern, is about storytelling.
But baseball isn't about the storytelling expressly. The players are actively engaged in creating a narrative, sure, but that's not the goal. RPG's all have storytelling as their primary purpose, and use different vehicles to achieve that.
Consider the table where you have two players. One that primarily attends the game for the storytelling, and another that primarily attends the game to advance his character mechanically, roll dice, and "win" tactical combats. In this case, they are at the table, both playing the same game (Dungeons and Dragons), but they are essentially playing different "games" (Storytelling Game with tactical skirmishes vs. Tactical Skirmish Game with a narrative).
And the truth about genres, regardless of which method you use to define them, is that they blur and bend together frequently. Not just game system to game system, but table to table, player to player.
You could, quite legitimately, state that a "Role-Playing Game's primary purpose is storytelling" but you should notice that you are also saying that any game that doesn't make storytelling it's primary purpose is not an RPG. Then it becomes quite possible for someone to be playing Dungeons and Dragons, but not be playing an RPG. Which, down the line, has resulted in all kinds of nerdrage, confusion, elitism, and people telling each other that they're "doing it wrong".
I guess my perspective is that the "high road" to take is to just accept every type of game that's defined as an RPG loosely and welcome everyone into the fold... and mette out the specifics and particulars on a game to game player to player level independant of broad genre-based categorization.
A mechanism for conflict resolution to facilitate collaborative storytelling. Then the term is too broad to be useful. ;^)
The conflict resolution has to be implemented TO facilitate the storytelling, and the storytelling has to be collaborative. I can role play with Monopoly, but calling it a "role playing game" is a deep stretch. That would be like calling Counter-Strike an MMORPG.
It's worth noting that if you just do what D&D says - say you play a module and follow it exactly - you will in fact be engaged in a collaborative storytelling exercise.
Your example about the players playing different games is absolutely spot-on. Modifying any base game results in a different "game," like putting $500 on Free Parking in Monopoly. However, that again is a player-side implementation; the genre is really only useful when attempting to discuss the game outside of its specific implementations.
I disagree that this wording makes every game into an RPG. Not all games have mechanics whose primary purpose is narrative creation. Power Grid technically contains roleplaying, but it is not an RPG because the narrative is not the end goal.
Even the most munchkiny D&D player is attempting to craft a story for their character. Even if the story only exists in their head, and it boils down to "OMG MY ELF IS SO SWEET," it's still the primary purpose. You might roll dice, kill monsters, and gain treasure, but those are all sub-games driving the larger game of "tell the story of a totally bad-ass elf."
Perhaps a more useful definition would be "a set of conflict resolution mechanics whose primary purpose is to faciliate the collaborative creation of narrative."
At MAGFest, I had to deal with a crowd where that mindset was the majority.
In some ways, it's a game design cop-out; ideally, your mechanics should be so important to the creation of the narrative that you shouldn't want to dispense with any of them. The same is true of a game that says "Decide how to resolve these inconsistent rules."
I'm not a fan of telling people to just change whatever rules they want in a game, because why even have a game at that point? But teaching people to interpret a rule in the way that results in the narrative that everyone wants is a good goal.