What game/system would you recommend to introduce someone to roleplaying (no experience beyond computer games)...

>coworkers learn I'm into tabletop gaming
>ask me to try out D&D and teach them cuz they've seen it on television and in movies and stuff and it looks like it might be fun
>reassure them that it's not as bad as they've seen or heard, we won't be putting on robes and wizard hats
>they show up
>throw GURPS down and roll in a chalkboard to begin teaching them the finer points
>they ask where D&D is
>begin to berate them loudly, spittle hurtling from my mouth across the table as I explain to them that D&D is philistine garbage, only accepted as the norm because it was first and pushed hard
>as they begin to awkwardly leave my abode I follow them out into the parking lot of the apartment complex, screaming into the night that TSR and Wizards of the Coast are amateurs and that indie tabletop development is heralding a golden age of pen and paper gaming
>entering their cars I try to block them from driving away, pounding on their hoods and sobbing that Burning Wheel is a more developed roleplaying system
>someone calls the police
>spend the night in jail because my friends wanted to play board games wrong

Thanks Obama.

When people think D&D they think of something more like Fate accelerated than that clusterfuck of bad design choices. "I want do thing!" "Roll it!" And then they roll the dice and describe what happens in simple English. . Its a lot more intuitive and teaches them good characters come first, instead of teaching them that character need to be charopped to be useful, or that all RPGs are are a bunch of rules.

Give them FATAL.

My first was Shadowrun and I turned out fine.

That being said it was mostly because I wanted to play a cyberpunk game and it was the most popular one. It can get complicated with all the different rules for magic and tech users and shit.

>I want to punch him
>alright Dave go ahead and roll your bucket of d6s
I fucking love Shadowrun

There might be not a singular mechanic that is hard to grasp, but dificulty isn't there. It is AMMOUNT of the rules and shit that makes it hard. I mean, D&D 3.5 core, excluding monsters and spells is like 600 pages long. With almost no fluff. Average RPG core is between 300 and 400, including some fluff. And you should have a grasp about monsters and spells too. GM basically has to learn all of this shit good (I'm assuming OP is new too), and players at least huge part, if you don't want the game to be bogged down my GM having to explain every bit of shit mid-game.

And while no one is doomed to become shit player by D&D, there are big chances of that. Especially if GM's new too and can't be a good guiding hand. System and how it's presented just focuses on wrong things and teaches people to set their priorities in wrong areas.
>It's the simplest and easiest way to bridge the gap from traditional board gaming to the world of pen and paper tabletop
1. Most people don't come to RPG from boardgames.
2. RPGs and board games are something completely different, and instead of teaching them that they're simmilar by chosing something that's basically a hybrid, you should do the fucking contrary to wipe all associations with boardgames from their minds from the start.

I had a guy join my group who totally on accident min maxed into rolling 26 dice every time he fired a shotgun. Everyone was freaking out,

>only accepted as the norm because it was first and pushed hard
>Burning Wheel is a more developed roleplaying system

I'm confused, this is written like it's meant to be satire, but these things are true.

Dungeon World. Relies on the same sort of fantasy tropes as D&D, but easier to learn and lighter.

Screaming advanced quantum physics material at people who asked you to explain condensation doesn't endear you to them. Just because the things you are shouting are true doesn't make it any less irritating, or within their comprehension.

When someone wants to be introduced to tabletop games, you give them D&D. Later there will be GURPS and Burning Wheel and Shadowrun and FATE, but for now, give them the game they saw those nerds on tv playing.

You should read
This post is a cautionary tale for all of you fucking retards who seem to think people who need introduction to tabletop games need to be cleansed of their preconceived notions and purified.

Except its an extragerrated satire without any touch of reality that proves nothing

If you need to find other players who already know the game? The current edition of D&D is probably your best bet. It's not as rules-light as I'd like for a starter game, but it's got plenty of players and is at least a vast improvement over the other big game on the market, Pathfinder.

If you intend to jump into this with your friends, I'd recommend Barbarians of Lemuria (see pic). Yeah, the name is kind of lame, but it's a good, minimalist, swords & sorcery game.

>Barbarians of Lemuria,Mythic Edition (current edition) -- mediafire.com/folder/7llc83r2xf8bg/Barbarians_of_Lemuria_-_Mythic_Edition

>Barbarians of Lemuria, Legendary Edition (earlier edition, fewer details & more minimalist presentation makes it even easier to learn, but the rules aren't as refined) -- mediafire.com/download/p5w885sa9a869ma/Barbarians Of Lemuria - Legendary Edition.pdf

>Barbarians of Lemuria, House Rules / Patches for Legendary Edition (if you want the bare bones minimalism of Legendary, but with the rules tightened up a bit) -- mega.co.nz/#F!CtQR2bST!y_awB-GHCiL3CdK4iLCV7A

>>Implying THAC0 is difficult
It literally is BAB with Subtraction.

World of Darkness has a large playerbase, I recommend you give that a spin. If you can't find it in a FLGS, try roll20.net.

Of course it's exaggerated but the fact remains that half the people in this thread are on a tirade against D&D for no reason other than that they don't like it.

You don't have to like D&D but the fact remains that D&D/Pathfinder are the most accessible to newcomers. It has a board, it has figures, it's a good, hybrid transition from scrabble and monopoly to Burning Wheel and Shadowrun, and other games in the tabletop genre that have no board.

Vanilla newcomers to the concept of pen and paper games are going to be less inclined to sitting around and imagining everything from scratch than they are to actually having a board and miniatures and shit.

Most people need baby-steps to get into RPGs. Even if you don't have tiles and miniatures, D&D is STILL the best place to start simply by nature of most anybody having heard of it already.

5e shoots for simplicity in a lot of areas, but still has enough moving parts that it ends up being rules-medium. That's still an improvement, and it makes an okay beginner game, but it's clearly not the ideal.

>You don't have to like D&D but the fact remains that D&D/Pathfinder are the most accessible to newcomers.
Pathfinder is rules-heavy and is pretty much the opposite of accessible. It's like recommending Dwarf Fortress as a good place to start for somebody who's never played a strategic computer game before.

how is pathfinder hard? please do tell

> D&D/Pathfinder are the most accessible to newcomer
Accesible on what ground? That they heard the thre letters D.N.D. before? That's the shittiest argument ever. You can tell them there are other games like that and that they're better, you don't have to scream at them because they didn't hear, just explain. And it won't make any fucking difference for them if they're not actually playing "that game they heard about" but something different unless they're retards.
And it's not accesible, and comparing it to even crunchier games like TBW or GURPS has literally no purpose. You should start with lighter games, not monstrosity with rules that might be not complicated but heavily overblobbed.
>it's a good, hybrid transition from scrabble and monopoly to Burning Wheel and Shadowrun
Except there is no transition. Because there is no continuum between those. Only a hybrid with no purpose.
>It has a board, it has figures
And they will get used to this, and they will think it should be like that, and it will take forever to un-learn them and convince that RPG isn't actually about hackandslashing through the dungeons while rolling dice and exping up a character. Something you could easily avoid by starting with something else and learning them good things from the start

The earlier editions tend to be clunkier in terms of having odd mechanics that work in different ways and so forth, but overall, there is a lot less there to worry about. For instance: skills. In 3.5 you get skill points that vary according to class and intelligence modifier. You buy up skills with different costs and maximum levels according to your class. This is something you do every time you level. A number of your skills are adversely affected by your armor and shield (so if you put your shield down, you have to recalculate). Some skills are affected double. Also, if you cast spells, then armor and shield can give you a chance of arcane spell failure. Of course, if you have masterwork or magic armor, the penalty is reduced. Now, certain skills have synergies with other skills, meaning that if you buy a skill up to a certain level, you get a bonus towards another skill. Keep in mind that many of the skill descriptions have specific target numbers or formulas determining what happens when you use them. And there's taking 10 and taking 20. And there are lots of things that modify your attributes (spells that boost them, poisons that lower them, etc.), so you might have to recalculate everything during your game.

On the other hand, in Basic, OD&D, and 1st edition A&D, there are no skills. You improvise shit based on character background and whatnot, defaulting to an attribute check--"roll you dexterity or under to avoid losing your balance when you walk across the slippery log". That's literally all there is to it.

Long story short, it's not that any one step of 3.PF is super complicated, but that there are tons of stats and formulas and modifiers and target numbers to consider, and it weighs down the system.

I was being a bit flippant about it, but I mostly agree with you. I'd go with D&D 5e or Dungeon World over Burning Wheel or any edition of Shadowrun for someone who's new. Fate would be easy to introduce new people to. It's not hard to grasp, and the cultural osmosis of DnD isn't actually all that helpful to /learning/ it.

If someone specifically wants to play DnD, of course I'd oblige that. I just always make sure to let people know that other roleplaying games exist.

>What game/system would you recommend to introduce someone to roleplaying
D&D 5e. I recently got a group of five total newbies into it. I helped guide them along in character creation and had a quick tutorial of how the game works before diving into one of the campaigns (Curse of Strahd). We've played every week for months now and they all love it.

As a follow up, Moldvay/Cook Basic D&D (B/X) is 128 pages long for everything--character creation, combat, monsters, treasure, etc.--and you only need the first half of that (the Basic Set of 64 pages) until you get past 3rd level. By contrast, the core Pathfinder rulebook is 575 pages--4 1/2 times B/X's length--and doesn't include monsters.

BAB is more intuitive than THAC0, but they are just different ways of solving the exact same equation.

Super social RP oriented, tons of backstory and fluff, sexy vampires. Yep. Great intro for complete newbs.

If you can't find WoD somewhere, maybe suggest your homebrew LARPing system.

4e was the only MMO style edition. 5e is best edition

3.5 was literally an MMO.

There's a big wall between us, and I'm not going to be able to beat through it to get you to understand the extremely simple concepts I am trying to explain. If you don't understand how D&D would make for a good transition between the board games a newcomer is used to, and the world of tabletop roleplaying games, then we literally have nothing to discuss.

how was it an MMO?

D&DO was a literal MMO based on MMO edition.

I understand completely and I think we're more or less on the same page.

I wasn't trying to suggest that D&D is easier or better to learn because people know what it is, I mostly just meant that in terms of people's willingness to try out something new.

In my opinion and experience, it's easier to start people off with D&D because they know what it is, have basically seen it played and understand how it's supposed to go, so they're more at ease with giving it a try as opposed to say Shadowrun. Which hardly any average outsider knows anything about, and probably would be less likely to give it a shot, since they don't know what to expect or how a game like that goes.

Ultimately what I'm trying to say is that D&D is an excellent place to start because people will be willing to try it out for the sake of having said they got to play that game everyone's heard of, and because D&D is somewhat similar to a standard board game, and the added element of some light-roleplaying will ease people into the idea.

Dungeon World, too, is a great place to begin. People won't be as likely to have heard of it, but it's very simple to pick up and run with, even using boards and miniatures for those who aren't comfortable with having no physical representation for what's going on.

Honestly Savage Worlds. It isn't too complicated, and it isn't too drawn or simple to make it boring, and it has enough options to fit most tastes.

GURPS

Its not that I don't understand how it's a transition, its the fact that this transition is unneeded and serves no purpose, while carrying substantial risk of bogging them down in between.
Best way
1. Pick rules light, narrative system, like FATE or Savage Worlds
2. Set game in ready setting your players know. They watch GoT? Make it GoT. Or anything else they won't need vast explanation about.
3. Help them create characters that fit the setting, fit the story and are enjoyable for them. Also that have some plot hooks, motivations and place in the world, none of that adventurer-murderhobo shit
4. Explain them the possibilities. What they can do (Which is basically everything BUT with consequences which should be stressed). If they are not retarded they'll catch this quickly and like it.
5. Play an enjoy upbringing a new generation of good players instead of creating bunch of rollplaying plebs

touche 3.5 was an MMO cause of DDO

How is rollplaying a D&D specific problem? It's literally something I've come up against in every single system I have ever played. There's always at least one person who only gives a shit about doing the biggest numbers, and doesn't want to roleplay, and if they do roleplay it's just some lone wolf suave character with a massive ego and a backstory that "will come out in play later, I don't want to have to type up a background."

And if you don't want D&D to be adventurer-murderhobo shit, don't run it that way.

It may be the implied default in most of the books, but you sure as shit don't need your game to start out in a tavern where some old man is complaining about orc raiders that took his daughter when they attacked his farm.

What about fantasy age? Plenty of stuff for beginning players, granted, few classes and specializations. But you don't even have to play with them. You can just houserule shit.

Hell, I made a human mage, that played like a henshin mystic monk. Fire fists, earth fists n stuff. Shit's awesome. Even abolished mana points, and just uses Ki.

No no, better yet:

GURPS, but tell them it's D&D: Pathfinder Edition.

People completely new to RPGs don't actually know what D&D actually is.

youtu.be/iztRfwxiq28
youtu.be/6dQYhzpuH4A

Notice how neither involves any knowledge of how D&d actually works. D&D is shorthand for "a game of fantasy pretend where dice are rolled". Something like Fate accelerated is infinitely better to capture the fun feeling the shows have, not the full blown armor class up tracking advantage disadvantage system with a hundred fiddly bits that is D&d.

Go fuck yourself if you want D&d on new players and kill their enthusiasm with a bunch of rules they don't need to do what they see portrayed on TV.

If you are playing with people who can't grasp 5e mechanics, maybe you should stick with Monopoly or checkers.

Coup/Resistance followed by Shadowrun.

Coup and Resistance easy rules get people hyped about evil Corporations and shit and if you pitch Shadowrun after they will eat it up not even caring about learning the rules aka the basics of table top.

As for finding people I go to cons because most game stores smell/have the aura of fat desperate nerd. To be fair, my group is predominantly female when no one can host and we are forced to rent space at the store it is always awkward because people stare.

1. Because IT IS heavily implied in the books. You can run it against the books, but why bother
2. Because crunchy rules make rolling through combat steal lot of time and give the impression that this is what the game is about. Especially if you're going to use minis and tiles. Especially if yo're going to make it dungeon crawl that is mostly about combat. And if not, why bother with D&D, tiles and "transitions"?
3. Because overstressed character advancement is also stealing attention form other things.
Basically, system mechanics in D&D and how are they presented IMPLY that its about rollplaying.
And if something is implied, people tend to catch it up and learn that it is right thing. While it's not.
They might not be natural rollplayers, but the system teaches them to be ones.

That's not the issue here. The issue here is that what they want is not D&D. What they want is a rules-lite (Not D&D) narrative (Not D&D) game that's a little silly (That can be D&D, though). They want to be sent to stop the evil dragon that's not actually evil, the reason they set the forest on fire was because they caught the flu and sneezed fire. They want to investigate why the goblins are stealing sheep and discover that the goblins aren't killing them, they're using them as beds because the sheep are soft and warm. They want to be sent to steal a cockatrice's egg because the king's chef needs it as an cake ingredient for the prince's first birthday. They want what is essentially an episode of a children's cartoon like Adventure Time or what the fuck ever.

What they DO NOT want is to sit down and have to read a bunch (or be taught a bunch) of rules, track HP and healing surges, remember armor class penalties and feats. They want to have a sheet that says "Elven Huntress" that is an "Expert Tracker" so they can track down a greedy merchant fleeing angry customers, they want to have "Ancient Wizard" that can cast "Light" so the party can investigate the spooky cavern where the locals dare not go, they want to have "Cunning Rogue" on their sheet that can "Read Lips" so they see that the king isn't actually speaking, it's the vicar behind the chair and the king is mind controlled.

Holy shit how is this so difficult to grasp for you people. They want to play pretend, not D&D. You don't need D&D's ruleset to do any of this, and in fact it actively hampers it by requiring them to know and keep track of so many rules.

Around here, the most popular games in order are:

D&D (5E), Pathfinder, D&D (other editions), 40K RPGs, Shadowrun, then everything else.

So from my perspective, if I wanted to get them playing a game that they could use as an easy way of meeting more players at public games at the local game shops, I'd tell them to pick up any of those except for Pathfinder and old D&D. When I was new, Pathfinder was an absolutely dense mess of bullshit for chargen. And anybody playing the older D&D editions at this point knows the ins and outs so well that unless they're a nice guy you're gonna get fucked up for not knowing better.

Now all of this said, I'd personally just walk my friends through a round of Savage Worlds. Shit's flexible, works with just about any setting, and is really easy to teach people how to play. When you take those things into account, you can do things to get a normie more invested. You could, for instance, run a game in the Harry Potter or Tolkien settings that they might be familiar with if they're willing to try tabletop but haven't done it before. You could even run Star Wars, 40K, Cthulhu Mythos, Old West, and whatever else you can think of if you can find PDFs for the sourcebooks and share them with your players. It's not exactly hard to find the books either.

That's just my biased opinion from limited experience though. If there's something even better, count me interested.

Fate is so meta in its management of roleplay and story that newer players catch on quick but older ones are clawing through the book, looking for old synonyms to mechanics they already know (to find little resemblance).

God damn thats a lot.
But then most rules are fairly circumstantial.
I make up cheat sheets that take up less than an a4 to cover most basics, with another for combat. Works good and keeps things moving.
>oh so i need to roll THAC0 + its ac to hit... thats 14!

Someone new to the hobby doesnt need to know how many sheckels you can get for flogging the kendar to a rogue trader's pet kroot now do they?

Just give them the bare bones and tell them shit as they need it.
Although if you are playing some hand-holding rpg where theres a skill for wiping your ass and you need these 5 specific feats to avoid getting any on your hand you may need to rethink the system for the intro to the hobby.

How about Everyone is John?

Forgot to answer op.
To rope them in find something adjacent.
Watch LOTR with em then ask em how they would have done it( if fantasy is their thing).
Sci-fi?
Firefly or star wars.

As to the system, I learned on ADnD 2e and was fine, but savage worlds is real simple to grasp, and the 40k ones are easier to get than the fluff.

>about to run an rt with a group who have never 40k'd
>wish me luck

>I'd tell them to pick up any of those except for Pathfinder and old D&D.
How familiar are you with old school D&D? Because though it may have some old school wonkiness, Moldvay Basic is easier than anything else on that list to play. By far. If you're only familiar with AD&D, you may think that all old school D&D is as cluttered as it is, but that's not the case with Basic.

>But then most rules are fairly circumstantial.
It's still extra shit you have to sift through, and a new player may find it hard to judge what shit to ignore, especially since there's plenty of clutter within the core, important shit. Take, for instance, skills:

Babby's First RPG
>5e, simply because the brand-associated name and following

RPG's to follow after you've inducted yourself
>Pathfinder
>Shadowrun
>4e or AD&D (If you're feeling adventurous)
>Dark Heresy or Deathwatch if you only have friends that are into Jews Workshop products.

Buy a single D20. Sit around a table and imagine shit. Whenever anything is contested or a matter of success or failure is called into question, roll the D20 and arbitrarily decide as the DM. Tell your players all of the relevant information and numerical values are in your head and you're keeping track of it all for their ease. Decide on the outcome you want, or whatever is best for the story, and then whatever number is rolled is irrelevant and supports your decision.

"My orc barbarian is going to charge in with his battle-axe and attack the gnoll before he fires his crossbow!"
*rolls a 3*
"You succeed, cleaving the gnoll in two pieces, his crossbow firing its bolt off into a tree, instead of your ally."
"But that was just a 3."
"I was rolling for the gnoll to survive, not for you to hit."

Moldvay Basic, as far as my local scene goes, is also even more obscure than Savage Worlds. I wouldn't recommend any of the games on that list for being rules list, I'd recommend them for being popular enough to have plenty of local groups of players.

Since everyone here is going on a screaming shitfit about whether or not D&D is good...

I'm going to suggest some retroclones, so it's D&D with the serial numbers filed off, and usually with simpler mechanics.

Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, Basic Fantasy RPG, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess can all be had for free, and in the case of LotFP, the free PDF version is artless and thus less likely to make people think you're some kind of weirdo.

They're simple to learn, simple to set up, simple to play, and they do away with the nonsense of having to learn 200+ pages of rules. There's also a ton of adventures and content out there for them.

For non-fantasy, I recommend Mutant Future, also available for free, and is a clone of Gamma World.

>What they want is a rules-lite, narrative, game, that's a little silly
D&D is all of those things.
Old school D&D that is. Basic and older.
My D&D rulesset is around 25 pages total. Almost all of which are classes.

He hates D&D. He's not rational, and he won't listen to reason. Whatever D&D did to him, years ago, it scarred him for life.

Moldvay Basic is what the following games are based on: Labyrinth Lord, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Basic Fantasy, ACKS and so forth (it's the most cloned version of D&D). As a system, it's pretty much interchangeable with Mentzer Basic (BECMI) and the Rules Cyclopedia, at least until you get to the higher levels it doesn't cover (most of the time, you can't even tell which version of Basic a module was written for unless you check the publication date). And since Basic is just a streamlined version of OD&D with the Greyhawk supplement, OD&D and games based on it (like Swords & Wizardry) are familiar. And Basic uses the same core rules as AD&D. It just has less clutter stacked on top. So if you know how to play AD&D, you know how to play Basic (though you may be looking for non-existent rules for a bit). Old school D&D is more or less just different versions of the same game, and Moldvay Basic is at the simple end of that spectrum.

Now, I'm not saying that old school D&D doesn't have its issues (like a bunch of wonky subsystems that function using different dice and mechanics), but it shouldn't be lumped in with Pathfinder as a "stay the fuck away from this game" for noobs. And I'd recommend it before Shadowrun and (from the little I've seen) 40k.

Depending on what theme they would like to explore:

Fantasy = D&D 5e
Space opera = FFG Star Wars
Horror= Call of Cthulhu 6thE

D&D isn't narrative. It's also keyed to a specific dungeon-delving niche and is rigid in some of its expectations regarding treasure, earning XP, class balance and so forth. I'm not dissing on D&D (I've actually been touting Moldvay Basic in this thread), but it's the type of game the person you were responding to was talking about.

Well I wasn't lumping it in with Pathfinder for the same reason. If you'd read, my reason was that most of the players are veterans and unless you're really brushed up on your 3.5 or 4E rules (again, I don't know of any local shops that are running games in Basic or anything based on it) or the guys you're playing with are nice, you're likely going to be left behind in a way by people who are just better at putting together characters in a system like D&D that tends to encourage minmaxing.

In terms of mechanics, there's pretty much zero character building in Basic. There really aren't any ins and outs to know. There are no skills or feats or anything like that. You have your six ability stats, your class and that's about it. Everything else is improvisational. "You want to try to find an oasis? Let's make that a wisdom check, but I'll give you a +2 bonus because your character background says he grew up in the desert."

>D&D isn't narrative.
Old school D&D is entirely narrative, in the actual sense, rather than those garbage narrativist games who mistakenly think failure should never be an option, only an obstruction, and mistake being ironic for being clever.
It expects players to tell the DM what they want to do rather than what rules they want to use (you mentioning Moldvay should know this since he basically codified it as "you can try anything") and has a combat system that's less than 10 sentences long.
>It's also keyed to a specific dungeon-delving niche
It's not. Even OD&D had wilderness rules and many of the OSR games love hex crawls, domain games or crazy mad gonzo stuff.
>rigid in some of its expectations regarding treasure
They can be handed out like candy if you don't mind that kind of setting.
>earning XP
Entirely up to the DM and amounts to 1 sentence if he feels like changing it "XP = GP" replaced with "XP = Quests cleared/Great Deeds/Whatever".
>class balance
It barely cares about that.

>You have your six ability stats, your class and that's about it.
And the ability stats for Basic are at most -3/+3 and with OD&D -1/+1 so they're not really as relevant in the same way they are in later editions.

If you let magic-users rest too freely, it screws the game up. Lots of spells are unbalanced compared to others unless you go with the standard dungeon delving shtick (things like wizard lock). Thief skills are pretty much useless at low levels unless you use them as saving throws. Beginning characters must play a very careful game of avoidance or they will get slaughtered. Not giving out XP for treasure will drastically change the rate of progression. Hell, even the way you accrue hit points as you level leads to a particular style of play. And if you want to see how easy it is to misunderstand the fundamentals of D&D and create a mess of a game, just look at 3e.

>If you let magic-users rest too freely, it screws the game up.
So don't?
>Lots of spells are unbalanced compared to others
That's down to adjudication. Charm Person in the games of Gygax et al meant you magically made a friend, who would treat you like a friend. Not a mentally controlled slave that does your bidding or anything like that for a first level spell. There's also component costs which limit it.
>Thief skills are pretty much useless at low levels unless you use them as saving throws.
Thieves if treated like incorrectly like a save-or-100%-fail thing, yes. People who do that generally buff up their chances though.
>Beginning characters must play a very careful game of avoidance or they will get slaughtered.
That's entirely down to the DMs. You can only get so careful even in dungeon games with limited light sources anyway.
>Not giving out XP for treasure will drastically change the rate of progression.
Again, DM adjudication. Several short and easy houserules have worked for many DMs for this since the 70s.
>Hell, even the way you accrue hit points as you level leads to a particular style of play.
I don't see how to be honest.
But then I use Empire of the Petal Throne's hit dice rules where you re-roll all your hit dice on level-up and take the new ones if they're higher than your old ones. (which averages out at about double the usual HP)
>And if you want to see how easy it is to misunderstand the fundamentals of D&D and create a mess of a game.
Sure, but that's true for just about any game worth playing.

Not him, but I wouldn't call it so much "hard" as bloated and unintuitive.

Like, the resolution mechanic is simple. Roll a numbered icosahedron, add whatever number came up to the relevant skill, stat, and any other bonuses or penalties that apply, then compare that to a target number. The problem comes when you introduce the sheer amount of bonuses and penalties, and the tremendous variety of target numbers.

For example's sake, let's take a look at Concentration checks. When you're trying to cast a spell and something's happening to make it harder than normal, you have to make an extra check to do it successfully. That's fine. What's the DC? Take a look at this fucking chart to find out (pic related). Let's say I'm learning this game--that's fucking intimidating. Not only that, but look at how granular it is. There are separate DCs for "Vigorous motion while casting" and "Violent motion while casting", and don't even bother trying while in "Extremely violent motion while casting".

And alone, that's still not too bad. So you have to look up a chart when something like that happens, whatever. But I'm assuming you're familiar with Pathfinder, so you know that that kind of mindset is *pervasive* throughout the system. To the uninitiated, Pathfinder is fucking made of goddamn charts. We're talking about a system that actually goes so far as to *stat bathrooms* here (for the record, they provide a +2 bonus on Fortitude saves to resist contracting a disease in the settlement it's a part of if you frequent one). And that's not third party! That's fucking Paizo!

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But the arbitrarily-set and voluminous rules are more than just that. They directly contribute to what I think really fucks over new players: trap choices. If you're at all familiar with the system, you know they're out there. There are feats, weapons, spells, even entire classes that are just... bad. Maybe they were included in an adventure path and never meant to be used by a player. Maybe somebody just really hates crossbows. Who knows. But there's nothing in the rules that tells you which is which, and the rules are so opaque and require so much cross-referencing that figuring that out as a new player is difficult.

Sure, sure, roleplaying is more important than rollplaying and all that, that's fine. But for a system so dedicated to writing down rules for things, a lot of the options they provide just kind of suck. It's a terrible feeling for a new player to realize that their character is just *bad*, and while a GM or other players who know what they're doing can help newbies avoid this, I don't think there's any denying that it's the damn opposite of "new player friendly". It's actively new player hostile. Imagine being a shiny-eyed new player who gets his eyes on the "Chokehold" feat and loves the idea of it, only to realize during play that it takes 32 rounds to choke out a CR 1/2 Giant Toad. That's heartbreaking.

3.5 was my introduction to tabletop, I used to GM Pathfinder, and I still play it with my group (when I'm not GMing myself, in which case I use other systems). Speaking purely anecdotally and from personal experience here, becoming competent with the system as a new player is a pain in the fucking ass. This isn't to say I hate D&D--I don't. But it's about a million miles away from "elegant and easy to learn".

Telling people what they actually want when they ask for something else is a classic sperg move.

Swords and Wizardry or Labrynth Lord with a TSR module

Give them the quintessential D&D experience that became cliche for a reason - it's fun

oh shit nigger what are you doing
this is roleplay indeed, and it soundskind of fun, but it's far from normal roleplays

People are going to accuse me of rusing, but I'm being utterly serious when I saw the only correct answer is Dungeons and Dragons Three Point Five Edition

It's been more than a decade since it was released and it's still one of the most popular RPGs around, hell on sites like roll20 it's still neck and neck in number of active games with 5th edition, the currently supported edition of the game. Veeky Forums likes to shitpost about balance and game mechanics but at the end of the day the raw numbers prove there's only one thing that matters: immersion, and 3.5 has that in spades.

If you're into video games and MMOs then 4e or 5e are probably up your alley, or if your graying beard is longer than your arms then maybe AD&D would work. But for almost all people, 3.5 is literally the perfect RPG.

Me and my group started with Call of Cthulhu 6th Edition (7th wasn't out at the time) because it looked mechanically easier than D&D (and because I like the setting), which otherwise would have been our first choice.

To find players, there's forums, gamefinder threads here, and the tried-and-true FLGS. If you have friends that are interested, they're obviously a great resource.

As for GAMES? I hate to play devil's advocate, but D&D hits the right balance for absolute beginners--when starting out, the "RP" in "RPG" is tough to grasp, and having the vanilla class flavours and combat simulation is at least a somewhat comfortable starting platform. The way I see it, the rules are skewed towards combat because roleplaying rules are too subjective.

As soon as they're comfortable with the ebb and flow of RPGs, that's when it's early enough to branch out and diversify the player palette. If they like combat stuff, Shadowrun, if they like open-ended options there's GURPS, if they liked the improv and RP there's stuff like Apocalypse World (or hey, Dungeon World).

When it comes to teaching JUST the role-playing aspect, I think Fiasco could work. It's a "game", but it's collaborative and freeform, and gets the juices flowing in the direction of personality and interaction, rather than number-crunching and build optimization.

>the raw numbers prove
>there's only one thing that matters: immersion, >3.5 has that in spades
I have never seen so many bad arguments in such a small space. Bravo.

I don't know how many times I have to explain this before you get it you dense motherfucker.

I'm not talking about Basic or anything it's based on because literally nobody around here that I know of fucking plays it. I'm talking exclusively about shit like 3.5 and 4 when I'm talking about older D&D editions because people actually play those around here.

I can't in all good consciousness recommend them on Basic because they wouldn't find a single game to join.

The terminology you were using was confusing. Let me point out the passage I was initially responding to.

> I'd tell them to pick up any of those except for Pathfinder and old D&D. When I was new, Pathfinder was an absolutely dense mess of bullshit for chargen. And anybody playing the older D&D editions at this point knows the ins and outs so well that unless they're a nice guy you're gonna get fucked up for not knowing better.

Okay, so you're apparently referring to 3.x and 4e as "old D&D", which to me is like calling The Phantom Menace "an old Star Wars movie". Also, you talk about Pathfinder in one sentence and in the next refer to "older D&D editions", which by its juxtaposition seems to mean "older than Pathfinder", meaning actual old school D&D.

As to your follow up posts, I was still laboring under the assumption that "old D&D" and "older D&D editions" indicated OSR stuff, which would mean that you were drawing conclusions based on AD&D (assuming that your comments about Basic's obscurity in your area indicated that you were unfamiliar with it). And while you did not specifically mention AD&D in your last post, you only excluded Basic from consideration, indicating a possibility (and I thought: fact) that you were leaning on your experience with 3.5 and 4e while still including AD&D, and therefore OSR, in your assessment, and thus painting it with the same brush. My point was that Basic is essentially the same game as AD&D (which I talked about in my previous post) and thus you should not paint old school with the same brush as new school D&D (like 3.5 and 4e) even if you were not specifically referring to Basic.

Tl;dr: If you don't want other people to be confused, don't use unclear language and unusual terminology.

5e starter set is like $13 on Amazon

>People are going to accuse me of rusing
We don't have to accuse you; you were being pretty blatant about it.

Let's see:

1. Presents statement of opinion as objective fact.
2. Presents statement of popularity as evidence of quality.
3. Makes "objective" declaration about "the only thing that matters" in a game.
4. Ad hominem statement about how people who like another editions are "into video games and MMOs", or old.
5. Declares a game "perfect".

You're literally everything shitty on the internet.

FUCK YOU