New to Tabletop. Where to start?

I've been looking to get into tabletop games like DnD and the like, but am unsure where to start.
Are there any particular casual ones I can play with friends to get a basis for the genre before diving into the more extreme stuff?
I was hoping for something sci-fi, but whatever is fine.

Other urls found in this thread:

onesevendesign.com/lasers_and_feelings_rpg.pdf
1d4chan.org/wiki/File:EVERYONE_IS_JOHN.png
dropbox.com/s/swrsabebae8ydem/Doctor Magnethands.pdf
youtube.com/watch?v=qlTsW9rWE0o
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Unfortunately, your best bet is to play DnD 5th edition. In generall, all editions and derivatives of DnD is a heaping pile of trash, but if you don't know anyone else IRL that can ease you into the hobby, it's probably your best bet.

Your future goal is to become proficient enough at tabletop rpgs for you to move away from DnD and play a better game. You're probably gonna want to learn a bit about shadowrun, since its one of the more popular rpgs that can be called "something sci-fi."

Ryuutama is a good starting point for fantasy, being designed as a beginners' RPG and all. No idea about Sci-Fi, though.

Stay away from D&D 5e. Its only redeeming quality is its large playerbase resulting solely from brand recognition, not any quality on the system's part.

Start with Micro-RPGs, something focusing actual Role-Playing with minimal mechanics.
onesevendesign.com/lasers_and_feelings_rpg.pdf
1d4chan.org/wiki/File:EVERYONE_IS_JOHN.png
dropbox.com/s/swrsabebae8ydem/Doctor Magnethands.pdf

These games are small enough you can introduce your friends, or complete strangers, to the concept of Role Playing without drowning in rules and fiddly bits! Its not Dungeons and Dragons, but D&D isn't casual either.

Most tabletop RPGs use a GM+Players set up and it's really hard to learn to GM any way other than seeing someone else do it right. But you can find streams of people's D&D sessions and stuff these days, so that helps.

Recommendations for starting with friends:
- Lasers And Feelings. It's stupid, it fits on one page, and it gives the GM rules that help unstick things and it works with low prep.
- Risus. Six pages of rules, works in any setting so long as the genre is comedy. Does lean on the GM though.
- Mouseguard. Much more rules than the previous suggestions, but lighter than some things. Still has some training wheel sorts of things.
- Come back and ask for recommendations once you've played a bit and know what you enjoyed. There are good games about character development, there are good games about killing monsters.

Recommendations for starting with strangers:
- D&D 5E is the only game in town. Sorry. But despite there being a lot of better games out there, there are even more worse ones, so don't worry too much about how we're all down on it.

If you're looking for sci-fi I highly recommend Traveller. Ask around the Traveller general on how to get started:
Don't listen to:
You don't have to play D&D if you want a tabletop rpg, it's just the most popular option.

Getting into tabletop is inherently a question of who you plan on playing with, so the real question is where are you going to meet other people to play these things and are you going to be the one who does the role of Dungeon Master?

who gives a shit about the question? look at the puffin! i mean, just look at it, that puffin gives no fucks.

I don't understand why beginners are supposed to start with ruleslight or no-rules games. Contrary to what the average user might believe, most people aren't noticeably stupider than most gamers.
Actual rules is a good thing. Y'know, for structure and stuff.

Games with less rules take less time investment to learn, so it's easier to get a bunch of friends on board to try out this new unknown thing.

Also, a lot of "light" games actually have more rules about what the GM should do and how people interact with the plot than heavy games do, and these things are very useful for newbies.

Not OP but I'm in a similar position.

I've been lurking Veeky Forums for quite some times now despite never having played before, I read some rulebooks of games that seemed interesting to me and am now looking at the options I have of actually playing them.
I live in a rural area of bumfuck nowhere and having to drive to the nearest city for games would be tiresome so I'm trying to find online games instead (until I mamage convince my friends to play).

How is Roll20?
I know that it's kind of a meme around here that it's filled with degenerates and other horrible people but is it actually that bad or can you avoid them by watching out for red flags?
What are some other places to find games online, preferebly beginner friendly ones? The only other one I know is reddit and I'd rather not go on there.

I'll be posting some very simple rpgs in these pdfs. They are usually about 1 to 3 pages long, so easy to print and hand out.

Action movie game

...

You cna watch this video to get an idea of how to play

youtube.com/watch?v=qlTsW9rWE0o

Pfft, Star Trek is for nerds.

Pffft, these gaijin games aren't nearly kawaii enough.

Why are there so many of these same threads popping up?

My recommendations are
For sword and sorcery start with
Basic Fantasy or DnD 5e
as you get more experienced look into Riddle of Steel, Midnight, Oldschool DnD (Basic/Advanced/2e)

as far as Sci-Fi goes you could start out with something like
Star without number?
I find it difficult to recommend "beginner" RPGs for sci fi but games you could look into could be GURPS or Traveller

A good two thirds if games out there, if not more, are DnD or derivatives. If you're just starting out and have no pals you'll have to play it, other better systems usually have few beginner friendly groups to find, they'd often already want to play with someone who knows their shit.

Harnmaster is your best place to start. It's a simple and friendly system to teach you the ropes of how fantasy RPG's should play.

From there you can move onto something more advance like Rolemaster which when played correctly feels like you're literally in a fantasy world.

If everyone's posting mini RPGs, imma post Academagia.

>mini
>72 pages long
I understand shit can go over 1000 pages, an example being FATAL, but i assume the guy wants a one shot, not a light novel

Yes, and shit like Everyone Is John is terrible for inexperienced players. Like most things, roleplaying needs a bit of expereince/practice before it can be done with ease; newer players should be introduced to the hobby with something rules lite but still with enough structure to get the ball rolling.

lol there is no proficiency scale in playing tabletop games

D&D isn't the most common port of entry because it's good (or even easy), but because it's simply the most common.

There are tons of games now focused on actually being solid entry points into the hobby for new players, most of which have been mentioned in this thread. OP should check them out.

You, however, should probably just get off the internet.

agree 100%
the best way to introduce someone to the hobby imo would be with an OSR game and a decently experience GM. you can introduce roleplaying but if they aren’t comfortable they can fall back on their character sheet without disrupting the game.

save the narrative stuff for either people who explicitly want to do narrative stuff or for people who spent enough time playing combat rpgs to want something more

Where do you live user? Popular RPGs vary heavily from country to country.

>lol there is no proficiency scale in playing tabletop games
There's a proficiency scale in any skill or action. Personally, I am much better at getting into character, as well as learning and adapting to new rpgs now, compared to how I was when I first started the hobby. Are you claiming that you personally saw no improvement in this over the years?

play dungeon world.

Www.dungeonworld- srd.com

>I don't understand why beginners are supposed to start with ruleslight or no-rules games
They're not. Rules-light RPG's are usually expert-level to play. They get away with being lite because the players' and GM's expertise fills in for a lot of rules and guidance so you don't need them. A group of new players that try to dive right into a campaign using Traveler or Fate Acc are going to crash and burn most of the time. Too much freedom is actually a bad thing in this case.

For new players, what you really are looking for is a game system that has a lot of structure, but not necessarily a ton of complexity. The newer D&D's are actually fine for this.

>The newer D&D's are actually fine for this.

Yeah and they are ruining the hobby by dumbing it down for newcomers. Now you have loads of nornies, chads, and roasties, whose only experience with fantasy is the Hobbit movies and whose only experience with tabletop games is Cards Against Humanity and Exploding Kittens. These chucklefucks don't know shit about RPGs besides some Veeky Forums screencaps they read on Tumblr about "epikk natural twenty XD XD" so they come into the game constantly having orgasms whenever a 5% event happens. This cancer was exacerbated by critical roll, which made everyone think their campaign would be a scripted comedy like Matt Mercers show. Now, the sjws are flooding tabletop gaming, hence why half the GM advice articles including one in an actual book by kobolds press, talks about how the hobby is dominated by white males, and how you as a dm are responsible for making sure all the women and transnigger in your games feel welcome (i.e. let them play cringey tranny self inserts and constantly bring up their sexuality in game and then point to the page in the 5e player book that lets them do it).

>There's a proficiency scale in any skill or action.
No, there isn't. There is no "you must be this good" requirement for any tabletop game, ergo there is no proficiency scale.

There are people who are more or less proficient at roleplay, at mechanics, at running games, but there is no proficiency scale.

Stop being autistic.

It there's no growth of skill, we wouldn't even be having this fucking thread; what's the point of experts giving advice to novices if there's no difference between the two?

You can play ANY game at ANY level of proficiency.

You are in no way required to "start here" in role-playing.

If you had ANY proficiency whatsoever you would know this.

>namefag
pottery

Are you implying I am wrong?

if he wasn’t then I will
If you don’t want to play with SJW types then don’t invite them to your game and don’t play games with them. you’re just a fucking retard who’s getting upset because your safe space is getting invaded

>namefag
>that entire post

You can, but it's gonna be a hell of a lot easier if you have experience and/or transferable skills.

If you're new to something, you should start with something simple instead of something complex. you don't HAVE to, but you're gonna have a better experience dealing with something you can handle instead of just being thrown into the deep end by yourself. It's not rocket science.

So, if you're new to RPGs, you should start with RPGs that are simple, rather than ones that are complex. Especially if you're like OP and you don't have an experienced member of the group to guide everyone through.

> no minimum requirement means no scale

I'm on your side, broadly, but that's some straight-up stupid logic. You realise that a minimum requirement for something isn't needed for it to be measured on a scale, right?

>wah wah a name day

Not an argument.

Agreed. Mirco-rpgs are only good if you or your starting players have theater backgrounds and are already use to a

...

*and are already use to a improv-heavy background

Wrong.

Someone coming new to the hobby will have none of the bad habits you obviously wallow in. They'll learn the system they're using, and probably correctly.

user, are you claiming that, for example, learning Shadowrun is just as easy as learning FATE?

>bad habits
I don't understand. Would you elaborate?

>user, are you claiming that, for example, learning Shadowrun is just as easy as learning FATE?
When you're coming completely new to the hobby, no system is harder than another because you don't have a frame of reference.

Moreover, recommending D&D is ridiculous hypocrisy if "ease" is your standard.

It's Wayne. He only exists to be tarred and feathered.

Wayne, dammit! Take your goddamn pills and go to bed until we get you for the event!

If you can count, you have a frame of reference. If you can read, you have a frame of reference. If you can think, and remember information, you have a frame of reference.
Shadowrun is a large, dense and complex system. It has numerous mechanics, interactions, and levels of play that are difficult to learn and remember, ESPECIALLY if you are new to the hobby and don't have anything to compare the rules too in your mind. Therefore, it is a poor RPG for new players, and OP should instead start with a system

>"But recommending 5e is hypocrisy!"
That, user, is called "an opinion." I am of the belief that 5e has many many MANY flaws, but ease of learning is not one of them. You are welcome to disagree, and you may instead recommend a different RPG for OP to start with.