I'm really interested in D&D, but I'm not really sure how I should start. Should I play with a bunch of other guys who know fuck-all or get at least a veteran DM and a few others? I don't know anyone who actually knows how to play so how would I connect with people like that? Discord maybe? halp
How to start playing D&D?
Ian Barnes
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Dylan Sanchez
Heres a discord discord.gg
Andrew Scott
First thing you'll want to do before you do anything else is decide which edition of D&D you'll want to play. Yes, it matters. Fortunately for you, the newest and currently most popular edition is also the most noob friendly, and that would be 5th edition. Now next thing you'll want to do is read the rules. Core D&D consists of the Player's Handbook (PHB), Monster Manual (MM), and the Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG). That may sound like a lot, but honestly the MM and DMG are only for the DM to use, so when you first start out don't worry about them. The PHB may seem lengthy, but don't worry about learning how every single class works or the effects of every single spell, just make sure you read Chapters 7 - 10. That's the basic rules of the game that apply no matter what you play, and it's a relatively short span of pages that you could read in an hour. After that it comes down to making your character, which is outlined in the first chapters of the book, but most DMs will help you out as long as you have a general idea of what to do. Before you buy anything though, the 5th edition general here on Veeky Forums (look for /5eg/ in the catalog) has a link in the OP to the remuz trove, which has pdfs of all published material for 5e as well as some other stuff. Once you've got a decent grip on the rules, you can look up Adventurer's League at your local gaming store, it's a WotC run event that's specifically made to let new players get some game time and experience. You can also check the Gamefinder thread here on Veeky Forums, as well as sites like roll20 for games, but personally I recommend getting some face-to-face games in first. Hands down the best way to play is with friends, though. Something to definitely keep you eye out for is the Starter Set adventure, Lost Mines of Phandelver. If you see someone running that (or want to run a game yourself to try out DMing), that's universally agreed upon as the best adventure module to introduce new players and DMs to the game.
Caleb Rogers
Personally, I like the "play with your friends" route, but some people's friends are not at all suited to role-playing, and only you can judge that. And I'm not talking about you being a bit uncertain how things would pan out (that's normal and can't be helped -- it's always something of a gamble, and even experienced people can turn out to be horrible or at least a horrible fit for your game and/or group), but some people are just clearly not cut out for the hobby (like uncontrollable fuckers who won't shut up or respect the GM's position of authority within the game). If you think you can find three or four friends* who have at least a decent shot at pulling it off (or at least who aren't clearly walking disasters going in), then I'd say that's what you should try. There will be more of a sense of camaraderie that way, and doing things with your friends is more fun than doing things with random strangers. Just realize you're learning something new, and like anything else, it's an acquired skill, so cut yourself some slack (and talk to the others so they have the same mindset) and just have fun even when shit isn't perfect.
*Two or five players can work too, but the game can start to get bogged down a bit with five players (with turns dragging out, and people being much more easily distractible), and the game may not have much energy with two people (not enough back-and-forth to really keep things rolling) unless they have the right sorts of personalities (though I've done a shitload of gaming with two players, so it can work out well if you do have the right ones).
Adam Johnson
>Fortunately for you, the newest and currently most popular edition is also the most noob friendly, and that would be 5th edition.
It's the most noob friendly of the modern editions. Moldvay Basic, or one of its retroclones is a shitload simpler, though admittedly a bit clunky in its old schoolness (lacking a unified resolution mechanic, but rather having different subsystems where you roll different dice for different things). Even with that taken into account, however, we're talking about a grand total of 64 pages of material to start playing, and only 128 pages of core material at all, which is multiple times less than with 5e, so it's much easier to learn. Of course, if you're looking for preexisting players to join, 5e has a much larger following at present (as Basic is three and half decades old and maybe four editions ago, depending on how you count them), so that pretty much makes your choice for you. Still, it bears mentioning that while 5e isn't a disaster of a game for noobs (like 3e is), it's not ideal either. It's passable at best.
Jack Peterson
shameless bump because you guys are giving really good advice
Dominic Gray
If you're just playing with friends (and not trying to find a preexisting game), you have a lot more options available to you, and can try a game that's significantly easier to pick up than D&D (pick related, though that's only one option). I'm not a D&D hater, but I think it's unfortunate that D&D is synonymous with "role-playing game" in the public consciousness. Even if D&D is significantly simplified from its (recent) previous editions, it's still not what I recommend for new players, and that's a shame, because it's where the vast majority of people end up starting.
Barbarians of Lemuria -- mediafire.com
And here's Risus, if you want something *really* simple, and you're okay with things being silly -- img.4plebs.org
Swords & Wizardry WhiteBox is a very stripped down, streamlined version of original D&D, if you want to see what that looks like -- img.4plebs.org
(White Box Heroes provides supplemental classes for S&W Whitebox, if you were going with that but eventually want to expand your options -- swcompanion.wdfiles.com
Aaron Reyes
Better than reddits anyway. Keep up the good work gents!
James Wood
At its core though, role-gaming is just a sophisticated game of make-believe, and the make-believe part of it is usually the most important (unless you're playing it more like a miniatures wargame, but that's a whole different thing). So the detailed rules are, in a way, rather secondary, and that's as strong argument for starting out with a light system. You can always move your way up the complexity chain when the mechanics of what you're playing start to become instinctive, but starting out, I think it's important to be able to give a significant portion of your attention to shit like group management, character interaction, "plot" and so forth, and not spend all your time trying to work the mechanics.
Ethan Morales
>that friend who gets drunk and gets autistically fixated on some negative action despite being repeatedly warned by the dm and players that it is a HORRIBLE choice
Dylan Davis
Give shit some time. Veeky Forums doesn't move at the speed of light. Wait until your thread is on page 8 or so to bump it, otherwise it's like your waving your arms and shouting "look at me" over and over, which can rub people the wrong way. It's no biggie, but if everybody repeatedly bumped everything, it would dilute the useful information in the threads and threads would be less ranked according to when they were meaningfully contributed to.
Jaxson Jenkins
I just have the tab pinned, sorry! What page was it on, like 2 or 3?
Adam Adams
bump
Jaxson Lewis
Being rules-lite isn't the only thing that makes a system noob friendly, otherwise things like Lasers and Feelings would reign supreme. 5e has easy to find LGS sponsored games and an active community, both of which factor into it being easier for noobies to get into on their own.
Robert Hernandez
Oh, and OP, if you do decide to do your own thing, I'd highly recommend having a "session 0", where you get together with everybody and discuss expectations for the game and try to get everybody on the same page as far as the tone of the campaign and so forth. How silly or gritty is the game going to be? What sort of shit can characters get away with? Is lolrandumb okay, or will it ruin the mood of the game and/or get everybody killed? Is it okay to kill other party members? (Hint: no. That's a quick way to derail a campaign, and it's the fuckers who can't play ball with everybody else who have the advantage of being the ones to attack. So I flat-out say: "I'm sorry, you can't do that.")
Also, it's not a bad idea to set the mission parameters for at least your first adventure ahead of time. You don't want to railroad people constantly and take away their agency, blocking them each and every time they stray from your tightly plotted story, but having a basic adventure planned is not a bad thing (so long as you make sure it's the type of thing your players would be into). You don't want to put a lot of effort into a dungeon, for instance, only to have your players decide they don't want to go into dungeons, because it wastes your time and effort, and it gives your players a shittier experience to boost, because you don't have material prepared for whatever they want to do. So framing your adventure like "This is the story of a band of adventurers who delved deep below the ruins of Khei-Cedo, in search of gold and glory" can work well. It tells what this particular "movie" is going to be about, and discourages people from going completely "off script".
Jacob Roberts
Right now, while there's decent traffic, it's taking a bit over an hour to hit page 8. If you refresh the thread and look at the lower right hand corner, right below the last post, you can see a serious of numbers like: 14 / 3 / 5 / 1. The last one of those is the page the thread is on.
Henry Hernandez
>Being rules-lite isn't the only thing that makes a system noob friendly, otherwise things like Lasers and Feelings would reign supreme.
I agree that Lasers and Feelings doesn't really have enough structure for noobs to latch onto. And 5e's prevalence is certainly an argument in its favor, but it'd be a much better noob game if it were significantly simpler.
Juan Ward
Holy fuck, BoL looks awesome for a beginner's type of thing, thanks man! I'll probably gather up my band of noobs (and the one vet i know) to play this!
Henry Martin
Buy 5e's starter set
Sebastian Young
Yeah, BoL is pretty awesome. The only thing I'd really caution you about is armor. It's much improved from previous editions, but it can still get a bit out of hand, turning combat into a tedious "death by a thousand cuts" sort of affair. Now, player characters are incentivized not to walk around in heavy armor all the time due to its effect on their agility, so it may not even be an issue in your game (depending on the way you play, and how intelligent your players are) but if you do ever end up in a combat with two guys in heavy armor, with helmets and shields, they are going to have trouble landing blows, and even when they do, they'll do very little damage, which could annoyingly drag things out. Again, you can just downplay and discourage heavy armor usage, and there are ways around the problem in any case (the use of hero points or improvised situational bonus on the part of the GM), so it doesn't break the game, but it's something to keep an eye on. If you want to play things safe, you might want to remove the mechanical effects of helmets (they're just "fluff" and don't affect the crunch of the game) and drop heavy armor (renaming "medium" armor "heavy"). Or just use the simplified armor table in the pic here.
Oh, and to avoid the all-or-nothing choice when deciding if a career applies to a roll, consider letting any career with at least 2 points in it give people a simple +1 to tasks that are peripherally related to it. It's not like the game is broken without this, but it gives you a nice middle ground, and lets you more freely apply careers to attack rolls when the situation warrants it, without having to worry about it being an overwhelming bonus.
Kevin Clark
bumb
Easton Brown
let me give some reddit advice
you should just play dungeon world
you should just play some other story game shit
you shouldn't play dnd, that's bad
I love critical role :)
Parker Smith
>you shouldn't play dnd, that's bad
Ive seen reddit say all of them but this one.
Anthony Scott
usually it's in combination with the suggestion for DW/story game shit
>dnd teaches you bad lessons, let DW teach you even worse lessons instead
Tyler Peterson
Mang, I'm very much into slutmogs, but that fucking thing going through her crotch must realy chafe
Gabriel Hernandez
>dnd teaches you bad lessons, let DW teach you even worse lessons instead
Sounds like reddit. I get a good laugh at the fucking "LOOK WHAT MY GF MADE FOR ME I'M SO NERDY XD" and the "I DREW OUR ANIME TIER D7D CHARACTERS WITH MY SHIT DARWING SKILLS!" posts in the D&D subreddits
Yeah but you never know when you need a crazy slutty bitch who looks like an extra from madmax
Nicholas Lee
Go to lotfp.com.
Download Tower of the Stargazer. It's a free adventure with dm advice. Read over it and get a feel for it.
Download the free Player's Guide. Read over it, get a feel, roll up a couple of adventurers. Lits of the rules are corner-case and can be skimmed for the ourposes of your first adventure, so the basics are really simple. Read the GM's guide if you're feeling like more reading.
Get a couple of friends, associates, colleagues or whatever. Explain that it's your first time GMing. Explain that it's basically DnD you're playing. Explain that their characters may die and that you have spares for them. Give each person a character sheet or let them choose.
Give them a shared pool of rations, torches, adventuring kit. Have them on cut-out bits of paper for easy distribution. Mark time for theur actions so you know when torches run out, when they need to eat etc.
Start the ball rolling, tell them that the challenge is to come out with as much gold and loot as possible.
If they have fun, go find another adventure to run (like Keep on the Borderlands). If not, grab another group. You get better with practise.
Levi Sanchez
Just watch Critical Role and use DnD Beyond for rules and character sheets, it's that simple
Carson Allen
Memes about CritRole aside, Matt's tips for Gamemasters are not a bad thing to check out.
Michael Campbell
What do you guys think about playing games through Discord?
Leo Morales
Never done it through discord alone. Discord+Roll20 or Table Top Sim is works very well. I recommend making the players message each other if they wanna collaborate since everyone is trying to talk over each other.