As a counterpoint to this, as I noted in my earlier post, D&D has a pretty good Starter Set box (though the original version is apparently out of print now). It has a lengthy (and pretty good) adventure that takes player characters from first to third level, five pre-generated characters, and all of the stats and rules that the DM needs to run the included adventure.
A group, and a DM, that are new to D&D has pretty much everything they need to get underway, without opening the Pandora’s box of extra classes, extra splat books, etc., until after they’ve played for a while, and can decide if they want to keep playing, and/or expand.
If you want an straightforward system that is generic, QAGS (Quick-Ass Gaming System) is always an option. There are also a bunch of supplements that flesh out things you can do.
It’s similar to FATE, but probably even simpler on the mechanics front.
And right now, it’s on a pay what you want deal. The creators suggest you get it for free and donate to a food pantry the standard cost of the purchase.
You know, somehow the WotC haters have tried to make “monetize” into a dirty word. We put out a little supplement, and trust me, we wanted to “monetize” the hell out of it. (well, I think we make like a $1000 each, maybe). Every game company wants to 'monetize" its products.
5e, especially with one of the starter modules, is a very easy way for new players and DMs to get tin the game.
And your game- Mothership- for first timers? A horror SF game where the PCs die easily and roleplaying is not encouraged? or at least kinda useless.
https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/18/18181.phtml Mothership puts characters in jams. It’s an RPG about vacuum-sealed chumps made to solve problems. The game excels when it leaves politics and ennui in the airlock. The characters don’t have time for such nonsense, they have issues to blow up, or harpoon, or buzzsaw, or jettison into space and pretend it wasn’t an issue in the first place.
Problem-solving in Mothership is lethal. Players learn from their mistakes while their wannabe Ripleys cannot. The first lesson of Mothership—in space no one can hear you scream, and if they did, they’re probably next to die. People shouldn’t foster relationships with coke cans from vending machines, and players shouldn’t write backstories for characters plopping out of cryosleep.
In some ways this game is like those in the OSR or Traveller. But it isn’t.
Characters are short-lived, and death can feel arbitrary, but horror cannot feel arbitrary. It’s impossible to fear what we don’t care about. But Mothership finds gravity in weightless lethality with success.
Now, I wanna say- that does sound fun as a break from more conventional RPGs. But to introduce new players? Nope.
Exactly, outside of Basic D&D , 5e is the easiest D&D edition to learn.
Nah, in context it IS a dirty word. Of course people who create stuff wish to make money from it and most people don’t begrudge them that. When people are talking about “monetize” in a context like this, it’s about releasing substandard and/or excessive products or manipulating existing products (such as DnDBeyond) to attempt to squeeze money out in an unhealthy manner. Just saying “We all want to make money off our stuff” misses the actual complaint. It’s like saying “Of course MegaCorp wants to make profits as it dumps toxic waste, breaks unions and keeps making its package sizes smaller – lemonade stands run by six year olds want to make a profit too!” The “make a profit” part wasn’t really the core issue.
However, WotC doesnt do that, and that’s not what "monetize’ means. One YouTube WotC hater moron seized upon that line from some Hasbro Executive and turned it into a dirty word.
For some reason the #1 in any line or field is always hated.
I mean, Games Workshop is well known as just about the least ethical company in the business- one who sues fan artists for example, and changes editions just to milk more money from us “Yanks”. But you dont hear much GW hate, as it is not #1.
That’s what it means in context. If someone wants to ignore that or respond with some flavor of “Oh sure they want to make money, we all do” that’s up to them but it just means their response will miss the point.
I disagree that WotC doesn’t ever push out substandard products but also don’t care enough to litigate the perceived value of their offerings from the past couple of years.
I’ve heard it used in that context in many other places and for other things as well (video gaming would be a major example). It didn’t all come from your one Youtube bugbear
If I have understood the suggestion, it was about the simple rules, possibly using them in a not-necessarily-straight-Alien(s) scenario. What is wrong with that for new players? The fact that their characters might die? Hey, it’s a hard-knock life.
We are still discussing who the “dungeon master” might be, as in can we find an experienced one? Or will I end up being forced to do it myself? Plus, do we have to come up from scratch with a good adventure? If not and we use a published one, will it be to everyone’s liking— they do seem to lean towards horror. But maybe that is not necessarily so bad? And so on.
Unless you’re playing 5e or maaaaaybe Pathfinder, I’d just accept that you guys are gonna have to GM for yourselves. Especially if you’re playing in person, the chance of you finding someone looking for some neophytes for a new Mutants & Masterminds game is pretty much zero. Even for 5e, the odds are pretty slim though you could potentially hire a DM (yes, that’s a thing) if you really wanted to. Not saying you should, just laying out options.
Though I still say it’s an excellent entry point for TTRPGs, 5e isn’t (IMO) a great system for actual horror. The tropes and mechanics are for heroic fantasy and those mitigate a lot of classic horror concepts and fears. It’s claim to fame in the department is Ravenloft and the “Curse of Strahd” campaign but that’s still more “gothic vibes” than creating a sense of “oh my god, it’s dark and I’m so scared and what’s that noise and someone save me” in practice if that’s what the group is hoping for.
As long as your players know that going in, and are absolutely OK with it, there’s nothing wrong with that. OTOH, for a new player to have their very first RPG character die right away can be a disincentive to keep playing, for many.
Writing an adventure on your own, especially if you’ve not played or GMed previously, is difficult. It’s hard to come up with a compelling story, take into account the likely ways that inventive players can short-circuit or break things, and develop combats that have the right level of being challenging (not cake walks, not instant wipe-outs).
Unless it’s simply not an option for the game and genre your group decides they want to play, I’d highly encourage using a pre-written adventure. There’s no assurance that it’ll be to everyone’s liking (though that’s going to be every bit as true for an adventure you write yourself), but look at the user ratings which the adventures you may be considering get (on DriveThru RPG, etc.), to try to at least weed out the bad ones.
Probably true, but an option: if you have a local game store that has a “looking for players” bulletin board (physical or virtual), would be to post something about looking for a GM willing to run a neophyte group through a one-shot session of [game system X]. It’ll definitely be more challenging than finding a D&D or Pathfinder GM, but it’s possible.
Agreed. The horror system which is probably the widest-played, and is reasonably accessible for new players, is Call of Cthulhu.
Call of Cthulhu has a short, introductory adventure called ‘The Lightless Beacon’ which is available for free. I ran it for my group, and it was straightforward and fun. The quickstart rules are free also.
The quickstart rules come with an adventure called ‘The Haunting’ which is a classic CoC haunted house adventure that many people like. My group liked The Lightless Beacon better though.
A lot of games have an introductory adventure in the back of the rulebook, or something readily available. I think choosing the genre is the most important thing. Then choose a rules-light game in that genre for a first try. Starting off with DnD 5e when nobody knows much about rpgs just sounds hard to me (but to be fair, I don’t like 5e).
That “roleplaying is not encouraged” is a complete mischaracterization of the Mothership RPG to such an extent I can only assume that you haven’t actually read the rules or seen a lively. In fact, both the Player’s Survival Guide (PSG) and Warden’s Operation Manual (WOM) emphasize role playing and interaction over just leaping into combat or relying on skill checks and the minimalistic rules to resolve conflicts. While the game as designed is a survival horror-type game it is almost trivially easy to reduce the lethality by limiting or eliminating stress checks, or just making a scenario that is inherently less lethal, although I would argue this is inherently limiting the distinction of the game in ramping up the tension on players to take action and make decisions, driving the pace of the adventure and producing great dramatic challenges and memorable moments.
But setting aside the excellent guidance that the PSG and WOM give to players and gamesters, the speed at which characters can be rolled up almost exclusively following the flowchart build into the character sheet, the simplicity of the rules (just four stat checks and three saves), and the simplicity of the rules makes it a very accessible game for both new players and gamesters who don’t have to try to memorize a bunch of arcane rules or spend table time trying to look them up on the fly. You can take people who have never played a role playing game previously and have them roll up characters and understand the mechanics within minutes without having abstruse discussions about what armor class means or why they should or shouldn’t be some particular character class to balance out the party. There are other rules-lite game systems with fast character generation, but relatively few of them are sci-fi or cyberpunk oriented.
Modern (i.e. 7th Edition) Call of Cthulhu has pretty straightforward mechanics and a percentile attribute- and skill-based system, and with the exception of the chase rules and some of the nuanced of combat and sanity loss can be explained in a couple of minutes. It is also very flexible in terms of setting; it really just takes adjusting some of the available skills and some tweaks to how bouts of insanity and SAN recovery is handled to go anywhere from the European Dark Ages to futuristic space opera. But because the game is essentially inherently investigative by nature and the cosmic threats so intrinsically indomitable, it can be difficult to actually run most Call of Cthulhu scenarios without either getting the players wandering off the map (or railroading them into staying on task) and ending up with a total party kill the first time they run into a nightgaunt or even a run of the mill ghoul.
Most published CoC scenarios are actually too complex for players who are not already familiar with the game to follow without some coaching and prodding without a Keeper who is really experienced, and it is actually pretty difficult to get the players to understand what threat they are facing and options of how to deal with it without having one or more NPCs essentially performing an exposition dump as some kind of deathbed confession or having them come across a journal. Every time I’ve run a one-shot adventure in Call of Cthulhu with players who haven’t played it before it ends up in some kind of (often glorious) catastrophe even when I thought the scenario was relatively benign, and I once had a sandbox camping where a party of characters essentially laid waste to coastal New Jersey because they didn’t pick up on hints that what they were dealing with was really dangerous.
*Call of Cthulhu * is one of my favorite RPGs and the one that I’ve run more than any other, but it really isn’t a great entry point into role playing, especially for players that might be adverse to having their character be killed or go instant for almost arbitrary reasons, in my opinion.
But, if you do want a system where a character can be killed or go insane for almost arbitrary reasons, nothing beats Paranoia.
And if you die, it’s not that big of a deal because you have 5 more clones remaining.
Note: I do not recommend Paranoia for a group of entirely first time TTRPGers. Not if you want to take it remotely seriously as a TTRPG. Then again, the point of Paranoia is not to take it seriously. So if you just want to be ridiculous, that works too. Also, Paranoia isn’t really campaign oriented. Because you will die…a lot. And you only have 6 clones total. You are unlikely to survive 2 scenarios, but surviving one is generally doable unless you’re really bad at the game, your GM is really evil, you’re really unlucky, or someone in your party really wants to kill you.
On a mild counterpoint to the “What game is easiest to learn” stuff, I’ll point out that if myself and three other nine year olds could noodle out the rules to AD&D 1st edition well enough to play games and have fun with no real memorable mechanics errors then I have faith that the OP and his brethren can work out the rules to Call of Cthulhu or 5e or Aliens or whatever else. Ease of learning is great but shouldn’t be something that keeps you from playing a system that sounds cool and thematically what your group wants.
One advantage to this day and age is that you can probably find a podcast of your game system of choice being played. As a case in point, I’m planning on running a Twilight: 2000 campaign come January and have been listening to someone else’s campaign which is helping me get familiar with the rules and flow of the game.
Gonna give an out-of-left-field recommendation: Swords of the Serpentine. Here’s a link to a Reddit thread about the topic, with heavy and crunchy participation from one of the co-authors, Kevin Kulp (side note: if you ever get a chance to play in a game that Kevin runs, do not pass it up: he’s freaking brilliant, and always a blast to play with).
Briefly, it’s a swords-and-sandals game with excellent mechanics for solving mysteries. Your equipment list can include things like “ceremonial armor made from silver coins offered freely to the temple (+1 toughness)”, but can also include things like “a letter mandating your retirement that you haven’t shown anyone yet” or “fond memories of your childhood dog.” One of the most important stats is “The three best things in life,” which can include things like, “Making new friends,” “destroying people who won’t be your friends,” or “learning something that they don’t want you to learn.” You can play a noncombat character who wins fights through social skills–I once saw a dowager countess defeat a couple of cultists with a scathing look and a veiled threat to tell their parents about their activities. The city in which it’s played is super compelling, and every one-shot I’ve played feels like it has a major effect on city events.
Best of all, if you start a group with it, you’ll be teaching the rules, so it’s really unlikely anyone will try to rules-lawyer you.
The easiest game to learn IMO is Basic D&D, as in the Basic set. You could start with it and then move on to other editions once you craved complexity.
For an easy learning curve and lots of SF fun I would recommend Gamma World 1st edition. It is a goofy blast.
But I am old school and I do not like the newer editions of most games. Many of them are rules-heavy and math heavy. Not my thing.
Traveler might be the exception, as the original Traveler was incredibly boring IMO. Hopefully they have improved it.
On the subject of inviting players, you would think that somebody into improvisational theatre would be interested in RPGs, but apparently this is not always the case. Though they admitted having played D&D a couple of times in the past, so my guess was not completely wild.
A lot of us cringe when hearing a former executive of a video game talk about monetizing anything because that industry has a history of abusing their customers with loot boxes and other microtransactions. I don’t have any objections to any company trying to make a buck, but the AAA video game industry has made a lot of decision I feel are anti-consumer over the years, so I can’t help but be suspicious when I hear WotC talk about monetizing their brand. Maybe they won’t be as abusive as EA Games, but we’ll see.
If I’m just going to introduce them to a game in a relatively quick 4 hour session, it’s fine. Players get to interact with one another, solve problems, die grisly deaths, etc., etc., etc. But overall I think you’re right. I don’t think a horror game is the best introduction to RPGs for most people.
It’s my favorite edition. Yet I’ve bought very few books for it. WotC just doesn’t publish much of what I want. I’m not bitter about it, I’m an old man by their reckoning and I’m not the future of D&D. I am the ghost of D&D’s past. I’m kind of excited about Greyhawk being in the new DMG though.
