Yep. DnD is usually fantasy settings… that’s what the rulebook is oriented to… but games like Marvel Superheroes are what City of Heroes would be. Other “table RPGs” include:
Star Wars
Elfquest
Lord of the Rings/MERP
Hero/Champions (my bro and co use this one for any kind of setting, it’s more flexible than the “fixed setting games” but sometimes an effect which would be a “third level spell” in LotR is terribly expensive in Hero)
Call of Chtulhu
It’s theatre improv around a table
Duck Duck Goose: when I was in college, we would spend any minute of Christmas or Easter vacation not dedicated to family duties in my parents’ “small living room”… we decided which scenarios to play based on whether the DM who’d prepared them reckoned they were “1 christmas session”, 2 or… the longest one was 7. That’s 7 sessions of almost 16 hours.
The only book you’ll need (and you will definitely need it) is the Player’s Handbook.
The Player’s Handbook explains all the basic concepts of the game, and gives you all the information you need to create a character.
The other books in that Core Rules set are mainly for Dungeon Masters.
The way I explained D&D to my wife (she thought it was just some social group I went to until she mentioned it to a co-worker and got an earful of the “it’s for serial-murdering freaks!” crap) is that it’s interactive storytelling: the DM creates the setting and provides basic narration, while the players each take the role of a character in the story and decide how to resolve the challenges they face. It’s up to you (mostly) to give your character background and depth. Some groups like to run a game that’s very ‘find stuff, kill it, get points’ some are almost all character development, role-playing and solving problems through negotiation, and most are somewhere in between (although good DMs will give experience points for fleshing out your character beyond some numbers on a piece of paper.
I was beat to the link! Foiled again!
Roleplaying games take some of us a while to get the hang of, but like anything once you are around it enough the acronyms and such will become second nature.
I on the other hand had the hardest time with the dice. When I would have to roll for something I would hesitate because they were pretty confusing at first.
My friends picked up on this and started just saying roll the big one and two little ones. For my birthday the thought they were funny by getting me different colored dice and then gave the GM a list of what number die went with which color so they could just then say “use the blue on and the clear one”.
By then I had already gotten the hang of it so it was just good natured joking but it’s a story that gets told quite a bit.
ETA: now I just stick to Everquest and don’t have to worry about the paper pencil stuff. Much easier on my simple minded self, and less joking about my inabilities to tell one die from another.
JSGoddess, Bonzo has the entire collection of books. As a stack it comes up to about my knee. It weighs, literally, a ton. He takes it everywhere with him, has a special backpack for it.
He doesn’t have a special backpack for his college textbooks, I notice. (she said grimly → Mom " :rolleyes: " )
I fall asleep about 9:30pm; if I’m forced to stay verticalish until 11pm, I wake back up. Many of those sessions involved about one hour and a half of me being asleep in the chair We’d start around noon and beat the heck out of Tucson way past midnight (if no family dinner was due) - but only because we didn’t want to have to explain to the mothers of the three who weren’t related to me why they’d spent the whole night out!
Another thing to note is that there are basically two kinds of D&D philosophies. One is very numbers-and-killing based - the DM sets up a dungeon, you kill things and get stronger. The second is more role-playing based. The focus is instead the story, and having your character act in, well, characteristic ways. For example, a hopeless idealist would rush into any conflict to help people, an antisocial barbarian would run off and/or yell at her group, someone who feels strongly that undead are evil wouldn’t cooperate with a necromancer, etc. Sometimes the fun comes not from solving quests (although there is some of that, too) but from exploring how different people act.
The key is to find a group that plays in a way that you like, since even following the exact same rules, you can get VERY different games being played.
Oh, also - it’s usually very easy to borrow a PHB from someone else in the group. I don’t own one. What I DID buy is dice - you can get sets for very cheap at a gaming store, and it’s nice to have your own.
I’ll second that. The books aren’t cheap so in our group we don’t mind lending to new folks who are still figuring out whether they like the game enough to invest in one. We also have loaner dice. And character sheets, although you can find any number of printable ones on the internet. You can also find ones that will autofill your stats, although I’d recommend working through it on paper a few times to give you an understanding of how the numbers work. (Be sure to use a 3.5 character sheet, especially if it auto-fills.)
D&D for Dummies is a pretty good intro, if your library has one.
I haven’t played in over 20 years. Is it still, as Unca Cecil described it, a “a game that combines the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping?”
The basics are less complicated than they used to be, but the extra stuff can get a little hairy. Of course, Cecil was playing with the wrong people to get the impression he did.
He forgot the player arguements and the snacks and the sleep deprivation. I’m old. I go to bed at midnight unless we’re mid-battle. Night falls, guards are set, here’s my sheet. If something attacks, the dwarf will throw a hammer at it.
Forgot to mention a couple of things. First, especially if this is your first character, it can take an hour or more to make and equip. You might want to get the character pre-approved before the game.
Also, fighters and monks are easier to keep track of and harder to kill at lower levels than most of the other classes. Although if you’re really interested in being a magic user, go for it. Just take some time before the game to think through your spells.
I learned table top role playing using GURPS (then Star Wars RPG, an dlater Vampire: The Masquerade)
When some friends got me to play D&D… “What do you mean I don’t get to design my character myself? I have to roll for attributes?”
I didn’t last long.
D&D now has an option to use a point buy system instead of rolling randomly, and a lot of DMs allow the point buy. But your comparing it to Vampire?! White Wolf’s World of Darkness games are cool and all, but they have a lot of broke ass rules.
If you’ve played CoH and Dungeon Runners, then you’ve played a game that is decended from D&D. Instead of the computer keeping track of what kind of damage you deal or recieve, it’s dependent on dice rolls (both the attackers and the defenders). Instead of the programmer deciding to put a zombie in that room, the Game master does.
When you approach someone about joining a group, I’d suggest mentioning up front that you have never done pen and paper gaming, but you have played MMOGs. Ask for help with your first character. You may very well find people that are willing to sit down with you and help you set one up, explaining how things work along the way. Remember that it’s (usually) a game of team work. The rest of the team will hopefully understand that if you have fun, they have more fun.
As for finding a group, are there any comic book stores, gaming supply stores, or college campuses around you? Those are all good places to look for groups. The stores may very well have bulletin boards just for this.
