Re–City Of Heroes.
There have been several very good paper & pencil RPGs based on Supers.
The 2 best are Champions and Marvel Superhero role Playing Game.
The DC Comics Role-Playing Game is pretty good, too.
DANG!
I wish I could find a group.
Some DM’s require one roll, one ability score, no changes. But others allow you to roll six stats and then assign the results to ability slots. Still others have you roll one for one and then allow one swap or ding a point for every swap made or allow shifting of points, but at 1 for 2.
There are variations that allow more design room.
It took 38 posts, but at last someone mentioned GURPS.
For people looking into entering the world of RPG, D&D is probably one of the worst systems out there. The rules are a convoluted mess of exceptions and cross references. Every book is incomplete enough to push you into buying more.
If what the OP wants is try her hand at RPGs, I recommend she looks into the alternatives. (although I have noted that people who enter RPG from the world of computer RPGs, tend to prefer Roll Playing and make themselves perfectly at home in D&D).
Is what she wants is enter specifically D&D, then good luck (and perseverance) finding a good DM. That makes all the difference between good and bad gaming. Don’t let a bad experience ruin gaming for you.
D&D (rather, the D20 system in general) is a wargame dressed up to look like a roleplaying game.
Seriously. Look at World of Darkness, Feng Shui, Paranoia, all real pen and paper RPGs. None of them require a board with elaborate dungeon setups, miniatures set to a scale of 1 inch = 5 feet, and a rule set where half the rules are keyed off exact distances and whether lines cross box borders and so on and so forth. The others only require verbal interaction and occasional dice-rolling (I don’t think Paranoia even bothers with dice) to determine outcomes. The focus is on the story being told, whereas D20 focuses on the game that’s being driven by the story.
I thoroughly enjoy D&D now that I’ve come to understand its true function. Wargames are for people who like number-crunching minutiae.
Psst, jsgoddess, now that we’re down to two 4-person groups, you’re welcome to join my online game this september; all the players are from the SDMB, and we’re using what amounts to an instant messenger and online whiteboard to play, so it won’t exactly match the live experience… but it’ll at least give you a chance to see what gameplay is like.
Because I’ve never seen it?
And I wouldn’t recomend Paranoia for a newbie.
Yllaria, you’re my kind of dwarf!
I teach roleplaying at my school. 
The standard group is 4-6 players and we play 2 hour sessions. Obviously every few years I get a brand-new group…
I usually tell new players to chat to the existing players and also spend about 30 minutes beforehand to explain the types of characters available and to create one for them.
I have used a classic adventure “The Village of Hommlet” as my introduction for the last 17 years. I also have a range of published adventures for, plus some of my own scenarios to give the players further challenges after their intro.
Roleplaying is very diffferent from board games. I also teach chess, and it takes me about 20 minutes to explain the rules before a newcomer can play. However once a player has a character (and you can give them a prepared one if time is tight), they can start roleplaying! You explain what their chances are of succeeding in any action they want to do, and let them decide whether to continue. (So a fighter in plate mail with a sword would undoubtedly be able to fight off a rabid dog, but be hopeless at jumping over a stream.)
As others have said, the referee’s style can be combat and/or roleplaying. I try to have a mixture of both, so the players can progress either by defeating a bunch of bandits or by sorting out a neighbour dispute.
There’s no doubt that roleplaying is good for many types of pupils:
- imaginative ones
- those who try to dominate all discussion (their character can’t do everything, so they have to listen to other players)
- quiet ones, because firstly their character will have some ability that the others need and secondly because it’s sometimes easier to announce that your character is saying something, rather than you speaking up
- less sporty ones (I run sessions on Saturdays, so there is an alternative to matches
Champions - currently, it’s Hero System, 5th Edition Revised.
Marvel Superhero - do you mean the TSR Marvel Super Heroes game? I hope not. I hated that thing.
DC Comics - There are two, neither by that title, both of which are good. (Better than Marvel, IMO) - ‘DC Universe’ and ‘DC Heroes’.
And js, please ignore the D&D naysayers here - D&D, because of its Microsoft-like market position, attracts a lot of detractors. It isn’t the best simulationist game out there, true, but…
… is something I’d contest until I collapsed. D&D is very streamlined and easy to use in the 3rd and 3.5 editions. The game is completely playable in the three core books. There aren’t a lot of exceptions. It’s a very good beginner’s game.
It’s the best game for introductory games, IOHO. Less stuff to track than in, for example, LotR; less flexible than Hero but it also means that you can whip up a character pretty fast.
We’ve had several intro sessions, always used 1st Ed DnD, only player’s handbook and master’s handbook. The DMs would have these double-sided sheets with all the tables we used, including the abreviated stats for the monsters. No fancy classes, stick to the basics… they weren’t so much intended to “get new players” (although we did!) as to show to a bunch of grown-ups what was it the kids were talking about.
It was always a bunch of simultaneous games playing the same scenario; one of the things we’d do afterwards is get people to tell what their group had done… sometimes you got totally different stories from what had originally been the same situation.
The TSR system was awesome!
Clean, easy to use, reflected the comics well, & flexible in the extreme.
Great system.
I was a D&D anti long before they went all Microsoft. (AD&D, really. I loved D&D). And my experience with 3 was biased and with 3.5 non-existent. The bulk of my D&D experience was with 2nd Ed. Use this to filter my position on it.
That said, CandidGamera is right in a point he makes. AD&D is just not a good “simulation”. Credit must be given to the effort they made to streamline “Roll” playing even if it came at a cost in “realism”.
I just find that there are both many simpler games and many more realistic games out there. I always had trouble with the Alignment rules and the unlocalized HP pool.
That said, those are nothing a good DM can’t fix if there aren’t any rules lawyers in the party.
AD&D is not bad beyond salvage, it is just that I always found it annoying that it was the system of choice by virtue of market share alone, when there are so many better systems around. And that by the time you had enough patches to cover all the incosistencies, you were almost playing something else.
AD&D, which comes in 1st and 2nd edition flavors, is fundamentally different from 3rd. AD&D was a mess of THAC0s and tables and exceptional Strength scores and maximum Constitution bonuses to hitpoints that depended on what class you were and trying to remember when you want to roll high or roll low and which races can multiclass and how much experience a thief needed for 5th level which was different from how much a mage needed and whether you needed to save against wands or paralyzation if someone used a wand of paralyzation on you and on and on and on.
3rd edition throws most of that crap out and makes it much simpler. 4th, if they can pull it off, promises to throw even more crap out, including the “Vancian” magic system where you have to memorize your spells every day, and even doing something about alignment so it doesn’t feel like it’s stuck into the system with duct tape.
I’ll play! And I’ll even be a cleric. 
I did comment in your thread.
sturmhauke, I was merely listing the rulebooks I’ve played. I disliked Vampire in general, but character creation was fun.
Sapo, I’m surprised I was the first with GURPS. It’s superior in every conceivable way.
… Dude, did you take Feeble in Reason? 
I kid, I kid.
I just… wow, did I loathe that system. I found it to be none of those things you mentioned. However, it was my first RPG that I ever played.
Dude, it was 10,000X easier than AD&D 2nd. :smack:
I remain content that I got into D&D when 3.0 had already come out and never experienced the snarl that is AD&D.
Although I will say that the AD&D has one thing 3.X lacks: Planescape. I got my hands on some Planescape sourcebooks a little while back, and the writing and setting is just brilliant. Once WotC bought D&D, though, they never ported it to 3.0.
RQII, Chaosium edition, Apple Lane…
I’ve got four file boxes of materiel sitting in my attic, waiting, waiting…
Friends keep trying to get me into online stuff (like I have the time) but for me the fun of the game was hanging with my friends. Game is just the excuse.
I’d pit you but it would be the absolute dorkiest pit thread of all time. So let me just say that term “roll playing” was trite in 1982, and I hate everyone who uses it. :mad:
Sorry. Really. Don’t let my smile make you think I am not terribly sorry.