Game for beginning role-players (split)

[vegasthroat]

It's my personal opinion that games with a more narrativist (and some gamist) approach (I REALLY hope I'm using those terms correctly, is there a FAQ or a glossary of accepted game design terminology around here...?)

anyway, it's my personal opinion that games with a more narrativist/gamist approach are much easier for new players to grasp.

3dEd DnD is NOT that game, the combat system is actually rather complex and abstract, although the setting is pretty accesible to most people due to popular media.

As far as SYSTEMS go, I think that Castle Falkenstein, and Little Fears probably have the best two systems to introduce non-gamers to the Role Playing Game Hobby.  The rules sets are simple, they reek of flavor and their simplicity allows new players to focus on 'the story' and their character development more.  People unfamiliar with role playing games can sit down to Castle Falkenstein and immediately dive into role-playing and adventure without having to ask for clarification, time and time again.
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[Clinton R. Nixon]

I've said this earlier today in Actual Play, but I'll repeat it: I can't think of a game that would be easier to use as a first role-playing game than Trollbabe. It explains the fundamental elements of role-play, like scenes and narration, in ways that other games don't - these things are just understood by role-players.

Trollbabe - because of its unique approach to scenes and narration - actually explains what those things are and how they work.

[Ozymandias]

The best type of RPG to introduce someone to RPGs with is one thats covers a subject/genre/etc that they're interested in.

Past that, I think it varies a lot. A big variable is the age of the person being introduced to the game. A middle school or high school student is likely going to have a lot of free time and therefore a complex or rules heavy system isn't really a problem for them learn and digest. (My own introduction to RPGs at that age was Champions.) As you start talking about introducing college age or older people you need to start moving to more and more rules-lite systems as they're simply not going to have the time to learn a huge set of rules up front.

But it always goes to back to finding a subject they're interested in, if someone is interested in sci-fi and superheroes then Castle Falkenstein and Little Fears don't make good introductions for them despite their ease of play.

[Cassidy]

Pale Fire,

Do you recall the "Lord of the Rings Adventure Game" that was published by Iron Crown Enterprise many moons ago?

I cannot think of a better example of an RPG written specifically for players who are new to the hobby.

As a system aimed at "beginners" it had numerous play examples, had a very simple core system, ready to run characters, and step by step introductary adventures and scenarios. It was an absolute pleasure to run.

Funny thing is it was intended as a stepping stone to MERP or Rulemaster (pun intended). We ended up doing the reverse. We played loads of MERP, tried LOTR once just to see what it was like, and eventually ended up sticking with it. The simplicity of the system was a breath of fresh air and it was a blissful game to run in comparison to it's elder MERP brother.

I don't recall LOTR ever taking off in a big way and it never seemed to achieve the popular appeal or attract the players to the hobby that it probably deserved to.

The product is now long out of print and as everyone probably knows ICE lost their Middle-Earth licence anyways and LOTR was consigned to the great RPG graveyard.

I absolutely loved that game, it was a real gem, and when we do occasionaly play a game set in Middle-Earth then thats what we use.

[Seth L. Blumberg]

Guys, shouldn't we be taking this to a new thread? Check out the post dates.  September -> December.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Splitsville indeed, Seth.

Here's the thread to which vegasthroat originally posted:
Beginner-friendly games

Best,
Ron

[vegasthroat]

Sorry guys, I'm a forge-n00b.

It was my first day...I wont do it again....

[kamikaze]

anyway, it's my personal opinion that games with a more narrativist/gamist approach are much easier for new players to grasp.

I'd have to disagree.  The best game to start a newbie with is, as Ozymandias said, a setting the newbie is interested in.  Newbies don't care in the least about GNS - it's not even on their radar.  Heck, it's not even on my radar.  I disliked GNS when it was invented on rec.games.frp.advocacy, I dislike it now, and I still think it's unnatural to be too far to any one extreme.

The games I've had the best luck with teaching newbies are:

_Star Wars_ (the real one, not the D20 thing) - mostly simulationist, with a strong gamist streak.

DUDE: The Alan Smithee Project - gamist simulation of a narrative media form.

_TORG_ - gamist, with a very tiny bit of simulationism (a few of the alternate-reality physics simulated in the game) and narrativism (mostly the plot complication cards in the Drama Deck).

All three have fairly simple rules, which is important.  All three make it easy to make characters - in SW and TORG, you pick a template and add a few skills of your own.  Done.  In DUDE, you describe your character, and you're done.  SW and TORG have easily-identified villains.  Adventures for all three are easy to create, and easy for the players to understand.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

One problem with a topic like this is that "newbie" is no better defined or described than terms like "realism," "balanced," or "transparent." It's easy for anyone to adjust the internal image of a "newbie" to taste, and for purposes of a given point. Discussions about such terms therefore tend to turn in circles as disagreement/assertion becomes the priority rather than rigor.

That said, I think that the overt metagame agenda found in both Narrativist and Gamist play (or rather, the respective agendas) represent widespread, widely-understood human leisure activities - building stories (in the non-gamer sense, hence not Sim-Situation) and competing with one another for fun. Simulationist play, by comparison, is a kind of rarefied or less-widely grasped activity, outside of role-playing culture, at least in group terms. That is, daydreaming is common, but group/communicated daydreaming is less so.

Mark (kamikaze), I think your examples actually support vegasthroat's point - they all carry a strong whiff of Gamism, by your description. I also think you might consider that GNS is not the Threefold proposed on the r.f.g.a. boards, although it is derived from there, because your use of "setting" is better suited to the Threefold concept than to GNS. According to GNS, setting is integral to any and all forms of play.

Best,
Ron

[kamikaze]

Hello,
One problem with a topic like this is that "newbie" is no better defined or described
[...]
That said, I think that the overt metagame agenda found in both Narrativist and Gamist play (or rather, the respective agendas) represent widespread, widely-understood human leisure activities - building stories (in the non-gamer sense, hence not Sim-Situation) and competing with one another for fun. Simulationist play, by comparison, is a kind of rarefied or less-widely grasped activity, outside of role-playing culture, at least in group terms. That is, daydreaming is common, but group/communicated daydreaming is less so.

Mark (kamikaze), I think your examples actually support vegasthroat's point - they all carry a strong whiff of Gamism, by your description. I also think you might consider that GNS is not the Threefold proposed on the r.f.g.a. boards, although it is derived from there, because your use of "setting" is better suited to the Threefold concept than to GNS. According to GNS, setting is integral to any and all forms of play.

Newbie's a very easy term to define - it's someone who hasn't played an RPG before.  Obviously, the only ones that matter for this discussion are those who could be convinced to try an RPG.

My point was that the games I've found newbies most attracted to had nothing to do with the style of game, but only the setting material.  It could as easily be Star Wars Monopoly as Star Wars RPG, for all they care.

But when you do sit them down, the games that have worked best for teaching newbies, at least for me, were very clearly and openly games first, simulations of the genre second, and narrativism dead last, if at all present.

I do *not* see hordes of newbies lining up to "tell stories" in games.  They want to play a fun game, and maybe reproduce part of the setting.

Simulation is widely understood.  "So we can be other people in the Star Wars universe, and it works just like the movies?" - that's a simulationist concern, and that's what people ask about.

Most people, and especially newbies, are fairly reluctant to play something overtly narrative, because they know that writing good stories is *hard*, that bad stories are no fun at all, and that most people are not good at making stories.  There's a reason why novels and movies are a one-to-many medium, and why the Web did not suddenly turn everyone into an equally-important publisher.  Narrativism is neat, *when everyone is good at it, and in a really creative mood*.  When anyone slips, it's awful.

So it's very much not vegasthroat's point - he opined that narrativist/gamist games are the bomb with newbies, and IMO it's gamist/simulationist games.  Yeah, gamism is pretty obviously interesting to newbies - big shock, people just starting in games like the game-centric parts, not the two alternate directions you can go from there.

The simplicity part is even more important.  If you try teaching a newbie with Rolemaster or Champions (which are both excellent games for experienced players who don't mind a bit of work to get more genre-appropriate results in their gaming), you're going to scare someone out of the hobby.


Tangentially, "according to GNS" is not a very productive phrase.  What you mean by it is "by my version of GNS theory".  It's not like there's a huge corpus of decades of GNS theorizing which has converged on the version you use.  There's rgfa, and you, and a few others.  And each version is different.  So you need to specify which version you're referring to, and not treat it as canonical.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Mark,

Clearly we disagree about the issue. That's good! I'm interested in what others think.

Here are the only things which might clarify the upcoming discussion.

I think one tricky part of the issue concerns what you mean by "simulation of genre." If you've read my essay, then you know that I think that "genre" isn't going to be a very useful term for critical understanding of role-playing. I suggest that in many cases, what I think of as "plain and easy Narrativism" falls into "simulation of genre."

Another thing is my point, which I think you might be eliding, that not all people who (a) have not role-played and (b) are starting to, are alike. Newbie A is not Newbie B. I think that before anyone starts talking about "newbies do this" and "newbies do that," we should identify common, actual features that apply across most of them - if any exist.

Finally, we should probably get some history/theory straight. GNS is mine. The Threefold Model is the r.f.g.a. proposal, which I found very convincing or at least stimulating in the mid-90s. I wrote an essay to apply the ideas to a few others I had, and over time, it took some struggling for me to grasp this, but as it turns out, my notions were different from the Threefold from the very beginning.

So GNS only exists as (a) my original System Does Matter article (January 1999), (b) a ton of debate on the forums of the Gaming Outpost, some of which was lost through their server crashes, (c) my current essay GNS and Related Matters of Role-playing Design, now over a year old, and (d) the wealth of debate here at the Forge.

Further debate about this final point (history and identity of GNS) should be taken to the GNS forum and not continued here.

Best,
Ron

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Guys (and specifically kamikaze),

I have to emphatically back up Ron's point that Newbie A is not Newbie B.

One of the strangest ideas that's ever floated around the RPG hobby is this notion that story based games are really hard, and that "standard" games (AD&D for example), are like RPGs with "training wheels" until the player is good enough for story based games.

No.  Just isn't so.

Some people will take like a fish to water to a narrativist game.  Others will balk.  And visa versa.  This has nothing to do with whether or not they know the GNS terms.  What matters is, simply, some people will really get off on building a story with plenty of narrative techniques (third person narration, flashback, flashforward, theme, so forth), others want lots of game elements, some are really fascinated by playing Mr. Wizard with the new potion for 45 minutes.  

There is no learning curve about any of the this.  There is no continum.  Different styles of play and taste are often just different.  To assume you start with something with lots of rules to make it easy to "play" and then improve skills to lead into story is like saying one starts learning how to ski by going through marine training boot camp.  Yes, some skill are transferible -- but one might as well get on the top of a hill and just go down the damned thing.

Take care,
Christopher

[M. J. Young]

Newbie's a very easy term to define - it's someone who hasn't played an RPG before.

I don't see that as so clear a definition. Let me suggest several denominations of such "Newbies".

[*]College-aged nerd who has played every CRPG ever written but never seen a real RPG, introduced by an active gaming group in the dorm.
[*]High school introvert who writes fiction, some of it fan fiction for a popular sci-fi series, some romance fantasies heavily influenced by Ann McAfrey, posted on a web site, who picks up a game in a book store.
[*]Mid-twenties white collar worker who plays wargames on weekends and has always heard of RPGs but never played one, invited by one of his Wargamer buddies to join them for something different.
[*]Ordinary eighth grader who has played a lot of board games and traditional card games who just saw one of the Lord of the Rings movies and is really interested in finding a way to have imaginary adventures like that.
[*]Magic: The Gathering champ who has heard that CCGs were invented by the people who make RPGs, but is at his first convention where he's going to join one for the first time.
[*]Mid-thirties housewife and mother whose kids play in the dining room every week who wants to know what it is that fascinates them about this game.
[*]Forty-something hobbyist who enjoys civil war reenactments who gets invited to a pickup game at a hotel in Gettysburg.
[/list:u]
I dare say every one of those people brings entirely different skills and understandings to their first game. To make some grossly unfair characterizations:

[*]The guy with the CRPG experience is going to have a solid sense of the adventure concept, but is likely to be "looking for the right answer" and not terribly focused on character concept.
[*]The fiction writer is going to be very involved in character and story, but perhaps not so good with rules or tactics.
[*]The wargamer, on the other hand, is going to be fabulous with rules--simple compared to some of what he's played--and is going to be looking for ways to apply his tactical knowledge, although it may be difficult for him to identify with his character as more than a game token.
[*]The eighth grader has expectations that might not be easy to meet, but probably will find a lot of enjoyment in even a fantasy dungeon crawl, if he can see the possibility that his character will grow into something heroic eventually.
[*]Our M:tG player is another tactitian, but he's a different tactician from our wargamer; he's got much more of an idea of spells and individual abilities (as opposed to group tactics). He probably also sees his character more as an extension of himself--not really a token, but not really a separate character.
[*]Mom has no clue what's happening here; if the kids let her into the game, she brings only herself and her curiosity.
[*]In Gettysburg, we're probably quite comfortable with the way the game simulates its world, but getting into the freedom of character choice may take some effort.
[/list:u]
Any of these "Newbies" is going to react differently to role playing. They are far from the same. In one sense, they have no knowledge of role playing games; in another sense, they have all been exposed to something like role playing--CRPG's, story creation, complex game rules, fantasy movies, CCG's, re-enactment, or merely watching someone else play in the next room.

In a sense, there are no "completely virgin" newbies to role playing. Everyone has been exposed to something that impacts the way they will perceive and approach their first game.

My point was that the games I've found newbies most attracted to had nothing to do with the style of game, but only the setting material.  It could as easily be Star Wars Monopoly as Star Wars RPG, for all they care.

Ah, but what are we asking? Are we asking what promotional materials are most likely to get someone to try the game, or are we asking what sort of game they are most likely to understand and enjoy? Those clearly are not the same questions, and just as clearly will not have the same answers.

I do *not* see hordes of newbies lining up to "tell stories" in games.  They want to play a fun game, and maybe reproduce part of the setting.

Funny thing is that "telling stories" is exactly what we wanted our role playing games to do twenty-cough years ago. We wouldn't have said that; we'd have said "having (or creating) adventures". We had already played bookcase game versions (don't recall whether they were Avalon Hill or SPI) of both Lord of the Rings and Dune, and found them wanting. The blurb we read about D&D sounded like it was a game that would let us have adventures of the sort we usually found in books.

And whatever anyone thinks, we felt like those games were successful in that regard. We created stories through D&D, Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha, and Star Frontiers, and week after week tried to decide which story we wanted to continue. I am certain that newer games do this better, because they are designed to focus on it first; but it was always the story that kept the campaign going.

By contrast, we didn't play the same boardgame week after week, even when we didn't know role playing games. We loved board games and card games, but it wasn't until we started role playing games that there was something to bring us back to the same games every week. That something was the story, not the world, and not the game.

The simplicity part is even more important.  If you try teaching a newbie with Rolemaster or Champions (which are both excellent games for experienced players who don't mind a bit of work to get more genre-appropriate results in their gaming), you're going to scare someone out of the hobby.

I'm not at all certain this is so. I don't have extensive experience with the two games mentioned, but I'm quite facile with OAD&D (in fact, I've apparently been cited in the latest issue of KoDT, from what I hear). The complexity of the rules have never been a problem for the players; it is up to the referee to manage the rules and keep the game flowing. I agree that complex games are more difficult for new gaming groups, because it often takes years for a referee to master such a game and the techniques required to run it smoothly; but if the referee already knows the game and has the skills, players should be able to hop into most role playing games without knowing more than Jared Sorensen's questions: Who am I, what do I do, and where do I do it?

And regarding GNS, Ron's articles are authoritative on that subject. We debate them here, but recognize that that which legitimately wears the label "GNS" is Ron's theory, built on predecessors (some of whom vehemently reject his improvements) and still in development in some ways. Ron is right; don't confuse the work on which it is built for the theory applied here. If you'd like to discuss the r.g.f.a. theory, that's fine (I think it's stagnant and not much use in its current form, but apparently some people find it useful). If you want to cite Kim or Tweet or even Scarlet Jester or anyone else who has contributed meaningfully to the development of game theory, that's fine; but there are definitions in use on this site which we find useful because we have a certain level of agreement about them, and there is nothing practical gained by claiming those definitions are invalid.

--M. J. Young

(Cross-posted with Christopher, who says some excellent things in this regard.)