n00bies: Why, and What Happened Next?

[James_Nostack]

I am curious about why people, particularly adults, choose to participate in roleplaying games for the first time.  I am also curious about how they reacted to (a) the game system itself, and to (b) the flow of real life stuff around the table.  

Here's what I'm hoping to find out... What design features make games appealing/unappealing to new people?  What design features make new people less likely to play again/never play at all?  When you invited a new person to play, but they backed out instead, why did that happen?

Anecdotes about in-game events ("We killed the minotaur," etc.) are only relevant to the extent they address these questions.

Apologies to the moderators if this thread stomps on Forge policies...

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I have never brought new people into gaming, so I can only speak for myself.  At age 9 I went to sleepover at a friend's house; his mom had purchased a new game for him called "Dungeons & Dragons."  He had read the rules a few weeks ago, wanted to play, and we weren't doing anything else, so...

I have trouble analyzing this because for one thing, it was almost 20 years ago.  For another thing, playing Dungeons & Dragons did not seem much different from playing Transformers.  There probably was zero conscious thought in my decision.

I had a good time for a couple of reasons: I was with a bunch of friends and we were all kind of loopy that late at night; there was, like, a map & stuff (probably my first exposure to graph paper); there were cool pictures in the books, particularly the Monster Manual which had all kinds of wack-ass monsters.  But most importantly, my friend didn't actually know the rules as well as he thought he did, so we kind of ran roughshod over him and bribed him with candy to let us win.  This may be like the fun of coloring madly outside the lines.

I suspect the motives behind a kid's first-time participation, however, may be different from an adult's.  Would anyone care to clue me in, either from personal experience or those in your gaming group?

[GB Steve]

We've got a regular column in Places to Go, People to Be that addresses this issue. It's called Once Upon a Time.

For me it started around 1972 when my Mum ran a LARP in our house. Ever since then I'd been looking for a door back into that summer and I found it 10 years later in a dingy shop on Charing Cross Rd.

[James_Nostack]

The link is helpful but it seems a bit more nostalgic than analytical.

I'm trying to get enough Actual Play analysis to figure out the traits that make a game appealing to non-gamers.  I suspect a huge part of that involves OOC stuff, which most game designs do not explicitly address, but I'm curious about other aspects of gaming that may be a turn-off or turn-on to newcomers.

[GB Steve]

I've got some quotes from the many different stories that talk about the initial appeal of roleplaying.

"You are the hero" seems to be a strong theme. Players go from reading the genre literature to playing it themselves. Then there's peer group and social issues. This works for teenagers, when most of these gamers started out but I think the appeal needs to slightly different for adults. The success of Murder Mystery games seems to indicate a desire to play make believe. However you're really lead by the nose in these and they are more a social event than a game.

From friends who don't game, learning to play RPGs is like when you learn a new language. I've got a friend who sings professionally for a living. She tried LARPing but has given it up because of stage-fright.

The big barrier is not some much the vocabulary or the syntax but more that until you throw yourself wholeheartedly into the venture, are willing to make mistakes, appear perhaps a little foolish, but to give it a go, you're never going to get it. That's not so hard for kids to do it but it's much harder for adults.

To a certain extent the massive amount of freedom coupled with the daunting rules is probably part of this. Adults are comfortable with and understand their surroundings. Roleplaying takes all this away and replaces it with a huge slice of anomy. Kids are explorers and gaming is just something else to explore.

Here are those quotes:

The excitement is still so clear. 'I' was creating the story. When I closed my eyes I could see it all. I've been that way for as long as I can remember. Every story, every book, plays itself out like a movie in my head. I was seven years old and I was the star - no, not just the star, 'the heroine' - of my own in-brain movie.

One of the things I recall most vividly is the flexibility of the rules. "AD&D flexible? But it's got classes and levels and ..." Well yeah, but you see: we grew up on a steady diet of Magic: the Gathering. And if there's any game that has bred a race of ruleslawyers, it's Magic. While running the dungeon crawl described in the box, one of the players asked whether his character could kick the white hot brazier towards the approaching goblins. After some checking, the GM said he could. Wow! What we've got here is a guy doing a clever thing, and there isn't even a rule against it. It wasn't an exploitation of a loophole in the rules, either. This rocked!

I came from a very strong fundamentalist Christian background, and because of that, the mythology of transgression kind of obsessed me.

The Fighting Fantasy gamebooks were fun in a sort of retreat to your bedroom with a dice and a pencil kind of way, but somewhat lacking in the sociability factor.

I'll never forget how we started off the game: "Do you wanna be a knight, a swordsman, or a wizard?" He explained that the three choices were, in order, physical, balanced, and magical. I chose a swordsman, got some spells and weapons, and played an organized RPG for the very first time.

There is no moment more magical than your first roleplaying session. It may be run by hacks, you may have no idea what is going on, you may be flinching in uncomprehending horror at the mass of numbers and tables before you (and that's just the character sheet) but somewhere, somehow, you have a feeling of your horizons being forceably ripped wider. You'll never be the same. Unless, of course, you were never destined to be a roleplayer, in which case, you forget the whole thing and go back to whatever you were doing before your friend subjected you to this geeky torture.

As far as I was concerned, my character certainly had limitless possibilities then. He could hide in shadows, he could detect noise, he had sharp daggers and a short sword and he knew how to use them (although not particularly well). The character was created and I wanted to play.

What I wanted was differentiated characters that disagreed with each other, but reached a common goal inspite of these problems. I wanted Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, I wanted the Fellowship of the Ring.

I read the books like they were venerable tomes, pouring over them till late at night, my sense of wonder and excitement growing with each new page. As I read the Dungeon Master's Guide, I felt like I was learning some sort of magic, an arcane and mysterious art that only a few could know. It was a forbidden art as well: the DM's Guide was the first book I had ever read that warned its buyer not to read it! By the time I'd reached the end of both books, I'd designed a dozen characters, mapped out a dungeon and designed an adventure. And I'd been converted to role-playing for life.

I was just 10 years old and some older kids (who hated me) were always talking about D&D. I saw an add for it in a Spiderman comic book. I think I felt the first pangs of lust.

Needless to say at age 11 random dungeon bashing was anthropologically uncomplicated, glorious, and rewarding. A gamer was born.

[Selene Tan]

I first read about RPGs more than a year before I found people who played them, and I knew they were something I wanted to do. I don't entirely remember the reasons anymore, but here were some of them:

- It sounded "fun"
- I played a lot of computer games (mostly adventure and strategy games), and this looked like a really cool "next step" since you got to be the character
- I already had a lot of character ideas for various stories that never got written
- It was a "geek" thing and I identified strongly with the culture
- The websites I found described things (e.g. campaign histories, character bios, funny events, etc.) that I wanted to be a part of

My first RPG was Star Wars d6 with the members of my high school's newly-founded Science Fiction Club. Several of the members had roleplayed before (some were in a D&D campaign together), and I overheard them discussing it and asked them about it.

One good thing about Star Wars was that it used regular dice -- I remember raiding all the board games in my house for their dice. Another was that, well, everybody knows Star Wars. This was also around the time that the re-releases of the original trilogy were coming out. I remember I was discouraged from playing a Jedi because it would be "too complicated for a newbie."

In college, I managed to get my boyfriend into RPGs. He'd heard about them before and thought they sounded interesting. Some people in his dorm were starting up a game, so we both joined it. It was pure-module D&D 3rd ed; the other people had played together many times and so there were a lot of in-jokes and things we didn't get. He also had some horrendous luck: his first three characters died within 1 or 2 sessions. He stuck with it, although eventually we both bailed out of that campaign when a friend of ours was starting another D&D campaign.

In that we managed to convince several of our friends to at least try it. One was my roommate; she tried it for one session with a GM-made character (Good cleric). The GM penalized her in a combat where we were using Skittles for enemies and she was talking about wanting to kill them just to eat. I could tell she wasn't really getting into it, and I wasn't surprised when she decided not to play for another session. Another friend who was invited to play for the first time really got into it; he had a lot of fun making up a character and coming up with a name and concept. He kept playing.

The next year we tried a homebrew which was dissatisfying, and the year after that we tried a Deadlands campaign. Later he told me that one of the things he enjoys most about RPGs is fiddling with characters and tactics to become effective. He said he enjoyed D&D because of that, and that was part of why he didn't mind making up new characters all that much (they were all very different). He liked Deadlands because it was a new system to experiment with, but the actual play (at least under that GM) wasn't interesting enough to bear it out for the long term. (Basically, I think his preferred mode is Gamism -- one reason the homebrew was unsatisfying for him.)

Those are the experiences of a high-schooler and some college students, which might be a bit younger than you're looking for.

[Mike Holmes]

What design features make games appealing/unappealing to new people? What design features make new people less likely to play again/never play at all? When you invited a new person to play, but they backed out instead, why did that happen?

Steve's giving lots of data on the positive end. Steve, any way to figure out, besides context, which of those are adults entering into gaming?

Anyhow, let's look at the basic fact of the negative side of adult entrances. I think there are two elements to it. First, many folks who play RPGs somehow never get that it's a social activity. Oh, they might be social with the people that they play with currently. But when a new person comes along, they're often treated with a sort of neutrality that one feels facing a chess opponent at a match where you're randomly assigned an opponent. Basically you've just become aquiantances, and you really don't need to have much more of a social contract to play out the match.

Not so in RPGs. People who are subjected to this will, quite rightfully, feel that it's very odd that they're performing this very personal sort of activity with somebody that they don't even really know. I think that weirds out adults all the time. Kids, OTOH, are already not good at socially dealing with each other, and find this quite normal. So, yeah, I'm saying that some RPG players are still playing like they did when they were kids in terms of the social situation. I see it a lot.

Second, what makes RPGs so personal? I mean, why does treating it like a chess match seem so weird? Well, it's the ritual nature of the act. You clear the ritual spaces (physical and metaphysical), and then you play a character who is an alter ego of yourself. The play of which, though not neccessarily like yourself, still says something quite deep about yourself.

Doing all of this without the appropriate social context is akin to walking naked amongst strangers. Being expected to do so by someone will often get you to do such a thing once. And then you'll never come back.

It doesn't take a month, a week or even a day to get to know a person well enough that they'll feel comfortable roleplaying with you. You can accomplish this, I think, in a matter of just a few minutes, when done correctly. But just shaking a person's hand, saying, "Nice to meet you," and then asking them to take off their clothing for you...well, that doesn't cut it.

So, there, that's my criteria. You know you're ready if/when you feel that if RPGs were about taking your clothes off for ritual purposes, that you could ask the person in question to do that. If you're not there yet, then consider taking a bit more time and effort on the social level to connect before playing.

Con games? Yep, they're like nudist camps. Everyone feels comfortable, because they're aware that everyone else is a nudist as well. Watch somebody who doesn't ping on "Gamedar" come by the table, however, and watch everyone shut up suddenly. With the exceptions of the exhibitionist player. :-)

Mike

[James_Nostack]

I could tell she wasn't really getting into it, and I wasn't surprised when she decided not to play for another session. Another friend who was invited to play for the first time really got into it; he had a lot of fun making up a character and coming up with a name and concept...

Ah, see--this is exactly the kind of thing I'm interested in!  Did both of these people begin in the same session?

Later he told me that one of the things he enjoys most about RPGs is fiddling with characters and tactics to become effective.

Is this "he" the same in the earlier quote?

It seems like enjoying play is mainly a matter of temperament, secondarily a matter of the overall social vibe at the table, and finally (if at all) what we regard as system--rules, dice, high concept, premise, whatever.

So--two questions for a later thread might be, "How does design affect  people with 'borderline' temperament?  Or, How can design positively affect the social vibe?"  But I don't want to jump the gun just yet.

Also -- it sounds like for some people a big part of the fun is simply exploring what in the world these games are, and what they're like: everything is fresh and weird, which can be an exhilarating combination to a certain type of person.

[greyorm]

What design features make games appealing/unappealing to new people? What design features make new people less likely to play again/never play at all? When you invited a new person to play, but they backed out instead, why did that happen?

I've found that introducing new players by showing them the book kills their interest right there. Two notable incidents I recall that support this are a pair of brothers who asked me what I was reading (it was a "small" game book) and I replied it was the rulebook for a game. They looked at me as though I were deranged and stated, "Wow. We'll I'd never play something that required that big a rulebook."

The second incident occured with introducing a new player to our group. She was very interested in playing, as it was a Wheel of Time campaign and she was a big fan; very excited that she could pretend to be in Jordan's fantasy world. She had never role-played before, however, so one of my other players gave her the rulebook to look over. She very quickly decided she was now not interested in playing: according to her, the size of the book scared her off.

In both cases, the people freaked out about the size of the rulebook. After all, if the rulebook for Monopoly fits on a four-page folded sheet, then a book the size of even an a "small" RPG must contain an incredible number of rules!

While we know that the actual number of rules contained in an RPG is relatively small, and most of the text is illustrative, explanatory, or supplemental, the "clueless n00bie" does not. They expect a rulebook to contain...rules! And alot of rules! Rules they will "have to know" in order to play! And that's just "too many" rules to have to know to play a game, too much work.

I don't know that this aspect of RPGs can be "fixed" -- since even small RPG rulebooks end up seeming large to the subculturally unindoctrinated audience -- especially since there are no boards or other props that might entice players to pay for a game printed on a four-page folded sheet. The only fix here seems proper introduction to RPGs via an existing group, through actual play without introduction to the rules(book).

On the other hand, the old red-box basic D&D set seems to me the perfect introduction to the hobby. It came in a box. It had everything necessary to play (rulesbook and dice). It contained not just an "introductory adventure" but a solo adventure that introduced the reader into actual play of the game as the very first section of the rulebook.

This is actually what started me in the hobby; well, this and the ad (which promised adventure, excitement, and treasure) for the red box in an early issue of the "Transformers" comic, combined with a growing love of fantasy. I played through that solo adventure and that was it. I introduced my best friend and his brother to it the next evening at a sleep over.

[Bankuei]

Hi,

When I was still up in Seattle, I managed to get some non-gamers introduced.  Most of these folks were in the writers/artists/theatre circles, and, so, had a pretty big interest in stories, pacing, mythology, fantasy, etc. to begin with.  And yeah, what sold them on trying it out definitely wasn't a book, or even a setting, but simply the idea of collaborative storytelling.  For them, it was simply a fun way of doing a group exercise in creativity, just like theatre games.

Of course, the game I introduced with was The Pool, which entailed no reading at all.

No one really wants to have to "study" something for fun, at least as an initial requirement to get started.  You can play chess with the basic rules, and later, if you want to get deep into it, you can study the various books and strategies.

A friend of mine explained to me when a couple of boys tried to introduce her to gaming, and spent something like 4 hours "helping" her make a character(that is, they did it themselves).  At first she was excited to try out a new game, but fell asleep during the process and never actually got to play.  She never understood what the boys were so excited about the whole time...

Chris

[James_Nostack]

Of course, the game I introduced with was The Pool, which entailed no reading at all...

No one really wants to have to "study" something for fun, at least as an initial requirement to get started...  

A friend of mine explained to me when a couple of boys tried to introduce her to gaming, and spent something like 4 hours "helping" her make a character(that is, they did it themselves).  At first she was excited to try out a new game, but fell asleep during the process and never actually got to play.  She never understood what the boys were so excited about the whole time...

Interesting.  So, one design element would be the Delayed Gratification Factor: presently, most games require you to read through a a bunch of rules in order to have fun... which is a drag.  As Mike mentions, the Red Box D&D explained the rules "on the fly" in the opening pages of the book, which partially alleviates this problem.  Are there other solutions?

One of the great things about the Pool is that it has almost no rules at all, which makes it pretty easy to get started... but there's also virtually no advice about how to play satisfactorily.

[M. J. Young]

I was reading the opening post, and wondering to myself whether I ever knew anyone who started role playing as an adult.

Duh. I am that person. I'm just thrown off because it was twenty-mumble years ago, and I suffer from that perspective that comes from so much time having passed that it only seems like I was a kid then.

Of course, I had no kids, and lots of free time. Also, we spent almost every weekend gaming with friends--by gaming, I mean board games, bookcase games, card games, bowling, pinball, miniature golf, and the rare war game. So we were already "gamers".

We'd long been looking for a game that would create fantasy adventures. We'd even acquired a Middle-Earth-based bookcase game (I don't recall which one, although I could describe it) and, if memory serves (on the chronology) the Dune bookcase game, neither of which really did what we wanted.

We read about D&D in an article in Psychology Today (on using it for group therapy for teenagers) and immediately determined to seek it out. We were fortunate enough to get a copy of the Blue Box original Basic set. It has relatively concise rules (remember, we were already doing bookcase games frequently and wargames occasionally, and had a copy of Hoyle just so we could learn and try new games).

People speak of handing someone the rule book and letting them read it in preparation for play. This is such a strange feature of RPG culture, and I don't know why we do that. I don't. We didn't do it with Monopoly or Pinochle or any other game. We chose one person, usually the owner of the game, to read the rules and tell the rest of us how to play. I've played thousands of hours of Gamma World and have still never read the rules, because it was entirely up to the referee to tell us how to play. I read the D&D rules, explained to everyone what they had to do to get started and what their options were, and they followed my instructions to create characters and begin play.

Our Multiverser rule book specifically says that players shouldn't read the rules--they're not really written for players.

I think it would help if you could communicate to people that it's better to have one person read the rules and explain the game to everyone else than to have everyone read the rules. My impression is that this is how it usually works for all games (who here has read the rules for football? who has not played? that's rhetorical.), so why not for RPGs?

--M. J. Young

[Selene Tan]

Ah, see--this is exactly the kind of thing I'm interested in!  Did both of these people begin in the same session?

No, they didn't. The guy started one session earlier. I feel like there was also another guy who tried the game for one session but didn't like it, but I can't remember who that could be.

Later he told me that one of the things he enjoys most about RPGs is fiddling with characters and tactics to become effective.

Is this "he" the same in the earlier quote?

No, the "he" is my boyfriend, who maintained an interest in roleplaying despite having his first several characters die. Which is interesting because that's character death is usually an immediate turn-off for new players. Admittedly, part of the reason was that I was still playing.
Later, he joined a Deadlands campaign for one semester while I was away, and at the end mentioned that he wasn't sure he wanted to continue roleplaying. Given that he'd expressed frustration over the pacing several times during the semester, I wasn't entirely surprised he wanted to quite Deadlands. I reminded him that he'd had a lot of fun when he visited with me one winter break and we got to play under my GM from high school, who's really good. He agreed that, yeah, it was probably the GM/campaign and not all RPGs that were the problem.

Oh, another data point... Recently I tried convincing another friend to try roleplaying. He likes playing computer RPGs and is busy working on a program that can incrementally create and render a world (for use in games). He said he was weirded out by the idea of a human GM. (Possibly, though he didn't mention it, he may have more been weirded out by the idea of doing all this by "just talking" rather than with a GUI and graphics and whatnot.)

Yay rambling.

[James_Nostack]

Our Multiverser rule book specifically says that players shouldn't read the rules--they're not really written for players...

You have officially blown my mind.

It's better to have one person read the rules and explain the game to everyone else than to have everyone read the rules

You know, I was completely unconscious of this until you mentioned it.  If I were to introduce someone to gaming, I'd do it by personally walking them through the process, only explaining the essentials.  

Note that if you were to read the rules to someone, the rules would have to be pretty short and (hopefully) sensible: it's a lot easier to learn something when you see how it fits into a larger pattern.

One of the Iron Gaming Chef restrictions I would like to see for next year would be, "No reading is required to learn the rules."

[komradebob]

I would actually point to this LARP scenario, called Trick or Treat, by ( I believe) Mike Young.

This scenario, as well as several of the other free LARPs at the same site, pretty much hits what I think a game should be in order to introduce new players to rpg concepts.

I think that designers sometimes forget just how very different rpgs are from most people's game playing experience. Many concepts that roleplayers take for granted as baseline are actually startlingly advanced (or at least very different) concepts for many people, especially adults.

Specifically:
GameMaster:
With the exception of referees in sports or the banker in Monopoly, I can't think of anything most people would have come in contact with that is even vaquely similar to the traditional role of a GM in a role playing game.

Character Generation:
Frankly, character generation is a fairly advanced concept. I'm still shocked that games are regularly designed in a such a way that chargen is one of the first items in the process. I personally think that chargen could be considered a very optional rule subset.

Hidden Knowledge:
With the exception of some sort of deductive game, like Clue or Concentration, how likely are people to have encountered any games that have serious amounts of hidden knowledge? Further, even games like Trivial Pursuit that have hidden answers assume at some level that all players have some access to the secrets eventually. A traditional old tymie adventure module works on thoroughly hidden knowledge.

Competition:
This is an aspect that I associate more with adults. My experience is that by the time people are adults, the concept that game=competition is pretty well part of their thinking. Younger people, as I'm finding with my daughter, conceptualize game=play activity, with seperate mental categories for games which are competitive and games that are not. Apparently, a simple rephrase, such as calling something an activity rather than game may make a fairly big difference for adults. An rpg for introducing new players, especially adults, probably needs at minimum a clear point to play that participants are aware of. More player directed play or self defined goals are again fairly advanced concepts and outside of non-rper experience.

Lack of Termination Conditions:
RPGs often do not have clear cut termination conditions. This also flies in the face of most people's experience with games. In fact, the lack of termination conditions tends to be a big draw for roleplayers, but in my experience simply confuses non-rpers. Going along with this aspect of rpgs, is the lack of time limits written in to the rules. Board games often end within an hour, with a very short set up period. Longer boardgames, (Monopoly, Risk, Life) are often only played only occasionally. IME, many non-gamers consider these boardgames to be too long to bother with. Games that don't necessarily have those same kind of limitations ( like Poker, Craps, or Blackjack) often have end points defined by the individual players and have distinct cycles of play ( the hand in card games).

Reward/Recognition:
RPGs traditionally reward characters rather than players. This is a little like rewarding the top hat in Monopoly when someone wins. It's just odd. It also doesn't necessarily work well for one-shots. As a suggestion, I've been trying to hash out an idea for an "Academy Awards" style post-scenario rewards ceremony/discussion. I'm thinking of something with categories like "best characterization of a..", "funniest out-of-character comment", or whatever.

Physical Components:
RPGs, in moving away from their strong early connection to miniatures wargaming, have also moved away from physical components other than dice, character sheets, and books. I suspect that this, more than the idea of playing a character, throws off adults newly introduced to rping. I strongly suspect this fact informed the decision by WotC to emphasize the miniatures aspect of the current edition of D&D. In this regard, D&D actually does recommend itself as an entry point rpg despite rather lengthy and convoluted rules. Even a simple "race" style board tied to plot might go far towards easing players into roleplaying.

Anyway, those are my rambling thoughts,
Robert

[Bankuei]

Hi James,

I think, overall, there are many factors with the current trend of games that turn away casual players.

-Initial Investment to understand HOW to play, or rules + setting
-Initial Investment in terms of setup (time to create character & situation)
-Expectation of extended play, for several sessions
-Sessions that last 4-ish hours

Compare this to boardgames, or even collectible card games in terms of entry effort and initial commitment.

Chris