Tangentially, I think a lot of people don’t know what’s fun about GMing.
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I also think a lot of people don’t have a creative bone in their bodies. Thus, they can’t have any good RPG experience until they learn. Having a GM who put in a lot of work will give them a great experience of someone telling them a story. They might call it a role playing experience, but it wasn’t.
There’s also the important step of picking an RPG system that works for you for “just making shit up”.
I am failing to see how a GM having well prepared materials to describe and inform a world and characters in it to interact with, and the PCs interacting with that world, is not roleplaying.
Imagine that I’m playing Kingdom Hearts, and I’m pretending to be Sora, but I’m just playing the exact story as it happens. Is that a role-playing experience?
No but that’s also not what I’m talking about. So in Kingdom Hearts you’re Sora and you go and talk to Goofy and Goofy says Oh hey go kill the heartless or whatever the fuck KH is about and you go and beat up the Heartless and get XP and then Donald is like Ok go do thus and such and blah blah blah. And in between there’s cutscenes and you can’t do anything outside that. Maybe you have some dialog choices that change the ending of the game or something but its all limited.
What I am talking about is that you have a world with a problem and give hooks to introduce the players to that problem and give them an opportunity to solve it through interaction with that world and its inhabitants. As you go they might miss things, or solve the problem in an unexpected way, or do something else completely unexpected that you have to account for - you expect them to kill all the trolls but instead they convince the trolls to stop raiding the village, how does that affect the overarching situation?
This is really just the sandbox vs railroad argument when the answer is an eight lane highway. You can take detours and maneuver around obstacles by switching lanes but you’re still going generally toward Toledo. Sandboxes suck because PCs tend to ignore the other kids and build their own sandcastle in the corner or kick over the other kid’s sandcastle for laughs.
I think Clinton’s comment about improv is probably the big key. I know that the longer I’ve gone the more I have defaulted to games where I can’t plan out the story and have to make it up on the fly.
I’ll admit, sometimes it includes brainfarts like forgetting the word cadeusus and losing the table for five minutes.
And to counter Scott’s comment, what I’ve found is that good players are harder to find than a GM. The more improvised a game is, the more weight there is on the players. I can see hiring a professional to walk you through an interactive story.
It’s just more exhausting running an all improv game.
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All of this. If your players are weak roleplayers the DM needs to put a lot of work into the game. There’s nothing wrong with highly DM-controlled games, it’s probably what most casual players expect, and unfortunately it’s a very hard skill to suddenly learn if you want to switch to something other than d20/shadowrun/w40krpg
I was thinking about this, It’s more like a highway with the occasional rest stop that resembles a sandbox.
Most of the time you’re traveling along the GM’s arc, but occasionally there’s a detour that’s less about the metaplot and more about individual character growth.
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Wow, this looks really spice:
TL;DR: Voight-Kampff test IRL
My mom’s friend has a daughter (12 years old) who’s really into DnD. What game should we get her to segue her into other RPGs?
It probably would be best to approach it through what interest her, in level of genre and style, but also does she have interest towards other games. I feel that if one plays D&D then they are totally capable of playing almost any rpg, at least when it comes to complexity of rules.
What genres does she like?
Burning Wheel is a much more teachable, more character driven fantasy rpg
Anything powered by Apocalypse Engine is also very approachable
Im heading out for the day but when i gret back i can upload/recommend a bunch of smaller rpgs (20-30 pages or less) that have a much stronger focus on drama rather than just simulating everything a la DnD.
+1 to the Powered by the Apocalypse suggestion.
Also: Fate Core/Fate Accelerated. Benefit here is that they have a ton of Pay-What-You-Want mini-supplements for different and very specific settings.
I agree with most of the suggestions so far and will just add a list with options based on interest.
- Torchbearer/ Mouse Guard - for keeping it thematically similar while transitioning from D&D
- Monster of the Week - for contemporary fantasy
- Paranoia - I largely likely this to teach people to be cool with death but can often lead to fun wackiness
- King Arthur Pendragon - for a knight simulator
- Dread - for horror or a neat alternative to dice
- Masks - for teen superhero teams (though I’m less fond of most superhero RPGs and someone else could have a better recommendation here)
- The Strange - for multiverse storytelling
- Star Trek Adventures - for fans of Star Trek and a competent game in that universe
- Our Last Best Hope - for last ditch effort to save the world (think Sunshine or The Wandering Earth)
- Fiasco - for a botched caper or something not freeform and GM-less
- 1001 Nights - for dealing with social hierarchy and story within a story concepts. Also, this is a great one for promoting player participation, even when their characters are not in the scene.
- Tales From the Loop - 1980’s kid focused fantasy (think Stranger Things)
- FreeMarket - for a game that actually incorporates sci-fi into the gameplay or people excited by the phrase “cannibal cookbook”
- Kagegami High - for fans of magical girls AND Welcome to Night Vale-esque worlds
- Mutant: Year Zero - for a post apocalypse game that isn’t Apocalypse World
That’s about all my brain can think of at 5:30 AM. I may update when more awake.
I think my new suggestion when people ask this kind of question is Dungeon World. It’s still dungeons, still fantasy adventure, but way way way better rules. It’s also not nearly as crunchy or burdensome to learn as Torchbearer. Open their eyes to the possibility of completely fundamentally different set of mechanics for a tabletop RPG first. Then after their eyes are open, you can escape the dungeon and the dragon.
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I really really don’t understand the hate for DnD. Its not hard and doesn’t get in the way of story and in fact can contribute to the story. I have taught half a dozen people the basics of 5e in a few hours and kept great campaigns going for years and had excellent storytelling result from mechanical functions. Its horsehit. There’s nothing wrong with DnD but these days everyone keeps going “Ugh how do we get away from DnD? What’s something better than DnD?” There are other fun systems but DnD is getting unfairly shit on all over the place.
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I just don’t understand people who hate on quake. I’ve played quake and had so many good times with it at lab parties over the years. Why play any other fps ever?
Whether d&d, whatever edition, is good or bad doesn’t matter. It is fucked up that one single game dominates an entire medium. Just like it would be fucked if 99% of board gaming was Monopoly, or 99% of video gaming was Super Mario Bros. And only a few extra nerdy niche people ever played anything else.
Stop playing the same fucking game over and over.
I didn’t say that I don’t understand why people play other games, I even said that other games are fun and interesting. What I don’t get is why people are dumping so hard on DnD when there’s nothing wrong with it. It just seems like dumping on the popular thing hipsterism.