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Saturday, April 4, 2020

Is it hard to get into RPGs? (Vox article reaction)

One of my gamers found this article and forwarded it to me:

Beyond Dungeons & Dragons: A guide to the vast, exciting world of tabletop RPGs

You can read it or skim it if you like.

Many RPGs have a steep learning curve, and the medium itself isn’t always the most user-friendly. Dungeons & Dragons is a fun game, but to get the most out of it, you need to have at least a few people at the table who really know what they’re doing and understand the rulebook backwards and forwards. That level of preparation often intimidates newcomers.

I'll just say this. No, you really don't. You can learn these things by yourself. Starter sets are out there, cheap, and easy to find.

And yeah, it helps to have people who know how to play. You don't really need much besides either a starter set or a friend who plays.

So, back in the day, what we did was find friends who play these games - which isn't hard, really, if you ask your circle - and then just start playing whatever game.

I was 9 when I started playing D&D and AD&D. And adults need a starter game? I just don't buy it.

If you want to get into a game, just find people playing it. How hard is that nowadays?

I don't know . . . it just seems like making a mountain out of a molehill here.

13 comments:

  1. I agree with you for true of simple games like D&D for sure, but I do think there are systems, sadly like GURPS, that have so many options presented at once that it intimidates and confuses more than ot informs. Some of the worked examples help eith this, but GURPS ATES, GURPS Action, GURPS Monster Hunters, and GURPS DF don't seem to be the natural first point of contact for newbies. Basic Set seems to be, and with a title like that, it makes sense to be.


    I guess that's why SJG is trying the DF RPG thing, but without any real metrics, its hard to tell if it's working at all. Also, never having seen a copy in the wild (not on SJG's website next to all of the other GURPS books), I don't know if it really gets presented in way that makes it seem like its own thing at a glance - i.e., just a glance and not reading an entire paragraph description about a the product after clicking a button or picking up and opening a book, which I'm not sure you can do with the physical box set anyway. Basically, I'm not sure to what extent DFRPG is marketed in a way to actually look like a stand-alone product and not another GURPS product.

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    1. I don't even know if starter sets like the DFRPG really "work" outside of people deciding to try it and then finding them. But my perception might be skewed - I always preferred shopping by mail order and then online, so I only have what I chose ahead of time to get in to rather than something I stumbled across in a store.

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    2. My firends in highschool and I had kind of the opposite experience, but that was before the internet really existed. Someone would be at a hobby store and stumble on something and if it looked cool, get the core book to try to run a game. Not all of these were very simple, but that just came with the territory back then. So I can empathize eith the idea that some games seem complicated.

      That said, there are a lot of games now that aren't. I think DnD 5e falls in that category for sure. So does GURPS Lite, but that's not a shelf product and GURPS carries a lot of unfair baggage and some unfortunate layout in the core books. I wish there was a way to shed that, but I don't see how at this point on time.

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  2. It's Vox... Vox is a garbage publication... and that's as far as the consideration needs to go.

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    1. Note to other readers: this is a very harsh and, as you'll note, completely unsupported opinion. My own experience of Vox is that:
      1. Their overall content is well-researched, informative, and insightful.
      2. Their videos lean more toward the entertainment side and thus are more prone to simplification, but are still high-quality work in general.
      3. No comment on the current context. But in the past, every single time I've seen someone launch an ad hominem style attack against Vox as a whole while failing to discuss even a single actual fact or idea of the topic in question, it's been because they view Vox's reporting as politically inconvenient. Vox does its best to tell the truth and discuss facts, which in the current political climate makes it a necessary target for attack from certain kinds of political actors who e.g. want to ignore the truth about climate change, or gun violence, or health care, etc.

      TL,DR: IMO Vox is not "garbage" and in fact is one of the better sources for actual news analysis... but don't just take anybody's word about it one way or the other; go ahead and read a few articles on the site yourself!

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  3. Agreed. The more material you have for a game (not just D&D), and the more a player wants to explore can increase the complexity. Almost none of us start at that point though, and there are fast and easy ways to get people into a game. As long as the GM knows the rules, (and preferably one player) things will work out.
    I like that the Vox article does mention some sources to help people learn more.

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  4. "Understand the rulebook backwards and forwards" is a huge exaggeration. But you probably do need someone who understands the core system (d20 + mods vs target number) and can explain how to make a character. I think character generation is the biggest hurdle for most RPGs.

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    1. You can get all of that from a Youtube video, though, in a few minutes of searching and watching. It's not a weird book that you need someone to with access to the cipher to decrypt anymore.

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    2. "anymore"

      But did we even need them back then? I mean I read, understood, and 'deciphered' the old Rolemaster Middle-earth Role Playing game on my own when I was 11 just by sitting down and reading through it one morning while waiting for the group to wake up (we did multi-day sleep-over gaming session back in the day).

      And fer dang sure I wasn't no big city lawyer back then...

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  5. I was like 12 and knew nothing about RPGs when I played my first game. I don't think that was uncommon back in the early 80s, I doubt things are all that different now.

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    1. I think it's just a lot easier to find fellow gamers. Especially now that "geek" hobbies aren't considered social suicide anymore, and we have all of these peer-to-peer connections thanks to social networking. 1/2 of my current gaming group is involved thanks to friend-of-a-friend online connection or just straight up "I read your blog." And that's with me not even trying to get players. Imagine if someone, you know, just tried to find someone to game with online. :)

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  6. How difficult D&D is to approach seems like one of those things that depends entirely on your tolerance for what boils down to house rules. Someone worried about "getting it right" is definitely going to balk at the array of little fiddly modifiers found in even the simplest versions of D&D, where a kid (or adult!) happy to simply play the version of D&D that exists in their own head will just do whatever seems to work, even if it means rewriting, throwing out, or inventing rules wholesale.

    The underlying point remains valid, too: there truly exist people who look at a D&D rulebook and think to themselves "I can't possibly play this without someone to guide me who knows all this stuff really well," and there truly exist other systems that are lighter, more intuitive, and (for certain types of players) better introductions into this whole TTRPG thing.

    Finally, your post sort of glosses over the very next paragraph! They went out of their way to explicitly say "But you know what? I’ve had many friends get into RPGs via D&D, so maybe my reluctance is misplaced...." They're aware that their perception won't be the same for everyone and go out of their way to try and acknowledge this.

    I feel you, and I agree that the phrasing could have been better or even pointed out that freewheeling house-ruled play is also not just possible but normal, but the way this post here glosses over nuance, focuses on a single line, and seems to hold the author responsible for an extant perception that they're reporting on feels a bit... click-baitey? Argument-baitey? It would be silly of me to ask you to write a whole thesis paper with in-depth commentary, but at least acknowledging their caveat would feel more fair.

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    1. I don't agree that I'm holding the author responsible for reporting on a perception. I think I'm holding the author responsible for espousing that perception as correct, even if there are later caveats applied to it. I don't see much of a "a lot of people feel like you need" or "some people think" but rather "you need." I don't agree you need what the authors says you need, and I don't really think you need starter, lighter games to get into the hobby especially in this day and age.

      I'd rather point people to this article:
      Satine Phoenix Has Advice For New D&D Players

      . . . than to the Vox article. I think it has more directly, practically useful advice for getting into RPG gaming.

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