RPG questions thread for newbies

For years I have wanted to start role playing on a regular basis but it always seemed to fall through. I have played some great campaigns of Palladium and Pathfinder but never played these games long enough to get really comfortable with all of the rules and details of the game. With the release of D&D 5th edition I figured this was a great jumping on point and have purchased the Player's manual and beginner box. I've been learning a lot but I have questions all of the time. I figured since this site has a lot of veteran role players it would be a good place to start a thread so I and other people looking into rpgs could ask questions and get some good feedback and answers.

My questions today: My wife and I just moved about an hour away from Utah county where we lived for 6 years, so we don't know anyone in our new area. My wife is really interested in playing but I would like to have more than one character in a party. Could it work for my wife to have a couple different characters that she could play at the same time? I've never really heard of anyone doing this so I was just curious. Thanks for the help in advance.

Oh yeah. It works fine. We were short on players so we each ran two D&D characters for several years. Our DM ran an NPC cleric as well so we had a well rounded group of 5. The variety is actually amusing. Running more than two is a bit too much for me though.

Dungeon Crawl Classics, which is really a DnD variant, has players using 4 level 0 characters for their first adventure. Running multiple characters isn't an issue if the player is cool with it.

Thanks, I feel like that gives us a little bit more freedom for right now.

Last night my wife and I went through a quick skirmish with goblins with D&D 5th ed. I have some questions about character stats that I'm not sure where they come from. If you are familiar with 5th edition or D&D in general, I could use some of your wisdom.

-There is a box for an attack bonus for eaach weapon you list on the character sheet. How do I figure out what a weapon's attack bonus is?

-Right after that there is a space for the weapon's dice/damage type. On the pre-made characters they have a bonus added to the dice damage the weapon does. For example for a shortsword is 1d6+2. The player's mannual only lists the shortword as 1d6, where did the +2 come from? How do I figure out the number that gets added to the damage?

-When making an attack you roll the 20 sided die, add the ability modifer and then add the weapons attack bonus on top of that to see if it equals or exceeds the creatures armor class, correct? And then you do the dice roll for the damage?

-How do I figure out what a chracter's passive wisdom is?

Please help!, thank you.

1. A weapons attack bonus is your STR bonus (or can use your DEX bonus if the weapon is a Finesse weapon- rapier). You also get your proficiency bonus to attack rolls. So a fighter with STR 14 (+2) and proficient in martial weapons would attack with a short sword and +4 and damage at +2.

2. The +2 was most likely from the STR bonus

3. Yes, but it has to exceed the creatures AC to hit. Then roll for damage and apply STR bonuses

4. Its "Passive Perception" which I believe is 10 + WIS bonus

Okay team. As I have been reporting in the RPG gaming thread, my wife and I have been playing through the D&D 5th starter set adventure. It's been a blast and we are excited to finish this adventure and continue on with this system. I have some limited experience with a few other systems but 5th edition is the one that we have jumped into and have become dedicated to. With this new excitement with playing RPGs there's been other games that I've been wanting to check out and get into but have some questions about.

Pathfinder/D&D 3.5 I have played some Pathfinder before but never became comfortable with it and couldn't tell you how the system differs from D&D 5th except that there's a lot more stuff you add for combat and checks etc. What are some of the pros and cons of playing this system? What kinds players would this game appeal to the most?

Spirit of the Century Right now this game is interesting me the most. I love pulp adventure stuff and have heard really great things about this game. Has anyone here played it and what were your thoughts? I think it runs on the Fate core system which I know nothing about. Just wondering if it's worth all of the hype it gets.

Mutants and Masterminds I'm really interested in playing a superhero game. Is there a consensus that this is the best one or one of the better ones? What other ones are out there that are worth checking out?

AD&D 2nd Edition This is classic. Is it still prevalent and does it still hold up?

Traveller I definitely want to play a sci-fi game. This is the one that has caught my interest the most with what little I know about it. What are the pros and cons to this one? I know there's some popular Star Wars games. Would you recommend any of those instead?

Thanks in advance for the help. If anyone has other recommendations for rpgs they love, please don't hesitate to let me know about them.

I have adopted the Spirit of the Century GMing concepts and applied them to my Savage Worlds' Rippers campaign for a more episodic/serial feel. I really like the emphasis that is placed on pacing and constantly keeping the time ticking on the players. It has also helped me trim my adventure plans to a session or two max so that the players end up feeling like they accomplished something. I can still fit the episodes into an overarching plotline, but the players tend to walk away from the sessions more satisfied. You mileage will vary.

TL;DR: No matter what system you use, read the SotC book for the GMing bits alone.

I cut my teeth on the OD&D white box in 1978, and played AD&D all through high school. AD&D is great for nostalgia, but in retrospect it's a mess, and there are many other systems to choose from now that are just more fun to play.

Pathfinder is not one of them. I would avoid Pathfinder like the plague unless your primary joy from playing RPGs is min-maxing. All of the complexity gets in the way of actually playing the game. I ran a campaign for a year and a half and ended up loathing it. D&D 5E is excellent if you like that level of complexity, so you've started in a good place. DCC RPG is awesome for old-school gonzo high-fatality hijinks. And Dungeon World is a great fusion of old school and modern RPG design that has changed my world. I run everything Dungeon World style these days, regardless of genre, and have written a few things for it myself.

You're right, Spirit of the Century is a Fate game, although it preceded the Fate system core rules release by a number of years. If you're interested in Fate, Fate Acclerated is a simplified and accessible intro to the way the system works. A lot of people love Fate, but for some reason a lot of the terminology bothers me, and I don't like all of the meta-discussion that happens during play. I've only dabbled, though, so my opinion is not super informed -- I just never felt like going back after a couple of plays.

M&M is fun, but you have to be in the mood for rolling powers totally at random (although that might have changed for the latest edition). The superhero RPGs I've heard the most positive things about over the past couple of years are Icons , Worlds in Peril , and the as-yet-unreleased Masks .

Traveller is a classic if you want hard sci-fi, but pretty dry. If you want hard sci-fi and end up liking the Fate system, Diaspora is a great option. The best old school sandox-style sci-fi RPG is Kevin Crawford's Stars Without Number , and the PDF is free! I hear great things about the Star Wars games that FFG has been putting out, but the price tag his been too high for my blood.

Oh yeah, and a couple of other suggestions for fantasy sub-genres you didn't ask about: Pendragon does an amazing job of capturing the feel of Arthurian mythos, and The One Ring does the same for Tolkien. Each of these reinforces the themes and atmosphere of their source material in their mechanics, with amazing results.

If you want to test the waters and see who you can draw into the fold, there's no better way to do it than Fiasco. It requires no setup, no GM and no preparation of any kind. It has no rolls, or skills or anything yet always ends up being a riot. I highly recommend it.

Seconding Eric's suggestion. I always have Fiasco on hand for one-shot RPG nights, especially if there are newbies present.

I would second the anti-recommendation for Pathfinder and D&D 3.5. One of my least favorite games. If you run the standard Pathfinder adventures, they assume that you are making highly optimized characters. If you pick stuff because it looks cool, your character will probably suck and the adventures will be virtually impossible without tons of GM fudging. To make it worse, there's a bunch of "traps" in character generation -- options that are terrible, but not obviously so. Ostensibly to rewards players who know the chargen system inside and out. I think that's really lame, especially considering that making characters is not actually playing the game.

SOTC I don't particularly like. The Fate system feels too loose and mechanically uninteresting to me. The system is designed around giving you "Fate Points" for playing your character, and then you can spend those FPs on introducing things into the narrative, giving yourself bonuses, or rerolling dice. My issue with it is that characters all feel the same mechanically; getting a +2 because you're fast is exactly the same as getting a +2 because your strong.

M&M I haven't played.

AD&D 2e I don't recommend. It's a grab-bag of barely-related mechanics thrown together with little rhyme or reason. If you want the old-school experience, play Basic Fantasy (free in PDF or at-cost in print), or Labyrinth Lord (a clone of B/X). DCC is also awesome. All three of them have fantastic support and great communities.

Traveller I've never played. The new Star Wars RPGs from Fantasy Flight is ... okay I guess. Crunchy, lots of character build options with loving discussion of every damn thing for nerd to nerd out over. The dice system is interesting. You assemble these wacky dice pools of custom dice, each die representing various things: skills, attributes, situational advantages or disadvantages, the strength of the opposition, etc. There's two axes of results you get: success <---> failure, and advantages <---> complications. So you might succeed but with a complication: you shoot the guy, but your blaster jams, for example. As Jason mentions, the game is really expensive, and you'll have to buy all these sets of custom dice that you'll never use outside of SW. Or you can pay $5 to buy FFG's dice-roller app. Personally I don't care about Star Wars any more; if the game had a different setting I would be more into it.

As mentioned, Fiasco is awesome.

Other games I like:

- Torchbearer. Dungeon crawling in the "fantasy fucking Vietnam" school of things, where by the time you make it out of the dungeon (if you make it out) you'll all have thousand-yard infravision stares and have PTSD over the horrors you saw and did when you were five hundred feet below the surface, completely lost, your only weapon a broken dagger, and the guttering light of your last torch reflecting in the dozens of eye clusters just outside the circle of light.... Anyway, great fun. Very crunchy system, but unlike Pathfinder, the crunch is all in play and not in chargen.

- Band of Bastards. This one is still in beta. The beta is free but not quite playable yet, although there is supposed to be an updated version dropping tomorrow that will contain the last bits needed to run a game. This is the game to run Black Company, The First Law, and other gritty, grimdark fantasy with. It has a crunchy combat system that works well as a sword fight simulator (the designers are into historical European martial arts and wanted it to feel like actually trying to murder each other with a longsword). The game is very player-driven -- players get to choose what they want XP for, so as GM it's your responsibility to put those things in their path and make their lives complicated.

- Blades in the Dark. In early release but available on DriveThruRPG right now. A fantasy heist game with really interesting mechanics to make heists fun instead of wasting two hours at the table as the players try to plan for every contingency. (Basically you pick one thing about your heist, like how you're going to try to get into the building, and then you start the heist. You can introduce your plan through flashbacks ["I bribed the guard to leave the back door unlocked"] that have varying mechanical costs depending on plausibility.) The game also has great downtime mechanics for what your crew does in between jobs.

- Mouse Guard. Now out in 2nd edition, it's similar to Torchbearer but not as grim or crunchy. It's still pretty crunchy though. Heroic mice with swords, based on the award-winning comics. I think the game is better than the comics.

I like FFG's Star Wars RPG quite a bit, though I haven't played it all that much. The dual axis of resolution already discussed is part of the reason, and though it does require some clever adjudication on the part of the GM, the focus is on narrative so as long as the results are loosely (at first, anyway) calibrated with norms established in the books and as long as people are having fun, it should be OK. The expense comes in two basic forms: first, the core rules are split into three volumes, with the first two (Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion) being different mostly in setting and smaller things like starships and equipment. The main Force rules are in yet a third book, Force and Destiny. You either accept that or play something else. There are, in addition, adventure, setting, and character-specialization books that are not required but that some certainly want or will want, and they are $30-ish, albeit hardback, generally gorgeous, and reasonably well written. There are also beginner boxes for each "line," which gives you dice, a truncated but not (much) simplified rulebook, and an adventure, mainly, with pregenerated characters and maps. I've run the Edge one, and it's pretty decent if very linear. FFG also has follow-up PDF adventures to each of the beginner boxes that are free PDFs, and they tend to be about two to three times longer than the beginner set's.

Lordy, I haven't played Traveller in a while. I played a fair bit of MegaTraveller in the late 80s/early 90s, and I had a lot of the original edition, which we played some, but there are several editions since then. Travelller is definitely more toward the hard-SF end of the spectrum than the science fantasy of Star Wars. Though I think they toned this down, the most memorable part of Traveller--and probably the most notorious--was that a character could die during generation. OG Traveller character generation was really almost a game unto itself, and the reason characters died mid-creation was that they were often pretty advanced in years and underwent a lot of training, education, and experiences.