[:thumbsup:]

Not much done with six? Then four would be even worse. Do you typically need many people for DnD to be worth it?

Meh, not really.

4-6 players (including the DM) is the best for tabletop RPGs. With less people, there isn't enough interaction to be interesting, and with more people, the amount of tabletalk and distractions can get overbearing. With players who are all complete noobs, including the DM, I would definitely not go over 6 total, just so the DM doesn't freak out trying to keep track of everything.

I've played very few large tabletop games that were enjoyable. Too often, with lots of players, the more boisterous personalities will take party leadership roles, and then the rest of the crew slowly become tools to further the party leader's agenda, and that get's old REAL fast.

I'd suggest, since you're all new to tabletop RPGs, start small, 3-4 players and one DM.

No, just the opposite. I don't DM parties of more than three people. It is extremely hard to actually get things accomplished in even a 6 hour time period with 5 or more. Add to that the probability of 6 people finding time to meet consistently to actually carry on a campaign instead of 2 rounds per year of, "okay everyone, roll up new guys," which is infinitesimal, and you face a quite real possibility of playing two games before the party starts drifting.

And if you're the DM? It is a decent challenge to manage three people, party bickering, item distribution, encounters, side talking to an appropriate, but not disruptive level. Doing that with more than4 players, for a brand new DM, is just giving yourself a world of trouble. If you are DMing you will be doing retarded amounts of work, and you also need to be able to think quickly to measure/meet the demands of the party.

If you don't care if your game gets dissolved after four or so sessions, and I've seen it happen so many times that it's depressing, and if you aren't worried about getting invested into your game, then by all means get as many as you'd like.



The best thing I like about three people games is that it gives each character a license to muticlass the @#%^ out of themselves. Most of them will be unique in the game, and certainly not made redundant. The more people in a game, the more people who can get excluded from tasks which their character isn't cut out for. If you have three, they are forced to improvise solutions and account for classes not in the party.

Also, cestin (for 3.5 anyway) Melee power tends to be inversely proportional with level. Magic tends to be directly proportional with level. If you're playing high levels, give your melee characters some nice magic items.

One more thing: don't break the rules until you know them, but after you know them, I like to start replacing them with better ones.

Edited, Nov 3rd 2009 8:00pm by Pensive

Pensive made good points. Also the fraction of time you spend playing is inversely related to the number of players. 6 party members means at least 5 people have to do something before it is your turn.

Paper works. There are also software resources.

This is what you will need.

Players need 4 things generally.
1. Dice.
2. Some sort of figurine. It can be a miniature, token, or even a nickel, but they need something to represent themselves spatially.
3. Character sheet. This keeps track of stats, level, and equipment and the like. Most everything about a character can be found here.
4. Power sheet. It's useful, especially when you are new an unfamiliar, for each player to have a quick reference to what all they can do. If I'm a wizard, then it's nice to see what spells I can use at any given moment.

The group as a whole needs a battlemat.
It can be a fancy store bought battlemat, or just a dry erase board laid flat. You need something large with grid lines to conduct combat on.

The DM needs lots of stuff.
It's hard to think of everything, because you need so very much, but here are a few things I can think of.
1. A combat rule book. The basic D&D book (player's handbook) has combat rules in them, and you will want to bookmark that section for quick reference. Players are going to be asking you specific questions like how to grab an enemy, or how much bonus they get for flanking, or if they get an opportunity attack. You won't know everything, so be prepared to look it up.
2. A combat log. It can be a piece of paper or an excel file on the laptop. You need some way to record what happens in combat. As a DM you can delegate certain responsibilities, but otherwise it is your duty to keep track of monster HP, to know whose turn it is, to keep track of effects with duration. Whenever something happens in combat, write it down.
3. Prepared list of characters, monster, or events that could possibly happen. If you players are heading to town they might want to purchase supplies, so have an NPC merchant ready and know what type of stuff he is going to sell. If your players are going to be ambushed by orcs, have the orcs stated out and their general tactics prepared before. Know where the story is generally going to go before you start a session, and be prepared for changes. You don't need exhaustive lists. You don't need to list everything an individual merchant sells, but something like jotting down "this guy only has weapons up to level 7" or "this guy is a weapon smith so he only sells weapons," will help you.

There is what is called a battlemat. You need some sort of grid to conduct combat on. If you've played gridded RTS games like FFT or Nippon Ichi games, think of it like that.

D&D can loosely be broken up into combat and story. Combat is the part of D&D for which there are a lot of rules. It's like playing most any RPG-RTS game, except instead of the computer calculating things for you, people do it. Combat is "I move 6 squares and attack the orc with my fireball for 17 damage and stunning him for one turn." Story is more free form. There aren't rules to story. Story is "I go to the tavern and regale the keep with my legendary tales. Then set off on a journey to the north on a quest for the legendary sword of Zanzibar."











For D&D the most basic information is found in the Player's Handbook, and because you are DMing, also in the Dungeon Master's Guide. Buy/download these before you play and read them. You will have to choose a version of D&D to play (just like FF5 has different rules than FF6, D&D 3.5 has different rules than D&D 4.0).

I strongly recommend D&D 4.0, the newest edition. It is by far the most friendly for new players, and in my opinion the most fun. The rules make sense and are highly standardized. There is no "I before E except after C," it's just "I before E, always."


Also, what do you play on? Are there maps, boards? Is it based on squares? Or am I completely missing the point, I know there's an element of made-up story - is it all made up, the only actual physical things are the pens and paper?

Is there some kind of starter kit that'd be good for us? There would probably be four, sometimes five players. Maybe six. What is a good version? I know there are new and old versions, and some olde time players don't like the newer ones.

if anyone could offer help, it would be greatly appreciated, or even just the link to the old DnD thread that was in here awhile ago.[/quote]

Character creation is something that'd be interesting to us - can you create custom classes? Custom spells? I bet this is all covered in the books, but I need to get around to downloading them, buying 'em would be too expensive I'd imagine. Or just more than I/we are willing to spend.

Pensive linked this in the last thread about DnD. How do I download just some of them? I don't think I want 3 GB of rulebooks, or need. Do I have to get it running in uTorrent before I can select the individual files I want?

Here is a brief overview.

Basically everything is custom created. It's set up for super heroes (marvel universe, after all) but it's not hard to adapt, if you spend a bit of time thinking of new things as "actions." There are no dice at all. There is no grid at all. There are no complicated turn dynamics at all. Everything you do is completed by allocating energy points which regenerate per turn (kinda like fatigue.) It's exceedingly newb friendly for both GM and players. It does suffer from having overpowered protagonists, but then again it was made as a superhero game. It lacks a bit in terms of cool magic items and cool devices. If you are good at making those up then you can surely shoehorn things like that in.

You get 40 points at creation, and buy the following with them

Intelligence
Strength
Agility
Speed
Durability
Hitpoints (equal to durability)
Energy (equal to 3x durability) You allocate these for combat

Job Traits: autoregen, spell resistance, damage reduction, energy resistance, natural armour bonus, might all be good examples of traits adapted for dnd.

9 potential "actions:" Actions are more like categories of actions than specific actions. A wizard might have "Evocation" as an action, which has a potential power of 1-9 (the number of which you bought at creation.) The number dictates the cap of points you can use per round, and you allocate energy during combat to actually utilize that potential; in effect, you decide how big the fireball will be, how strong the magic missile is, how much you heal, as long as you are within the cap. You can further specialize "actions" with sub-categories and get bonuses. The "Evocation" might have "Fire Magic" as a specialty, meaning you can get access to new things related to that, bonuses of circumstance, etc.

Actions are used for everything. If something you do is mundane, you don't bother rolling anything. If its not mundane, but you don't have a category on your sheet which pertains to it, then you can bruteforce it with one of your base stats at DM discretion.

The main difference between this system and typical DnD is that absolutely nothing is chance of the dice, because all you do is allocate resources. This has both pros and cons. The other huge difference is that you adapt extremely broad groups of abilities to specific situations, instead of adapting extremely specific spells or abilities to everything you run into.

Mininova and Pirate bay are fairly good.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5122199/Dungeons_and_Dragons_4th_Edition_through_August_2009 (more content)
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4361453/Dungeons__amp__Dragons_4th_Edition_25.08.2008_All (many redundancies, but has some extras)


Here is what you definitely need: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual.
The Player's Handbook has everything your players will need to play D&D. It sets out the basic classes, gives rules for combat, list items and equipment, explains leveling, etc. AS the DM you will want to read the Dungeon Master's Guide to give you an idea of how to DM. The Monster Manual will also gives you a list of pre stated monsters to work with so that you don't have to design all of them yourself from scratch.

Beyond that I think there are some other materiels you should download that are pretty core.
Players will like: Player's HandBook 2, Martial Power, Arcane Power, Divine Power, Adventure's vault, Adventurer's Vault 2.
The Player's Handbook 2 effectively doubles the number of classes players can pick from, giving them many more choices. Each of the Power books (martial, arcane, and divine) expands a set of classes, giving them more options, so more choices for players again. Adventuruer's Vault 1 and 2 give lists of items, giving more choices for equipment.

For you: Download an "Adventure" book. This is basically a small one session campaign planned out for you. It won't be very good, but it will give you a better idea of how to conduct an adventure as a DM.

Edited, Nov 4th 2009 3:05pm by Allegory

I'm trying to get the 4.0 version from Pirate Bay, but do I have to use Miro like they suggest? I've been getting the torrents, then running them in FrostWire but all three that I've tried get stuck at 'Locating Sources.'

Edited, Nov 5th 2009 6:22pm by CestinShaman

I dunno, but there's a tutorial on PB that says to use Miro, but I knew already that any torrenter can run a torrent. I'll kick up uTorrent and try them there.

Thanks for all the fishhelp.

I've been having difficulty connecting to them for about a week now.

Last time you played there were real dungeons and real dragons. ba-dum-pshh.

Well PB is up this morning and I got my torrent and figured it out. It works very nicely in uTorrent, (Already 2.5% done!) so I bet I'll be using it instead of FrostWire for torrents from now on. Now I just need to get dice, a playing board/map and some pieces. Heroscape figurines look like they will work really well, so I'm gonna just get those out and let people pick, and then find more in other games.