Comments on: Explaining Dungeons & Dragons

By: starwind1985

starwind1985 — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:55:25 +0000

i always describe d&d to those unfamiliar with it as a videogame played with dice and miniatures instead of a controler

By: Pingwin

Pingwin — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:28:16 +0000

We (gameclub) used to explain it the other way around. Its a game where you pretend to be someone else who is somewhere else and you decide what he will do. “You are standing in a corridor, there are two doors and there is a crate in the corner. What do you do?”

The ‘what do you do?’ is for me still the core of an RPG, not the dice that we use to see if we get to do what we want or that we fail :)

By: Dudemonkey

Dudemonkey — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 14:28:01 +0000

Interestingly, this is an amazing technique for onboarding males, but would probably fall flat with women. Feminist literature aside, men and women think in fundamentally different ways and have different things that they look for in entertainment.

My girlfriend recently ran an experiment where she had a guy do one website design and she did another. Both were good although hers was a little more professional (because she IS a professional). In a blind survey (ie, she basically asked each person to pick one design that they preferred with no background about the designer), men overwhelmingly picked the design done by a guy and the women overwhelmingly picked her design.

The point is that, especially in creative endeavors, men and women have very different buttons that get them to respond. When I explained D&D to her, she eschewed the competitive, violent aspect of it but was very interested in character building and storytelling.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 18:56:51 +0000

One thing that I found really effective in another game system was to have a single sheet of paper.

On the front side, put down the character’s name and background. Talk about what the character’s “job” or role in the party.

Let the new players take a look at all the characters and pick out the one they want.

Then, when everyone has a character, have them flip over the character sheet to a simplified set of the “rulesy” stuff like attributes, skills, feats, etc…

Very effective since people pick the character they want to play before they get lost in the rules.

By: megascorcher

megascorcher — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 03:55:17 +0000

I remember, before I played my first session, I felt the “Example of play” paragraph of the Dungeon Master’s Guide had given me a good idea of how the game worked. Although, I had already heard of the game before I read it. The times I’ve had to introduce someone completely uninitiated to how the game works, I have always included a basic explanation of the game’s storytelling aspect, and how the DM controls the whole world around the players, and it seemed to work on most of them. I remember at least two who actually tried a game after it.

But yes, if you’re going to explain the game very quickly to someone who haven’t heard anything about it before (which doesn’t seem to be many, by my experience) your description is good, but it is also like it assumes that the one you’re explaining to doesn’t even have any idea of what a roleplaying game is.