I was raised in a religious household in the 90s so of course things like D&D were haram. I even went to an evangelical college (that’s a whole post there), so I was never exposed to TTRPGs.
And it sucks, because from the little I know about them, I know I would have loved to play them.
But… how do they actually work? I think I have a very basic framework. I know you have one character you control/play as. You roll to… make things happen? Or they determine things that happen? I know there’s a game master who doesn’t just read a story out loud… they actually influence things?
I’m gonna eventually get into Disco Elysium and I feel like actually understanding TTRPGs would help. And there’s a game store near me that hosts games, I’d like to show and not be a total noob.
its when i get on my hands and knees and my bf uses me as a coffee table
i assure you its a completely platonic and transactional situation. he puts his coffee on me, i get a warm thing on my back.
It is improve comedy with gambling. It is mostly played by nerds but the game is too good for them
At a basic level, it’s cooperative story telling. Typically, the GM controls the environment and NPCs while the players each control a character that interact with the environment and NPCs.
This cooperative story telling at the extreme ends can be either a mechanically heavy dungeon crawl focusing on fights, or plot/dialogue heavy and (usually) mechanically light. You can emphasize player agency (sandbox) or deemphasized player agency (railroad) or anything in between.
Dice are typically used to randomize success or failure of a specific action, and to procedurally generate things (though there are ttrpgs that use things besides dice or have no randomization). Randomizing success or failure of an action is typically improved by the specific abilities of the characters or NPCs. The could include physical or mental capabilities, skills, magical powers etc.
Randomization for procedural generation isn’t necessary since everything can be intentionally designed, but can be fun. You can procedurally generate combat encounters, NPCs, treasure hoards, cities etc. Really anything.
As you can tell, there’s a lot of ways to play ttrpgs. Even just within d&d, I’ve seen a lot of variety with some groups very similar to mine, some interestingly different, and some playing in a way I would find unappealing.
Dunno if you’ve played video games before but most RPG games draw heavy influence from TTRPGs. You’ll have a set of attributes and skills, which improve over time. You can gain unique abilities that make you more powerful.
The only difference between an rpg game like New Vegas and a TTRPG is that in the TTRPG, you have to say you want to do something, and the adjudicating player (Game Master, Dungeon Master, Keeper of Secrets, etc etc) will tell you to roll a die to see if you succeed or fail, with modifiers added to the roll based on the applicable skill or attribute.
If you want to get into TTRPGs you can straight up show up to a game night and be a total noob, because everyone to ever play was one once.
If you want to get into TTRPGs you can straight up show up to a game night and be a total noob, because everyone to ever play was one once.
This is probably the best advice. If a group isn’t open to introducing new people to their hobby, they’re probably not going to be people you enjoy playing with/being around.
