Roleplaying games for beginners that aren’t Dungeons & Dragons
Five games to get you into pretending to be someone else.
Two years ago I wrote an article explaining Dungeons & Dragons for those who’ve never played it, and now — in our post-Stranger Things world — there are more people interested in it than ever. But D&D isn’t the be-all and end-all of roleplaying games: there are so many from the last forty years, and many of them work great as a first roleplaying experience. (If you’re fuzzy on how roleplaying actually works, my D&D primer linked above explains the basics.)
Here are five games I’d suggest for beginners, each for different reasons. Some of them are little indie games you can pick up really cheap, or even for free! They’re aimed at adults, though most would also work with kids; if you want to play with younger kids though — say, under the age of 10 — I’d encourage you to look up some of the games specifically designed for that age group, like Hero Kids or No Thank You, Evil!.
All the games below are available as ebooks, but if you want a physical copy — something I prefer so it can be more easily passed around the table — be sure to look up your local hobby game shop and support them by buying it there. After all, you’re gonna need some dice for most of these, too. For ease of looking up more info, the game titles under each heading are linked to the publisher’s web site or store.
A brief note about learning to play: as with any game, I recommend one person volunteers to read through all the rules before you get together, rather than you reading through them for the first time together. That person should probably also take on the role of game master, if the game requires one.
Take turns telling tall tales
The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1998), James Wallis
Fantasy Flight Games ($24.95 USD print or various ebook formats)
In a nutshell: you all play pompous nobles, furnished with drink and challenged to tell tales of your preposterous adventures. Make it up — the more ridiculous the better! — but your friends can interrupt you to challenge the details of your story and keep things interesting with wagers and duels.
Likely you’ve heard of the Baron — the man so famous for telling lies that the psychiatric disorder of faking illness is named after him. The story of the real Baron is pretty fascinating, but it’s the stories of the fictional one — as depicted (more or less) in the brilliant Terry Gilliam film — that are emulated here.
The book is presented as written by the Baron himself, who often digresses to talk of his adventures, giving you loads of example stories to set the mood — it’s a genius conceit. But when summarised in the appendix, the rules fit on just two pages! There’s no preparation, and you don’t need anything to play besides coins, pen and paper.
Baron Munchausen is atypical among RPGs in that it is about literally telling stories, rather than collaboratively experiencing them through play, and it does require individuals to take turns in the spotlight, possibly making it a nightmare for those who fear public speaking. It has rules for competition (players vote for their favourite storyteller at the end), but those are easily ignored if you want lower stakes, and drinking is practically encouraged to get everyone relaxed. There’s also a tweaked version for younger players titled “My Uncle the Baron”, which makes the storytelling challenge a little easier.
For the most part it feels like a parlour game, but such distinctions aren’t really important; once you get into the spirit of the thing, you are absolutely playing a role just as much as if you had a bunch of character statistics and dice. As an introduction to pretending to be someone else, its hard to imagine anything simpler, easier to learn or more immediately fun.
Do silly voices while attempting silly things
Goblin Quest (2015), Grant Howitt
Rowan, Rook and Decard ($15 USD PDF)
In a nutshell: ready your best goblin voice as you play a group of these tiny, stupid and fragile footsoldiers in the armies of evil, left to your own devices in the camp and trying to achieve something daft before you get yourselves killed.
Grant Howitt makes brilliant games. I considered an entry for “literally any game by Grant Howitt”, but many – especially his free one-page games – assume a basic familiarity with roleplaying, so best to have a bit of experience before trying those. I still recommend checking out Honey Heist, We That Remain or…well, any of them really. (My favourite is probably The Witch is Dead, in which you play the familiars of a murdered witch who go on a quest for bloody revenge.)
But I digress. I recommend Goblin Quest because if you are at all familiar with the modern fantasy genre you will know that goblins are fun, stupid and expendable little creatures who generally exist to raid human settlements in large numbers and get killed by heroes on one of their very first adventures. And now, you get to play them and work out what kind of ridiculous nonsense they get up to when wandering around the encampment of evil while most of the actual monsters are off making war.
The camp itself is a wonderful creation that drips with Howitt’s signature wry, weird humour: the evil wizards in charge are tentacled monstrosities hiding behind robes and beards, while the bugbears who run the inn are horse-faced street hustlers and the hobgoblins who do all the admin are proudly uptight, having been kicked out of the faerie realm for being too boring. In amongst all this, your troop of tiny green idiots — each player gets their own clutch of five related goblins — will come up with a “quest” to make their mark on the history of goblinkind, armed with something as majestic as a frying pan or a stick. You map out a terrible plan, and then roleplay out your success or failure, definitely losing a few goblins to cartoonish, violent misadventure along the way, and hoping you can achieve your goals before you run out.
If that sounds fun but this kind of fantasy isn’t your bag, don’t sweat it — the book contains no less than seven sets of alternative rules for playing similar games of beating the odds as everything from Inigo Montoya-esque sword fighters out for revenge, to multiple versions of Sean Bean trying to make it to the end of a movie alive. There’s even (with very different rules) a game of Regency Ladies (and Gentlemen) trying to find the right match. I recommend playing the original goblins version to get the hang of the rules before trying the alternate versions.
You’ve probably figured out by now if this is something you want to try, but like many of the other games here it’s designed to play out an entire story over a few hours, and that story is guaranteed to be very, very silly and one of the best evenings in money can buy. You won’t need anything except some pencils, some regular six-sided dice, and your best stupid goblin voice. You don’t need a Game Master, but having one is probably best especially for your first time. Unlike some of the the other titles here it has a good, brief introduction to roleplaying section which will help you get going.
Live a Cohen brothers movie in under three hours
Fiasco (2009), Jason Morningstar
Bully Pulpit Games; $25 USD print + PDF, $12 USD PDF only
In a nutshell: use dice and lists of suggestions to set up a web of connected characters, then take turns setting up and ending scenes to create a collaborative, cinematic story about the worst of human nature. Halfway through, the dice make sure everything goes to hell, and at the end they tell you just how screwed your character got.
Thanks to deservedly good press and some famous fans, Fiasco has become the most famous of the “story game” style RPGs — games that explicitly focus on collaborative storytelling. You still play a character, but the building blocks are the relationships between those characters, which you choose first; you work out who you are after you know how you’re connected to everyone else. As you take turns around the table, each player gets their shot at deciding where the story will go next, playing out scenes as though in movie, but one of the best features of the game is that you only ever get to decide what your scene is about, or how it ends — never both. This makes sure the story is told in a way that makes everyone feel like they own it.
Like Baron Munchausen, there’s no “game master” player who is in charge or who drives the story — everyone has equal say. Unlike Munchausen, Fiasco requires a bucket of dice; they’re regular six-sided ones, but you need four per player, and you need them in two colours. They don’t decide your success or failure — the players decide that — but limit your choices to speed things up, and provide some randomness when everything goes to shit. Which it will, because that’s what Fiasco is all about.
(A quick update from August 2019: the Bully Pulpit team are Kickstarting a revised Fiasco that swaps the dice out for cards and includes everything you need to play in a new boxed edition, so it might be worth watching out for that.)
Like many of the best story games, Fiasco focusses on telling one kind of story really well, and in this case it’s stories with the feel of Fargo, A Simple Plan, Burn After Reading or maybe an episode of Archer. These are stories where the protagonists are probably terrible people, or at the very least make terrible decisions. It’s a mood and a tone rather than a genre, and there are dozens of “playsets” — lists of relationships, objects, places and desires — available for free online which allow you to tell Fiasco style stories in just about any setting you can imagine, from backstage in a Broadway theatre to an Antarctic research station. These are one of the best things about the game — you don’t have to make things up whole cloth, everyone gets to pick from a list. If you like the main films referenced as inspiration above, I recommend trying the “Main Street” playset from the rule book for your first game.
Everything you need in 16 pages, for free
Lady Blackbird (2009), John Harper
One Seven Design; free PDF download
In a nutshell: you play the passengers and crew of the smuggler skyship The Owl — including Lady Blackbird herself, who is fleeing an arranged marriage. Roll dice to see if you can overcome challenges posed by the Game Master as you try to get Lady Blackbird to her rendezvous with her lover — or fight amongst yourselves to sell her out to the many forces who want to capture her.
In most respects, Lady Blackbird is a traditional tabletop RPG: it has a Game Master who takes on the roles of the antagonists and supporting characters, and sets up challenges for other players; the players are in control of their own protagonist characters; and players roll dice when attempting to overcome obstacles. But the rules are elegant and simple, the characters pre-generated so you can pick it up and play straight away, and the setting at once beautifully evocative and almost a blank slate. You might not already be familiar with the world of Lady Blackbird or steampunk space fantasy, but that doesn’t matter because you get to define that world: what can a skyship do? You decide! Where do goblins come from? Up to the person playing the goblin pilot! Does it hurt to do magic? Describe it when you cast a spell! And so on.
All this stuff is no less accessible than Dungeons & Dragons, and a lot quicker to read. As usual, the Game Master should read through the whole game first, and it’s fair to say this is a game best suited to a group who enjoy making stuff up as they go along. That’s wonderful for the right group, but could be daunting for some players; if you are the GM, make sure everyone understands there are no wrong answers and you’re all there to help each other! In any case, you’re not starting from scratch — the sketch of the Wild Blue is brief but very evocative and leans on a tradition of swashbuckling fantasy (watching or reading Neil Gaiman’s Stardust would be excellent inspiration), and the rules are so short and sweet that they won’t get in the way of telling a great story together. And all this in 16 pages — which includes two versions of rule sheets for each character!
One caveat: like Fiasco, you will need a bucket of six-sided dice (at least 10 per player ideally), but since many indie games now run with this approach that’s probably not a bad investment anyway, especially since you get the rest of the game for free.
Action and excitement in any world you like
Fate Accelerated Edition (2014), Clark Valentine, Leonard Balsera, Fred Hicks, Mike Olson & Amanda Valentine
Evil Hat Productions; pay what you like PDF (or book + PDF for $5+)
In a nutshell: choose your favourite world of adventure from literature, film or television — or invent your own — and create your own heroes by writing short phrases describing them to take them on adventures in a game where everyone contributes to the story.
Fate is a “generic” roleplaying system, but I use those inverted commas because while it doesn’t come with a set world or character types, it does have a specific style in mind: dramatic tales of characters who are competent and proactive. Fate Accelerated Edition (FAE) takes out a little of the flexibility and customisability from the full version to fit the whole package into 40ish pages, and it really, really works. From the get go it promotes a collaborative form of storytelling, encouraging you to start by coming up with the world you want to play in together.
Fate’s big contribution to roleplaying games was the idea of “aspects”: short phrases that sum up a character and which can be invoked to both help and hinder them. So while there are some numbers and dice involved in Fate, the most important thing about your character will be their high concept, which you might write as “Last in line to the throne of Frostvale”, “Detective nearing retirement who takes the weird cases”, or “Enchantment Specialist of Hippogriff House”. You can already get a sense of those characters, can’t you?
You’ll also have an aspect that represents how you always get in trouble (like “Gotta Look Out For My Little Brother” or “Can’t Resist Slinging A Good Insult”), and one or more others representing things your character knows, their relationships to others and so on. But you don’t have to think of them all straight away — Fate makes it easy to define a few things about your character, and add in more details later. This also extends to the world in which you play, as you can use your aspects and expendable “Fate points” to influence bits of the story. This means that although FAE does require a game master to play as the world and its antagonists, they don’t have to shoulder the burden of deciding how the world works all on their own.
All the statistics for your character are boiled down to “Approaches”. These represent how your character solves problems, so you can decide whether they’re good at being careful, forceful, sneaky, quick, clever or flashy. This is a genius solution because no matter what genre you’re in, those choices can cover all kinds of characters. And, when you act, there are only four things you can be doing — attacking, defending, overcoming an obstacle, or creating an advantage. Those actions have standard rules which apply in all situations, and a two-page spread summarising all the rules you can refer to during play.
Unlike most of the other games in this list, Fate Accelerated Edition could absolutely support an ongoing campaign, where players meet regularly and tell a longer story in an episodic format, like a television series. It’s also very compatible with the full version of Fate, these days known as Fate Core, so if your group decides you want to get a bit more complicated, you can always upgrade if you want to and you’ll already know the most important rules. Plus there are games and worlds already out there that use Fate that are ready made for you, from the pulp sci-fi action of Atomic Robo to the gritty, magical pulp detective Dresden Files and many original settings as well.
If there’s any downside to FAE, it’s probably that it uses Fate dice — special six-sided dice marked with pluses, minuses and blanks. You can use regular ones but honestly, considering how cheap the game itself is, investing in a single set to share among the players is definitely work it if you can find them (it’s much easier than interpreting regular dice for Fate). FAE is written specifically with first time players in mind, so there are examples and suggestions scattered throughout the book.
…and many more.
While I think these games are especially good for first timers, to be honest most roleplaying games aren’t horribly complex – and certainly no harder to learn than Dungeons & Dragons. If you’re considering playing one, I’d encourage you to search one out that tells the kind of story you enjoy — whether that’s one based on a fictional world you love (there are excellent games for Doctor Who, Star Trek and Lord of the Rings for example), or a genre or style of fiction that appeals – and just give it a read. There are plenty of forums online where you can search for answers if you have questions, but as most good RPGs will tell you, the “golden rule” is that having fun is more important than following the rules anyway.
So get out there, find a game that suits your interests, and give it a go! And if you do try roleplaying for the first time, I’d love to hear which game you chose, and how it worked for you.
