Transcript
All right man, you ready to play some D&D?
Are you talking about Dungeons and Dragons?
Yeah! D&D! You said you wanted to try it, today’s the day.
Yeah, I was just tryin to be trendy man.
You got anything better to do?
Well, I was gonna go on a –
On another singles hiking trip when you hate hiking? That doesn’t count, man. C’mon, I got three other players lined up, one of them’s bringing pizza! You wanna be like a wizard throwing some fireballs or you wanna be a badass warrior like The Hound in Game of Thrones?
Well, I do like Lord of the Rings, so I guess it’d be cool to like cast magic spells or whatever.
Awesome! Okay, just fill this out and we’ll start rolling some dice. I sent you a link.
Yep, got it. Is this like a uh … what is this, a tax form?
What’s better than a full, 100% usable, perfectly tuned, perfectly organized, perfectly designed OEM product? Well, if you’re me, the answer is … half of one.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we ignore the inevitable onslaught of the digital age and discuss things as if time were standing still. We’re going analog!
So you’ve got a new player or you’ve cleverly duped a bunch of your friends who’ve never played ttrpgs into playing some DnD. Or, you know, you’ve kidnapped some folks and forced them to roll some dice at crossbow point. Hey, whatever floats your boat, ain’t nobody here harshing your vibe.
However you’ve reached this point, nothing changes the fact that onboarding new customers is typically the most difficult thing for most commercial endeavors. So what can we tabletop gamers learn from slick salesmen and women and the retail and commercial service industries?
Maybe we can settle this right now. There’s a thing that we all know called opportunity cost.
One tip we can take from them is that our goal should be to make the process as smooth and speed bump-free as possible. And you do that by removing speed bumps. Duh.
Now if you just hand someone new to DnD or tabletop rpgs in general a stack of rule books, you’re probably just gonna freak them out. This is a situation that warrants the ol’ boiling a frog trick. You want them in the soup before they know they’re gonna be soup. I musta been drunk when I wrote this, I knew I was missing a bottle of Cynar. What? It’s got an artichoke on the bottle.
Basically, the less someone knows about what goes into making the soup, and the less they have to work to make the soup themselves, the less trouble they’re gonna have attending dinner.
Here’s what I’ve done in the past to introduce new players to the game as simply as possible. Via light conversation, I get a bead on what kinda character they might wanna play. I ask softball questions like:
“Do you like the idea of casting magic spells or stabbing guys with swords?”
“What character would you play if you were in the Lord of the Rings movies?”
“Do you like the idea of healing or protecting your fellow party members?”
“You wanna sneak through the shadows picking pockets or pop off with a bow like Robin Hood?”
I can’t believe I just said “pop off”.
Essentially I just want to find out what base class they gravitate towards – fighter, wizard, cleric, thief – without even mentioning the word “class”, I don’t bring up any of that minutia with them at all.
I will ask them if they’d like to be a human, a hobbit, an elf, or a dwarf and just sort of leave it at that, unless they ask further about other races. And that’s it. I just make sure we all agree on a day and time and I just let them be until then. Basically in their minds, I want them thinking they’re just coming to hangout for some beer and pretzels.
The point here is to do everything you can to not overwhelm them with too much information. I wanna alleviate as much work or even choices as possible. At this stage anyway. Remember, I’m talking about getting people into the game that have no inkling as to what DnD is like. And all we want is to get these folks to the table, which is the actual battle we’re fighting. We gotta think like used car salesmen here, just remove every conceivable obstacle you can think of. Offer to provide those pretzels and beer. Or energy drinks, or dark chocolate, or whatever they like – I don’t know you’re friends, you know them, just make sure the bribes accurate. And make sure wherever you play has access to a bathroom. That sounds dumb, but it’s a consideration that sometimes just doesn’t get considered because it sounds dumb.
Now, you only need a couple things to run a game of DnD. We need dice and we need players at a table. And those players need characters. There is one other thing you need but we’ll talk about that later. At this point, I know what everyone is gonna play, even if they don’t. On the day of the game, I run a very quick, like 30 minute session zero to setup their characters. And I start with this.
It’s a very simple half page character sheet. I print these out two to a page, cut them into half sheets and hand one to each player along with a cheap mechanical pencil.
Now I know some of you are yelling at me that I should just be sending new players to DnDBeyond, and hey, you might be right. But in a few real world instances, I’ve found that even DnD Beyond is a bit much for someone completely new to tabletop games, or in particular rpgs. So this is just what I’ve done in the past and it seemed to work pretty well. I also kinda don’t want them distracted by using their phones or tablets. I’d much rather have everyone hanging out in the same real world space, if you know what I mean. At least for this first session.
Remember, first impressions are … I don’t know, there’s some kind of saying about first impressions right? First impressions are hard to change, maybe. If our new players don’t have a good time or stuff takes too long to get going or they get too confused, the chances of them wanting to play again start dropping. No pressure, right?
At the table I walk everyone through filling out their sheets together, starting with their character’s name, race and class. Again, I just tell them to put down fighter or wizard or thief, et cetera. And then I give everyone three six-sided dice and we roll up stats. I just tell everyone to roll the dice six times and jot down the totals on a sticky note. Which, yes, I also give them. Sharing is caring. When they’ve got their six numbers, I coach them on placing the highest numbers in their class’s key stats, just now mentioning how something like Strength is good for fighters, Intelligence is good for wizards, et cetera. I kinda give like one-liner descriptions of what each stat sorta represents, like Dexterity is how physically coordinated a character is and Constitution is how much a character can drink before they pass out. Just try to make things relatable at this point, which means for brand new players, referring to real life sorta things.
Now, you might argue that actually rolling stats is a speed bump that could have been glossed over with either just pre-made stats or some kind of simple point buy or allocation formula, and you’re probably right. I’ve just found that, typically, rolling the dice at this point is usually a pretty fun thing for new players. It gets them into the mindset of rolling dice and calculating results, it’s a fun tactile thing to do that isn’t just writing stuff down and, what to me is the key feature here, this is what starts to make each character feel personal and unique to each player, you know, cause they rolled those stats with their own two hands, their own dice, they got their own results.
Rolling up stats is also a time-honored, classic tradition of tabletop rpgs, right, and I just want my players to have that experience, even if they never play again. But as you noticed, I don’t go with any of the more custom ways of rolling these totals, like my favorite which is rolling four dice and dropping the lowest number. Going with a straight three die roll per stat is kinda harsh but it also just gets rid of any extra math and extra explanations I’d have to do, which both take up time and can become needlessly confusing – so it is a little bit of gloss on that speed bump, if you will.
Glossy speed bumps. I gotta hire a writer.
After stats and their associated bonuses are notated on their sheets, all you have left is some gear and spells. For magic users, I would have already found out what kind of magic they find cool, you know, back when I was lobbing those softball questions.
“Oh, you like the idea of casting magic spells. All right, what kinda magic do you think is cool? Do you like the idea of manipulating objects like Hogwarts students or do you think reading people’s minds is cool or do you just wanna blow stuff up?”
So I’ll just hand them spell cards for some cantrips and a first level spell that I’ve already picked out for them. If I don’t happen to have commercially printed cards or whatever, I’ll typically find spell descriptions online and screen cap them and text them to the player.
For the non-magic users, it’s pretty easy: “Do you like hammers, axes, swords or bows and arrows?” I’ll rattle off a few weapon stats for them to jot down and that’s it, we’re ready to play.
Now, some of you may not agree that all the info needed to play a game is on this compressed character sheet and you, again, might be right. But for me, this works totally fine for a first session with newbie players. If they end up having a good time and want to play again, they’ll find a full fledged character sheet pretty cool and interesting having played a game and they usually have fun filling it out on their own.
So I did mention there was one other thing aside from players, characters, dice and a DM that’s necessary for playing a session of DnD, and that would be the “adventure” itself. I’ve got some specific ideas on what kind of adventure to run for brand new players but we’ll save that for next month’s rpg-topic video.
So, go dupe some dummies into playing DnD. That was completely crass and uncalled for, I just couldn’t pass up the alliteration. But you know what I really mean – go find some players who’ve never played DnD and see if you can trick them into sitting down at a table. Maybe that table’s in a bar, whatever works.
See ya at the pub!