I never was exposed to DND until BG3. I loved it and everything about it and now I want to do the real thing. I've never done IRL RPGs or tabletop stuff before. Where do I start? Also I have no friends
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There's a good starter set now, it's short though, it can give you a taste of how the game plays with several classes. I highly recommend the Essentials Kit, it's basically a starter set too. However, the adventure is pretty lengthy, and it comes with a helpful screen that the DM or referee can place between themselves and the players. This allows them to hide materials to avoid spoilers for the adventure, and the screen itself has a lot of helpful minute information that is handy to have available. The outside of the screen displays a decent piece of artwork to the players. No better place to start than with the start product! if you enjoy the experience you go from there, most likely getting the three core rulebooks.
Work on your bait.
Look here! This sounds like bait, and maybe it is, but this is also the sort of limp wristed homosexual who would play and enjoy modern D&D so it might not be bait at all!
>Where do I start? Also I have no friends
Get friends, first. Also consider not bothering with D&D since the actual system is sorely lacking in all the things you might expect it to have from play BG3. And you'd probably think that's weird as frick, since D&D is a big deal, right? And it's so popular and iconic. Why would this one game be infinitely better at doing D&D stuff than "The Real D&D™".. and that's going to be a far longer discussion that you're not equipped for since you didn't even bother to lurk moar or figure out that you could just pirate and read a bunch of PDFs to get a feel for things on your own.
>Why would this one game be infinitely better at doing D&D stuff than "The Real D&D™".. and that's going to be a far longer discussion that you're not equipped for since you didn't even bother to lurk moar or figure out that you could just pirate and read a bunch of PDFs to get a feel for things on your own.
wat
5e is bad and will not magically recreate BG3 at your table. You could have lurked and learned that. Or you could have found the books online for free (we have a thread for that) and read them yourself to learn that.
Firstly, BG3 is running on the worst version of D&D thus far. Its an awful linear experience that betrays the actual imagination D&D can capture.
If you want -real- D&D, Look back to the past https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRVJNkOObIU
you're full of shit, the game is full of moments where stuff like
>hostage is enprisoned
>a fire is burning
>you have a time limit to beat the enemies and save the hostage before he burns to death
>IF YOU HAVE some water on you, you can toss it on the fire
>>and the time limit goes away
it offers sandbox play
What is a limited set of choices in a videogame to the power of imagination?
kek, your limited imagination is no match for a well prepared DM
what would you do instead in that scenario? if your party is low level there's not gonna be any magic user ass pulls neither.
A "well prepared" DM that has no idea how to Improvise & handle a curveball.
Also that doesn't answer my question. How can a limited videlgame compare to a truebsandbox and someone who can accomodate the players open choices?
by being well designed, next question
>Well designed
As in he'll have a set linear path for you, and the second you step off it he won't know what to do.
>You must go to this town to fend off the dragon attack and-
>I go the other way
>But the town is under attack! There are dragons-
>I go the other way, i don't want to deal with the dragons
And then they'll throw a temper tantrum and toss something at you or try to force you into going to the town.
Any DM worth their salt is able to improvise and accomodate whatever the players want. The usual DM nowadays is a disgruntled Novelist trying to herd people to re-enact his Manuscript like a theatre play without showing them it.
>Where do I start?
What do you want? Books to read and get immersed on the universe? If so, the best ones are the 3.5 setting books for general ideas (manual of the planes, fiendish codex 1 and 2, expanded psionics handbook, forgotten realms campaign setting, etc).
4e has a beautifully illustrated book in the form of Elminster's Forgotten Realms. One of the best looking D&D books, imo, although its not great for the lore itself after you get into it.
Now, when you go further into the past with 2e you will find a LOT of really cool stories and concepts but most of it is black and white and with a very archaic format. I dont recommend going straight to them.
Yeah, a well prepared GM would had planned out a rough outline of every settlement in the region and with its relevance to the objectives of the adventure. Sometimes you go railroady or sometimes you go for a super sandbox with dozens of different plotlines happening at once that the players are free to interact with.
And if all of that fails, they can improvise. In one of my last campaigns I literally had a player say "wtf there is no way he planned this entire subplot under the city all along" after I made up some shit on the spot based on my knowledge of the region.
BUT these games are always limited to the mechanics of the game and the inherent limitations of the medium. You cant fool around nearly as well as you do in video games. Everything is object-oriented while in video games you are much more free to slack of and interact with a pre-constructed enviroment. On tabletop this is always a lackluster experience that is little more than an embelished dice roll.
A good GM is one thing. But being a good player is also important. Some amount of prep is necessary for a GM, and if the player's entire thing is avoiding the GM's prep, that just means the game will be shit for everyone involved. The players and GM need to be on largely the same wavelength for DND to be enjoyable.
And guess what that means? You should play with your friends, DND is a social activity. Do not play with randos. If your group is disfunctional, the game will be bad.
>If you want -real- D&D, Look back to the past
Don't do this. OSR/TSR is steaming hot garbage that only hipster zoomers pretend to like.
How did it get popular to begin with?
Because for America and Europe at large, it was a new and different hobby, and dominated brand recognition before any other game could get published. That said,
is a lying homosexual who probably doesn't play games at all. BX D&D is actually pretty good for the one and only thing it intends to do well. What really is a shame is that many games came out in the 1980s that did things beyond "dungeon crawling as survival horror" but got overlooked because TSR won the advertising gamble.
Because like I said, hipster contrarians saw old thing and immediately started jerking it off because to them old thing = good, new thing = bad and it doesn't go any deeper than that.
>is a lying homosexual who probably doesn't play games at all
Got a game in about 18 minutes gaylord, running one tomorrow afternoon, another one saturday morning, and then playing in a game sunday afternoon. Already have characters ready for two more games that are going to be replacing some of the ones my group has going when they end in a few months or added to the rotation for Wednesday. Meanwhile all OSRtards do is circlejerk about how cool they are for playing dogshit based on old dogshit.
>BX D&D is actually pretty good for the one and only thing it intends to do well
Yeah, boring samey dungeon crawls. It's a wargame, not an RPG. If you want an RPG, play something better.
>Getting this turnt by being called a nogames
Yep, you're a nogames.
You guys are acting like this couldn't be possible and there's no reason to be acting that way. There's probably millions of people this scenario applies to. Y'all have been so poisoned by bait threads that you're jumping at shadows. Everyone's new at some point, and OP is starting out.
OP, there's websites specifically for getting groups among strangers. Pay-to-play, which is generally looked down on, like StartPlaying. Mix of free and pay models, like Roll20. Or niche meetup websites and still-alive TTRPG forums can be found with a search engine easily. I would start with those.
D&D is absolutely not a beginner's game, though, and starting with it tends to get you stuck in thinking all games are this hard to learn and this slow to run. They're not. Most games are 10 pages or less, which you can find out about on websites like DrivethruRPG, or by finding the PDF Share thread on /tg/. If you really want to do 5e D&D-type heroic fantasy with outlandish flavor, there's plenty of knock offs for that (like Dungeon World is a fairly popular one) or you can jump in the deep end and get some patient DM teach you how to play 5e on one of the above websites. I just wouldn't personally recommend it.
>Also I have no friends
Discord it is then.
>I never was exposed to DND until BG3. I loved it and everything about it and now I want to do the real thing. I've never done IRL RPGs or tabletop stuff before.
You should read the players handbook. There are a lot of people in here shitting on 5e, but there is a kernal of truth in what they are saying, in that you should keep an open mind regarding TTRPG systems. There are lots of quality DND 5e alternatives for medieval fantasy adventure games. Some examples of this are Pathfinder 1E and 2E and worth learning about.
There are places to find groups online like Discord servers, Reddit, Roll20. Get on google and search for your Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS), they might have classifieds for games.
Playing IRL is superior to playing online with camera, which is is in turn superior to playing online with voice only. Being able to see the people you interact with and being seen has a big impact on engagement and roleplaying. If you are uncomfortable being on camera, power through it, its very normal to feel that way before you get accustomed it it.
Temper your expectation. BG3 was written by a team of professional writers over years. The actors are all pros who beat out a bevy of other actors at the casting sessions. The people you are playing with be amateurs enjoying their hobby. You should also keep in mind that if you watch shows like Critical Role or Dimension20, that these people are also professional actors, and they are playing a game that is primarily intended to be enjoyed by the audience, not the players and DM.
Understand that you are playing a collaborative game, and that the DM is a collaborator too. You should make sure you leave room for the other players to contribute, and they should in turn be doing the same for you.
Here is a good thing to ask everyone when you join a table: What do you enjoy doing in game with your character? You can all pow-wow about this and set each other up to have fun.
First get friends, then pirate the player's handbook and make a dude, then pirate a module like strahd and play it
>I have no friends
Tough luck buddy, you're not going to be playing TTRPGs anytime soon. Don't listen to the foreveralone autists who play solo "Games", those aren't real TTRPGs.
Play BG1+2 and get your start with 2e (also called AD&D; technically not the same but close enough for your purposes).
Start with looking for /5eg/ in the catalog, and ask your moronic questions there
>Also I have no friends
Unironically get friends. You're gonna hear a whole lot of anti-DND on this board and while I think the game sucks, you want the honest to god truth? It doesn't fricking matter what game you play. Find cool people to bullshit around a table with play pretend, and you win. Try to drill down into the perfect system to incentivize the right behavior--forget about it. TTRPGs are a niche within a niche. It's tough to find good groups for the most popular kleenex-ass game in the whole hobby, let alone an actually interesting, tightly designed indie game.
So good luck to you man, join some discords, don't be afraid to bring it up to normies, it's more socially acceptable than it's ever been, w/e. Find your people first, and the game can come later. You'd probably have the most success just finding fans of BG3 and slowly introducing them to the idea of playing the real thing. You'd at least all be on the same page thematically.
Find your FLGS and seek a table. For the love of St. Cuthbert, don't play 5e though. It's left difficult to excise brain-rot in many players minds.
Also, PnP D&D is nothing like the game you played, gotta rip that bandaid off right now. Same thing for any "live plays" you watched on YouTube, they'll almost always be scripted and not a good representation of what the game is like.
>they'll almost always be scripted and not a good representation of what the game is like
>not a good representation
True. They're a bunch of professional improv comedians using loaded dice, and the gameplay is highly edited. They're also unwatchably bad and you should stop giving them attention.
>scripted
If you said "preplanned" and "not really live", I wouldn't have to do this, but you are a brainless internet parrot, and your father is ashamed of you.
At least as far as D20 and CR is concerned, the only realplay podcasts with any amount of following anymore, they're not scripted. That is a specific term with a specific meaning. They don't have scripts, and their pregame outline is just a list of the major story beats.
>Find your FLGS and seek a table. For the love of St. Cuthbert, don't play 5e though.
So you're telling him to play MtG instead?
I fished an BG3 player with no prior experience from roll 20 to play Ars Magica and he's amazing.
I think it's the best effort/reward approach. Keep in mind that every group is different and you might have 4 shit groups for every good one.
>gotta make sure my shitpost paladin that will never see honest play is Postive and Wholesome and Respectful enough to still get upvotes
The bizarre, extraverted, for-approval way mainstream internet experience just about everything is miserable and highschooly.
if this isn't bait: don't start playing ttrpgs with d&d, it will give you permanent brain damage
Ignore anyone who says anything like this. 5e's a fine starting point but you have to keep in mind it's not a jack of all trades system (those suck anyway), it's a dedicated class-based high fantasy system with high modularity without being barely a system at all (i.e. FATE, PBTA).
If you want to try something other than that, branch out into other systems. For example, Star Wars 5e exists but doesn't really do star wars well because it's a 5e clone. Instead, try the West End Games D6 system (any edition, but I use 2E Revised since it was the last one released to my knowledge). /tg/ pretends 5e is the worst system ever (it's certifiably not, I have run BESM 3e and I will die on the hill that it's a thousand times worse than 5e ever could be), but at worst it's average. It's easy to pick up, easy to run thanks to many online tools, easy to play because of its relatively simple resolution systems, and has enough support that you aren't starved for content without being the bloated mess of redundant and dogshit options that 3.X/PF1e are. It's not the best at everything, and it has its issues, but none of them are hard to deal with or houserules out and the oneD&D content has made a lot of steps in the right direction for a lot of the weaker shit in 5e.
So run/play 5e if you want to get an experience close to BG3 but if you ever want to try something new don't use 5e for it, because 5e is very specific in what it wants to do and you can't just make it do everything despite what people might say.
Ignore this anon. He thinks a rules system that codifies an exhaustive list of everything the PCs can do, each with an exhaustive list of the results of those actions is a rules-lite approach comparable to FATE.