The Artifact RPG

To finish off the Basics series, the Have Fun! card.

Have Fun!

The goal is for everyone to have fun. The other players, especially the Game Master wants everyone to enjoy the game. You don’t have to know everything about the game, especially not right away. If you have more experienced players in your group they’ll be happy to help you out.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. If someone is telling you something you don’t understand, it’s okay to tell them so, especially the GM.

Part of an RPG is exploring, discovering new things about the setting and the game. If you’re just starting out in this setting or as a player, everyone understands that you don’t know it all so don’t expect yourself to. So relax, you’ll get there by listening to the other players and interacting with them. If someone mentions something you don’t recognize, ask them about it, we love to tell about our stories. By the end of the session you’ll probably have a story to tell for yourself.

This card is probably going to have the most head scratching associated with it because I get into some very basic play mechanics. Next in the Basics series, the Winning card.

Winning

You win by working together with the other players to beat a situation that the Game Master presents. It can be almost anything so it’s exciting to find out what it will be. Because you’re working with the other players, you get to connect with them and be a team so most of the time they’ll be helping you win. It’s challenging, social and fun.

At times the Game Master will feel that your character can’t automatically do a task and that the character will have to pass a skill roll. The roll is compared against your character’s abilities. To pass a roll, you roll two different colored ten sided die (sides are numbered 0-9). The dice are not added together, they are the tens and ones place of a number between 1 and 100 (00 is considered 100). If one die has tens place numbers on it that is the tens or the darker colored die is the ten’s place. If the number on the dice you roll is lower than the character’s attribute and any one skill the Game Master says you can add, you’ve passed and your character can carry out the task.

I was going to do the Winning card next, but when I wrote it I found that I needed to introduce the GM card next. I’m a little bummed at that. I was hoping to have the cards independent of each other so they could just be handed around a table randomly. Next in the Basics series, the Game Master card.

Game Master

The Game Master (or GM for short) is a special type of player. There is usually only one in a group of players. The GM has the job of getting a game ready to play by making up things that might happen to the player’s characters.

When you want your character to do something, you tell the GM what you want to do. The GM will then decide if that is something that the character can just do or if there are rules that could be used to test if character can do. Walking around is not normally difficult and it’s something your character can just do, a backflip is much harder so the GM may want to use the rules to test if it can be done.

The GM will also control everyone that is not a player’s character. For example, if the players go into a city, anyone they interact with is controlled by the GM. The GM will speak for them and tell you what they’re doing. The players decide how they interact with other people.

Next in the Basics series, the Character card.

Character

When playing the game, you make and control a character. This will be your character and no one else’s. If you’ve played or even seen a video game in the last twenty years, you’re already familiar with playing a character. The person, monster or whatever it was you controlled was a character. In an RPG you have more control over that character.

Most players treat their character something like you would a pet, you take care of it, teach it new tricks and get it toys to play with. Your character will ‘live’ on their Character Sheet. A piece of paper that keeps all the information your character can use to do things in the game. There is a lot packed in the character sheet because your character can do a lot. The good thing is, that once you get the hang of the character sheet, you’ll understand almost all of how the game is played.

The character sheet will help you remember what your character is like, what they’re good at and what they have so you don’t have to.

Wednesday I posted about trying to ease a new player into a new game or setting by giving them the basics on a few 3×5 cards so they don’t get overwhelmed. I figured I’d post my 3×5 card text here starting with the ‘Setting’ card. This would be different for each game and could even be different for each campaign. Mine here is generic for The Artifact RPG.

Setting

Earth is in trouble and humanity’s only option is a strange manufactured planet. While the builders of this huge planet seem to have abandoned it, there are already humans living there when Earth forces arrive, and most of them are not friendly.

This Science Fiction setting pulls it’s tone from the ideas of colonization of the 15th to 19th century but updated to a near future setting. The game is intended to play slightly to the heroic side of realism, meaning that the characters are regular humans but the system allows them to be slightly larger than life.

The majority of the action is under the surface of the planet in gigantic structures. Dinosaur like animals roam the planet. Technology in game includes teleportation, piloted robots called Environmental Suits or commonly E-Suits, nanotech augmented humans, anti-gravity engines and plenty more.

Sometimes when you’ve played RPGs for a while you forget how daunting it is to face that first game. I’m convinced that a lot of people that look at an RPG imagine they have to be a mental giant to learn a book full of rules. To a new player that’s what the book is, an impenetrable block of instructions. To someone that’s played, the book breaks up into concepts that categorize the rules and that makes it a little easier to digest the whole. As for me, I get a foothold on a basic concept and work my way out. In some books it’s understanding character creation, in others it’s event resolution. Even then, I know that I’ve had players that get the basics and they’re not going to get any further. They’re a functional player and that’s okay, not everyone needs to explore every nook and cranny of a world or system.

So how can a GM get a player to that foothold? Only introduce the basics. If you could put each concept on a 3×5 card it would probably be best. the less paper they see at any one time makes it easier for them not to get overwhelmed. Here’s a list of subjects for those cards.

Basic Setting

Just a quick blurb on the setting and what to expect as far as tone and feel of the game.

What is a character?

Explain what a character is in contemporary terms. It’s easier now with most video games using a character. You just have to translate their video game experience into how they’ll play a character in a table top game. As a player how do they control the character? Explaining the character sheet might be a good idea too.

How do you win?

I’m thinking to include something of my earlier post on this but also a very quick explanation of event resolution.

What does a Game Master do?

This is standard boilerplate but can also explain how much control the GM will have in this game.

Don’t Panic!

Maybe that’s not the official title of the card. This card is there to reassure the new player that while there is more, they don’t need to know it immediately. If they need help don’t be afraid to ask.

Number 6?

I was trying to come up with six cards but I can’t think of any other subject’s you would need. I may be missing something obvious. Let me know if I forgot something vital. I’ll be working on a PDF with these subjects that can be printed and cut into flash cards in the next few days and I’ll make them available for download.

This question has tripped me up when introducing RPGs to new players. My normal answer is something along the lines  of “Well you don’t really win, you progress. . . ” and then I explain getting more stuff and experience. Almost every time, as soon as I get to “Well you don’t” there’s a bit of a shock on their face and that blank stare that says “I’ve lost interest.”

As you may have noticed, I think that introducing RPGs is an art that we as a community are routinely under skilled in (a.k.a. we stink at it). This is just one aspect of the process of that introduction. Getting new people into RPGs is a sales process. I’m not a natural salesman so I really have to think about what I’m doing to get it right. One important concept of selling is solving a problem. If you can offer a product that solves a problem you have a sale. “You don’t win” doesn’t solve a problem it introduces one and that’s how they’re interpreting it. One thing to keep in mind is that sometimes you can solve a problem that the person didn’t know they had, you just have to convince them that they had a problem in the first place.

So how can you solve the potential player’s problem? I’m not interested in making up some random reason, I enjoy playing so there has to be something that it does for me. That something is winning. It’s a different kind of winning than a board game but each session is something like winning a video game. There’s a problem, a challenge and then a resolution (hopefully) in most sessions. Yes there are sessions and maybe even whole games that don’t follow that but it’s the default for RPGs. But that’s not good enough. Saying it’s like a video game means to the prospective player that they might as well stick to their video games because it’s what they know. They already have a solution to the problem, there’s no reason to have two tools that do the same thing.

Most RPG players will agree, playing an RPG is not the same as playing a video game. So how do you explain that difference? One point is that it’s because an RPG is a collaborative game. Instead of playing against each other you’re working together. But . . .

MMOs can be collaborative too and with voice chat you get to “hang out” with your friends, so why not just leave all the reading and the math and stick with the shiny graphics and sound? There has to be something else that separates table top and MMO. You could say that in a table top RPG you really get to know your friends but that would more than likely scare off people. Why? People are afraid that their friends will really get to know them, and because you know how the game is played you’ll have the upper hand.

I can only give an illustration to explain the difference between table top and MMOs and it goes like this. “When you want to talk to a friend, talking over the phone is okay but you’d rather be hanging out face to face. That’s the difference between table top and MMO. Even if you’re in the same room on the computer, you lose that personal connection.” Maybe connection is the right word then? Yes there is the aspect of the Game Master making the game more interesting but they’re not going to understand that, not really.

Put it all together

So when a prospective player asks how they win I’m going to say something like “You win by working together with the other players to beat a situation that the Game Master presents. It can be almost anything so it’s exiting to find out what it will be. Because you’re working with the other players, you get to connect with them and be a team so most of the time they’ll be helping you win. It’s challenging, social and fun.”

How will you tell a new player how they can win? Sound off in the comments.