I’m in the fortunate and privileged position of having some very long term friends in my life. Unfortunately, we’re now spread across the country. We’d like to try and keep our social connection by playing a TTRPG over zoom or something.
I have never played a TTRPG before. I really got into Disco Elysium and that’s got me interested in TTRPGs. Other friends have been interested for years but no one’s bothered to try and organize something. So all of us have zero experience with running an actual game. And no one to guide us through it who has experience.
I’m looking for recommendations for a TTRPG for us get started on. Needs to work over Zoom. I’d say the most important aspect is that it’s fun and social. “Fun” sounds like an obvious one but the reality is I have one shot to make playing TTRPGs “stick” with this group. If my friends don’t have a great time with it we’ll probably not play after this.
Happy to answer any questions about myself or my group that would help you come up with a recommendation.
I know a lot of people recommend rules-light games for beginners, but if your group has neither roleplaying experience or theater experience, then something more structured and board-gamey may actually benefit. What I find is that players without any experience fall into choice paralysis in rules light games, and having clearer structures can facilitate learning. It really does depend on what sort of experience your players are interested in. If I had to make a blind recommendation, I think that the Free League “Year Zero Engine” games might be a good candidate if you’ve never played a TRPG before. They have the right balance of rules complexity for new players, good GM support and high production values. There are plenty of different genres (and degrees of complexity) in the ecosystem.
Some examples that you may want to look at:
- Mutant: Year Zero (post-apocalyptic adventure)
- Dragonbane (fantasy adventure) (Technically not YZE, but it has similar levels of complexity)
- Vaesen (mystery, folklore, horror)
- ALIEN RPG (sci-fi, horror)
- Tales from the Loop (coming of age, sci-fi adventure).
Most of the these games have a starter kit with one-shot adventures that are meant to introduce players to the system and roleplaying more general.
Monster of the Week is pretty simple to play and run in my experience. My group sometimes uses it for one-shots when one of us is out of town because you can whip up characters and stories real quickly.
A little oddball and not really a typical ttrpg, but Fiasco is a lot of fun for practicing those RP chops. No GM, just collaborative storytelling with a structure to ensure that whatever it is your character is trying to set up goes disastrously, for themselves or someone else.
DnD 5e is also a great beginner system, if you have one really experienced player willing to DM and bear the weight of the (lack of) rules upon their mighty shoulders like Atlas. Very very easy as a player, but needs a good DM to make a lot of rulings on things the game rules don’t actually cover.
Do you have an idea of what setting you want to play in, and is anyone willing to be GM and guide the story or would you prefer a setting where you all get to be players (those exist!)?
Yeah I should have mentioned, anything that’s “no GM” is actually preferred, I think for our group.
I’m kinda open on setting. I know that does help much but this group plays all sorts of board games so we’re comfortable in lots of different settings.
I’m also curious about what systems you recommend that are just players and no GM actually.
Fiasco is my favorite - you can adapt it to so many kinds of stories, as long as it’s a Coen-brothers-esque disaster. Lots of laughs all around.
Haven’t had a chance to play it myself, but I’ve also heard lots of good things about Goblin Quest
I skimmed your comment earlier and somehow missed Fiasco. It sounds amazing lol. Goblin Quest sounds fun too since I’m a DND player.
What worked for me is first finding a setting that you all like. Mechanics are really secondary.
If you were thinking a DnD setting there’s Quest, I haven’t played it but it has a more simplified rule set than even DnD 5e.
https://www.adventure.game/news/quest-digital-edition-free-to-play-announcement
You can also look into online assistants like Roll20 for loading maps and letting people make character sheets, but it does have its own learning curve just figuring out the program.
I recommend Dungeon World for the following reasons:
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Zero prep. Whoever’s going to be the GM doesn’t need to spend hours on planning. There’s also shared world building, instead of the players just creating their characters and the GM being responsible for everything else.
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It has few rules, but they’re important. New players playing dungeon world tend to quickly pick up on how the game is delivering structured creativity, and once they collectively have that understanding you’re in a good place to experiment with other systems or homebrew variations on Dungeon World.
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It has low material demands. Pencil, paper, 6-sided dice. A browser window with tabs for everyone’s character sheets in Google Docs will work, but you don’t even need that.
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There’s a bunch of other themes under the ‘Powered By The Apocalypse’ system that you can easily switch to.
Came here to say Dungeon World. I love the system, it’s very fast-paced compared to most others, and really allows a lot of freedom. I’d suggest using something like chat gpt to quickly generate NPCs and anything else you might not want to spend a lot of time preparing.
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I recently ran my first game of The Witch is Dead for my kids’ first game and we had a blast. You play as woodland creatures trying to avenge the death of a friendly witch. It has simple, one page rules so you don’t get bogged down flipping through a book trying to find stuff. It also has a little chart you can use to give you some basic points for your adventure, but it’s fine if you make your own thing up.
Another one page game you might want to check out is Everyone is John. I haven’t played it yet, but from what I’ve seen it tends to get kind of dark since everyone is a competing personality trying to control John.
