I'm looking to start a group for some pen and paper role-playing. I was considering Dungeons & Dragons 4E, but we're not really interested in using minis or grids. We want something we can even play over Skype if we wanted. Can we adapt the rules easily, or should we look into other games? If so, what games do you recommend?

We want a pen and paper game that focuses on role-playing. We're massive fans of role-playing. We're not interested in deep tactical gameplay and we're happy for narrative combat. Combat isn't too important to us. A system whereby the dice determines if we hit or not for fairness is all we really care about. We want to role-play, not number crunch all the time for every little thing and factor in the wind direction and temperature difference from across the room and then add the dexterity bonus and then do this, all just to open a door.

4E isn't really what D&D is all about for me, but I am biased since I started over 30 years ago.

For beginners I recommend a basic box set for an older edition (I started with 1st ed. and don't really know what other box sets are out there.)

It should come with a basic rule book, and quest with maps, and some dice.

There are game stores with used stuff, and you can check out http://www.dragonsfoot.org/ for some free downloads.

We used to play a lot without 'flooring' but we did like the miniature figures which are great for positioning (and they are just fun to have).

get the hang of it first, then start making up you own adventures as DM.

you can also make a character sheet on your computer then print out copies for your players.

do your homework, and know that a good DM will spend time away from the game session preparing things.

It takes patience , and understanding what is fun for each player, so engage them, draw them in with your story. keep in mind that each character class will want a chance to shine, so write for that also.

If the rules seem too confusing or clunky, just find a way to streamline them. it will keep everything flowing smooth.

or you can just hire me

I was looking to play 4E, but simply streamline the rules a little bit and switch to narrative combat instead of using grids and minis. I prefer a focus on story and even the fights should be based within the story. Narrative combat also lets you have more freedom, so that anything can happen. There's no "that's not on the map, so it doesn't exist". It's also cheaper. It's kind of hard to encourage people to spend ￡60 pounds on books and then even more on minis and stuff.

http://www.unseelie.org/rpg/wh/index.html for a 'let's try roleplaying and see if we like it before spending any of our hard-earned' session.

I'll hire your help then ;P

I haven't played 4E yet, but I heard it was pretty bad and 3.5e is still the way to go and the most played one now a days. Currently I got a group of 8 going, my brother is the DM and we're having a blast. I'd personally recommend 3.5 edition, as the changes I read about in 4e don't seem desirable to me.

We also made ourselves an ultimate DnD playing board for a low cost and I'll tell you how to make one.

What we did was buy a white dry erase board (we got a big one, like 2 feet by 4 feet, but any size will work though the bigger the better). And take a straight edge and drew out an entire grid with the dry erase markers so the whole thing is one giant grid. Then we took a razor blade (a knife will work) and carved little + marks at every intersection in the grid. then when that is done, erase all the markers, and you got a whole bunch of + signs covering the board in a perfect grid. With these, you can now use dry erase markers and draw up maps on the fly. We got black ones for making the map, but also red markers for like throwing in fire that's spreading and whatnot or blue ones to signify bodies of water on the map.

So if like your group of adventurers is in a dungeon, and all they can see is a dark hallway, you just draw that part up. Then lets say they walk a few feet, and spot an intersection in the hallway, once they spot it, you can instantly draw it up on the board within seconds, and draw out the dungeon as they traverse it.

As for miniatures, no need to buy any special miniatures or anything, just use some coins or erasers or something. (our group actually uses my friend's piles of warhammer miniatures as our characters, but really it doesn't matter what you use). Hell, you can even cut out a square piece of paper the size of a single grid, and mark it as your guy or whatever. (I actually made out of paper giant 'miniature' like game pieces, like dragons and stuff that you can throw on the board and move around with ease, and also like ships, with grids on them, that you can move around the board easily while your players are all standing on the ship).

Now DMing can be pretty difficult if you don't know all the rules. What I did to help myself out, was write out a bunch of easy to go to rules, like making a whole page of "combat rules" which has in all the rolls and stuff for all the different combat things, like fighting defensively, charging, overrunning, grappling and so on. Another way, is get those sticky tab things and put them on the more common pages in the books which get looked up for rules regularly so you can easily flip to those pages on the fly.

You can also spend a whole day, reading the entire players and DM manual, writing notes down for some of the more complicated rules and eventually you'll learn them. Admittedly the going may be slow when you're trying to figure out the rules until you start knowing them all by heart.

Another thing to help DMing, is to gradually add in new elements for each new encounter, and learn them as you go. So like start your first encounters with basic battles, then start adding in environmental variables, then add in monsters with like poisoning or whatever, then start adding in mounted combat and so on. Do that for every encounter, and by later in the game, you end up knowing all the rules on the fly, and can do very complicated encounters with ease.

Okay. Thanks for the suggestion. We're not sure what pen and paper game to do now. I intended to do D&D 4E with them, but simply switch out the grid for narrative combat. It seems that isn't going to be as easy as I expected. What should I do?

If any of you have been watching YouTube's Geek Week, you'll see that the Yogscast did a D&D session. I was looking for something in that sort of style. We all want to focus on role-playing, not number crunching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt_NXdWaDcA

I'll pass, but thanks.

Well, the rules are what you make of them. Even something like GURPS, which tends more towards number-crunching, pretty much tells you to only use the rules you want when you want. The thing to keep in mind with a table-top game is that it's all in your hands. Our own group, for example - sometimes we'll go through a dungeon with a dry erase board and enact the combat turn-by-turn with miniatures. Other times when we want to move the pace up a bit we'll ditch the miniatures and just relate what we're doing, make our rolls, and keep things moving. Even other times we can go even quicker and just tell the GM roughly what we're doing and he'll describe the battle without any die rolls at all. All depends on the situation and preferences at the time.

That's really an important distinction to make from the get-go, I feel. You're not tied to any specific rules in a table-top game, they're all tools provided for you to use as you see fit depending on the circumstances you find yourself in, moment to moment. It's not a computer game where the game literally can't function without following every step of the rules in order.

As far as that goes, D&D has always been pretty light on the number-crunching. It's designed to be a pretty streamlined experienced. You're never adding more than one or two modifiers to a die roll, and especially if you've prepared ahead of time and written out all the info you need (like Armor Class, bonuses to hit, etc - mostly covered in the character sheet anyway,) things should move pretty fast. The first couple of sessions in a new game are always a bit slower as everyone needs to acclimate to the rules, and especially if you're all sort of new at this. So remember to be patient.

My group at the moment is participating in the https://www.wizards.com/dnd/dndnext.aspx. Which we find an interesting concept, really. The upside is that it's a totally free D&D ruleset. The downside of course is that's not a "complete" set of rules at this point, and there are weekly changes being made (some of which can be pretty drastic.) You can, of course, decide whether or not you want to play with any of the changes being made at any point.

As far as miniatures and whatnot goes - I've never played the version of D&D you're talking about, but in general miniatures and maps are only there as potential tools. I can't think of many RPG rules that specifically require them. They're just there to help make things easier and visualize the combat, but there's nothing saying you have to use them at all. As has been mentioned already, a dry erase board works as well as any store-bought maps. What we use is a big sheet of gridded paper under a clear sheet of dry-erase plastic, so we can draw up the map as we see fit. My group is mostly older gamers who have been at this hobby for decades, so we're not short on miniatures, but I've used everything from GI Joes to Monopoly pieces in the past.

I've decided to try Dungeon World, instead of 4E D&D.