Initiate of the Art
As you might recall from the sappy romantic writeup in Thief + Wizard, Part 5/5, the writer and illustrator of this here Handbook are happily wed. And when it comes to the geekly arts, that means we’ve hit the jackpot. We get to sit in on another’s games, talk shop between sessions, and steal both minis and dice sets from one another. Not all couples are so lucky.
Sharing what you’re passionate about is a good thing. When you walk out of a session filled with dragon fire and world-shaking revelations, it’s only natural to want to tell somebody (anybody!) about the day’s adventure. The next logical step is to actually bring those people into the game. But sometimes, those people just aren’t into it. They make Munchkin cards about this experience.
To a certain extent, this business applies to all hobbies. Getting your friends and loved ones to try out full-contact skijoring, intramural quidditch, or competitive dwarf tossing can all be a tough sell. But there’s some strange alchemy that happens in the gamer brain. It insists that, “If I just explain it one more time, I’m sure they’ll come around.” As Thief so ably demonstrates in today’s comic, that just ain’t so. Besides which, if she actually did manage to pick up a spell or two, she’d have to change her name to Arcane Trickster, and there’s no way she’s going through that paperwork headache.
And so, we come at length to our question of the day! Have you ever tried and failed to bring someone into the hobby? Or worse, have you ever sat at one of those awkward tables where some poor schlub was failing to show an utterly-uninterested acquaintance the ropes? Tell us your tales of poorly-explained rules and why-did-you-make-me-come-to-this eye rolls down in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
Hey-hey, there it is! ^_^ I was wondering when you’d use this idea.
I’m always open to requests. After 500+ of these things, I begin to fear the I’m repeating myself.
Well… I’d love to see your and Laurel’s take on an Only Sane Man, 3.5E-style, woman Spellthief.
“Stop throwing a tantrum. I only touched you as a touch attack, and I am taking your spells because I’d like the orphanage NOT to burn down.”
Is Only Sane Man something like Rational Man With a Shotgun?
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/5ikp48/who_is_rational_man/
In this case, she’d be a woman with the power to stop others from going nuts with their spells, while putting them to actual good use herself.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnlySaneMan
They’re not wearing their rings 🙁 Continuity error!
People do sometimes keep their rings in their pockets during working hours. Wizard needs to make intricate gestures, and Thief has to grease locks and gets blood on her hands in battle.
Wizard wears it Frodo style: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/fe/7e/4e/fe7e4e661cd7b0c33a6f6f7cf83b61cc.jpg
Alternative title/lesson of the comic: don’t try to convince people to multiclass / prestige class / pick teamwork feats to synergize with your build.
In the doggos game, I wanted to build a grappler. You better believe I badgered Laurel’s warlock into taking Hex.
I thought you were playing dogs, not badgers?
Not to initiate someone into the rules / game itself, but I do have a pal (who plays Pathfinder with their own group) who I shared my Pathfinder adventures with!.
Then later I awkwardly learned they were very much never interested in said tales and that I was actually nagging them with my stories.
Oh no! Was it a very dramatic reveal?
Nope, more of a awkard one via discord chat. :p
I feel like DnD stories (or anything you’re passionate about) are like telling someone about a dream you had, if you can keep it short and punchy, they can be intresting, but start to dip into detail and gosh darn can you see peoples eyes glazing over.
I did manage to get my boyfriend into DnD despite this and now DM a duet adventure. But he draws the line at playing Animal Crossing with me, despite how many times I’ve asked him to join my island. You’ve got to accept that you both won’t always enjoy everything together and thats probably healthy!
Relevant video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pnx7W0W1WeU
The other players in my group do not get urged to build their characters for synergy.
What does happen to them is that I take tactical and strategic principles, beat them out into spikes, and then attempt to hammer them through their thick skulls. They must be made of mithril…
I gather that they charge into melee ahead of schedule?
Before I picked up 5th edition, I played a little bit of Pathfinder—a VERY little bit, because I only had one friend who played and all my groups were met through him, and for various reasons they all fell apart. After I got into 5e, he and a few of my other friends who hadn’t played before decided to do a short campaign (lost mines of phandelver, which I had previously run for my family).
He spent most of the campaign backseat DMing and complaining about how limited his level 3 barbarian was compared to the spellcasters he usually played in PF (despite my encouragement to switch classes) and the lack of customization options.
Now, to be fair, I also prefer the skill point and feat system from PF, but I really felt like he set himself up to be disappointed in the game by focusing on what he didn’t like instead of what he did, and by deliberately moving away from his preferred play style in the name of “well SOMEBODY has to be the front line” instead of trusting me to rebalance the module as needed.
Needless to say, after the party did an any% speedrun of the module, he declined to continue on to the next adventure.
There’s a mixed level of system mastery types at my tables. I’m glad the group that switched to 5e actually switched to 5e.
My story of failing to introduce people to the hobby isn’t sad, fortunately, it is instead glorious.
I ran a 3.5 game (this was back before a friend of mine introduced me to Pathfinder and I made the switch) for my extended family while we were all visiting our grandparents for Christmas. (This was many years ago, pre-pandemic.) Knowing people could be fairly easily turned off by all the math, I did most of the character work, except for a couple of my cousins who wanted to build their own sheets. Not everyone enjoyed the game itself, and several people decided it wasn’t for them, but everyone enjoyed the raucous fun of the eight of us (me and a party of seven, and boy that was another lesson I ended up learning) sitting around a table talking about monsters, and arguing about the feeding habits and susceptibility to waved blankets of giant centipedes. While I only ended up converting one or two of them to the hobby, everyone had a good time, so all in all, I’d consider it a success.
That is glorious. And it’s especially cool that you got all of them at least a taste of the game. That way they can sorta kinda understand your war stories when you share em later!
My failures to get friends into the hobby mostly involve schedule-conflicts.
Boy don’t I know that feel:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/scheduling-conflicts
It wasn’t so much a “I failed to get someone interested in a game” so much as my best friend and I reading more of the rules and listening to others play through it and realizing it’s just too much work. In particular, Starfinder and Shadowrun are just too clunky. My friend was really interested in getting our game group to play Starfinder after our Pathfinder AP but then we ran into starship combat. After that he quietly tabled the idea. Similarly with Shadowrun, there’s just too many things to cover from magic, vehicles, wireless etc. We love the setting, but it’s just too much to run on its own, so he adapted Monster of the Week rules for it and we did a couple of one-shots from that.
My Starfinder group had “the starship combat talk” not so long ago. It’s still up in the air whether we’ll handwave the final starship combat in Dead Suns.
It’s such a shame, since the setting etc. is so cool, but starship combat is just… ugh. But you can’t have a space focused game like Starfinder without space combat 🙁
I’ve heard that’s why they added starship combat: because it’s expected. They could have stuck with elf gates and just gone Stargate style though. But that wouldn’t hit the audience expectations.
That certainly would have helped. Especially if your party having their own spacecraft was a more late game thing so it wouldn’t be heavy of a focus as it was in regular play.
My first ever real game was run for my family at Christmas, and never have I seen my father, mother, uncle and grandmother look quite so confused, although my grandmother did inform me that she felt “very bloodthirsty” afterwards, which amused me both at the time and now.
Since then, I’ve had two people play a game and then awkwardly back out, two people point-blank and loudly refuse to play to a simple “would you be interested” (one of whom later came around) and one person, memorably, stand up and leave in the middle of a game complaining that “this is stupid.”
None of them are very good stories, I’m afraid, but they’re the simple truth.
Grandma got into the spirit of the season.
What made the “this is stupid” guy call it quits? Was it just an accumulation of things, or was there some element that they disliked in particular?
I can’t speak to their mind, since they were nobody I knew well, but the thing that seemingly sparked the outburst was them getting hit and dropped to 1 hp.
while I do talk about gaming occasionally outside my gamer bubble, Imhavent invited a non gamer to a session yet.
Rather the opposite: A co-worker professed interest, but I had my doubts about his sincerity.
Personally I think of him as „the king of half truths“ and suspect he only wants to participate in order to be able to lie about it with authority.
Oof. Yeah, that sounds like a guy not to associate with even outside the gaming context.
Once in my table we got Don’t Rest Your Head. The others on the group decided to try it without telling me. I come to the table, sit, and find that book there. I… tried my best, for them, but after a couple hours of talking about… stuff… they got that i am not gonna play that game. Sadly a lost afternoon for us, but at least they understood why 🙁
Not familiar with the title. Why didn’t it click?
Don’t know why exactly. That game and Don’t Loos Your Head, don’t know why i don’t like them. Isn’t the content or the aesthetic or the art. Maybe its the whole things spiraling down into further madness. I think it’s how that topic is treated what makes me uncomfortable. I like madness powers in games. To reach strength from something like that, i like the idea. I would lie if i say that when i was reading Lexicon of the Throne for Godbound i didn’t jump straight to the Madness word f power. The Malkavians, a clan of crazy vampires are my favorites on V:TM. But that game, makes me uncomfortable. With a topic i like to play to make catharsis 🙁
I have 2 that come to mind (I’m sure there are more):
1). My spouse is a player in my games so i can’t talk to her at all about what i have planned. Somehow this job has landed on my Mother in law. She’s almost 70, is delightful and humors me by listening but very much has no desire to play, and probably doesn’t get what I’m talking about most of the time.
2). At the end of 2020 I got a tattoo commemorating the completion of my first campaign. 3 years running and to level 20.
It’s on my forearm so very visible. People at work started asking about it, and i started blabbing about it.
I’m reasonably sure 9 out of 10 have no idea what I’m talking about (so 9 of those 10 conversations were the awkward conversation), and one seems completely fascinated by the whole thing, but with zero desire to play. She absolutely does not get the point of the game and that as the DM, I’m not looking to win. I’m pretty sure on more than one occasion she’s said “so you lost again?”.
When everyone at work was baffled by my explanations i offered to run a 1-shot with premade characters and got no bites.
My worst was in one of those awful work meetings where you sit around and tall about efficiencies.
“Where do you go to get inspired and find new ideas?” said the moderator.
“The DMG!” I replied. Then I wanted to sink through the floor as I explained what that was.
“Always check that the lid’s open before you take the piss, otherwise you’ll just have a mess.”
“Also don’t ever use this quote around the person you’ve failed to get interested in the thing you like.”
Arcane Tricksters are downright OP. Get a Familiar and you can simulate the Swashbuckler’s Rakish Audacity, Get the Mobile feat, and you can simulate the Swashbuckler’s Fancy Footwork (+10ft movement) Get Booming Blade and you can stack even more damage on your Sneak Attacks while making it even harder for your targets to move without taking extra damage. Go Wood Elf and you’re looking at 45ft base, 135ft doubledashing.
That’s not even getting into Levitate/Fireball/Hypnotic Pattern/Banishment/Polimorph Magical Ambush shenanigans.
Speaking from a 3.X standpoint, Arcane Trickster is still pretty good. And even more so if you use the unchained/legendary games version of the rogue.
Really, both of these sources ought to be the default for 3.P.
where are their wedding rings?
They Frodo that shit: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/55/9e/63/559e63863cea79d26cfdc4a044910818.jpg