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 recommend Dungeon World for the following reasons:
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.
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.
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.
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.