Well, I'm mainly a Mage Knight player, and have a teeny background in the board game side of fantasy (Dragon Strike, Dragon Quest...the kids stuff basically).

So i was wondering, I have these great WW sets, and nothing but MK to play. Where should a DnD noobie start?

Any suggestions for easy rules and scenarios etc...? We love the Munchkin card game....would this be the ideal RPG to begin with?

Anything that can get more use out of Dennys great work basically.

Cheers in advance

Wow, this question almost belongs in the RPG Talk forum. If you're interested in starting with RPGs, you'll get a lot of different opinions about the best system to play with. There are a lot of systems out there and a lot of gamers who are fans of different ones.

D&D/d20 can be a good starting point. Mostly because so many people play D&D that it's fairly easy to find a group to play with. If you already have a group to play with and you are all pen to any system, I personally recommend Savage Worlds. It's a fast and easy system that handles everything from "D&D-ish" fantasy to car chases and spaceships.

"This is from a personal view, so just take it as that."

If you haven't already bought any books for D&D, and don't have any friends with any, be wise about what you get.  Every since WOTC took over D&D, they have doubled the price of the books.  To get started, have descent options for your game to be up to 3.5 standards, you will probably end up dishing out some cash.  Good items to start with are:
Players Handbook $40.00
Dungeon Masters Guide $40.00
Monsterous Manual $40.00

Now don't get me wrong, it is a great game.  But before I went out and jumped right into something, I would definately look for people around my area that already have at least the basics.  Also, you might find some people that are trying to get out that are selling their stuff on e-bay, this would be a wise option.

Another note: keep the sessions limited to about 5 to 7 people plus the DM.  This will help to always keep things moving.  I usually have D&D night at my house.  If I am not careful after the word gets out, I will end up sending about 10-20 people home cause my house just isnt that big for one huge D&D extraveganza and people don't want to play split campaings with another DM.

I know this is a bit much info, so I will leave with one last comment.  If you have a low-level charachter, no matter where they might be, always ALWAYS keep your eyes open for a Terrasque! ;D  You will find that the DM's have a sense of humor too

Whoah, where are you buying your books?  These are $30 each.  You can also find the 3.5 Gift Set on amazon.com for around $60 which includes all three books.

Cheers for the replies guys.

We've been playing various board games in a group for about a year now. Usually there's about seven of us, so we're ok in that respect.

We've played Dragon Strike, Dungeon quest and other pseudo RPGs like When Darkness Comes etc....

I'll probably have a look at Savage Worlds and stumble in that way. I'll also check out Ebay for cheap D20 books maybe.

Thanks again.

I didn't know, it has been a while since I bought any books.  I bought all of mine when they were 19.95 each.  My mistake on the prices, I got it confused with another book that costs 40.00 from them (Dragonomicon).  Thanks for correcting me, I should have woken up moere before inputting anything .

The nice thing about SW is that all you need is in one book ($30 new). Go to www.peginc.com and check out the free "Test Drive" rules in their download section as well as the free adventures. There's a lot more material in the full rules, but all you need to start is in the Test Drive pdf + one of the adventures (which comes with pregenerated characters). "Jared's Folly" is a good introductory fantasy adventure.

EDIT: www.dragonsfoot.org also has a lot of free Savage Worlds downloads. SW is also geared towards using minis, so your WWorks scenery will have lots of potential uses (you can see a couple examples on the link in my sig)

I'm gonna go ahead and second Bighara by recommending Savage Worlds.  Just enough rules, but not overwhelmingly many.

May I ask a Question BigHara.
Savage World has a 2-yard grid. WW-boards a 1-yard grid.
How do you handle the Boom-templates and such things? dou you make the template double size, or ignore it simply.....?

Ralf

You might also want to take a look at the D&D Miniatures game - it is designed around 1 1 inch square grid, which means it works quite well with WW.

A lot of people seem to like the prepainted D&D  miniatures, though I prefer painting my own. Plus it is fairly cheap to get into, if more than a bit light on roleplaying.

The primary advantage of D&D is that there are a lot of third party companies supporting itunder the D20 License. You can find rules for nearly any genre of game. (Plus a lot of the third party settings are just plain cooler than the WotC ones in my arrogant opinion.) Plus if you are looking to play a dungeon crawl there is a goodly number of scenarios and settings to choose from.

There are also other games out there. GURPS uses a hex grid rather than square, but it isn't that hard to adjust things. (Though I personally don't much like GURPS a fair number of folks do.)

The Auld Grump

*EDIT* Plus there are several compatable games for which you don't need the D&D Core books. Conan recently came out, while Everquest has been around for a while. Mongoose is also coming put with generic genre specific games that use the same mechanic as D&D. One of these may well fit your needs. They tend to cost more tham ay one D&D core book, but less than buying all three. Even the moste expensive (Conan at $50) is cheaper than buying the three core books.

The more WotC expects to sell of a book the less they tend to charge for it. Thus $30 a pop for the Core books, $35 to $45 for less used books. If there are additional items such as tip in maps then the price goes up a wee bit.

Plus WotC does provide a free version of the rules in the form of the SRD, which lacks the character generation and experience rules but is good for a glance through to see if you are interested.

You may want to go and see if you can find one of the free PDF versions of the SRD that people have posted in several places. (WotC is quite nice about letting people reformat and redestribute the SRD, the whole point of the document is so people can use it.)

The Auld Grump

WWorks uses a 1" = 1yd. grid?? It seems closer to the d20 1"=5 ft. scale to me. Savage World's scale is 1" = 6ft. I haven't run into a problem.

I'd agree with Bighara that there isn't any trouble with scaling with SW and WW.  Most games seem to use a 1 square/hex= 2 yards/meters formula excepting D&D which is 5 feet per square.

AuldGrump brought up GURPS, which is well supported but not to everyone's tastes.  There is a free downloadable version of the Gurps rules called Gurps Lite that is available from www.sjgames.com.  That normally uses a hex-grid, but shouldn't give square grid gamers too much of a hassle. ;D

All of the WorldWorks sets using 1" square grids should work fine for Savage Worlds, where 1" = 2 yards.

For myself, I mostly just use a regular ruler and just ignore the grid anyway.  I'm still waiting for "gridless" sets to come out!  :-)

Hear, hear!

I use a battlemat because squares make it easier to draw the map. After that out come the rulers! A mega board with squares, and terrain without... (Not that it is hard to make pattered, but gridless, inserts to cover the floor.)

Oh, and never, ever get into a fireball flinging contest when the other combatant is a carpenter... 'I throw the fireball hmmm, 114 feet, 8 inches....' 'Gah! Me 'ead just went poof!'

The Auld Grump

Hmmm, I believe that WW actually uses a 1 inch = 5 foot system, so as to be compatable with Dungeons and Dragons.

The Auld Grump

At least half of my problem with GURPS is some of the... more fanatical players I have met. (Including one who was saying that the only reason WotC was creating the D20 license was to kill GURPS...)

And the system is one of the most min/maxable ones I have ever encountered. (Plus - I am just not a big fan of D6 based systems... D10, D20s yes. D^ no - with the exception of the ould Babylon Project RPG where you subtracted a red D6 from a green D6, so the average roll was 0. High and low rolls just meant a better or worse attempt, with double 1s being the only automatic failure.)

The Auld Grump

I've looked at Savage Worlds and it seems to be a good game, but I have no experience with it so I am going to recommend Arrowflight. Quick easy rules and fun gameplay. It's one of the top 5 RPG's I've played.

You can find it at...

http://www.deep7.com

I like Arrowflight a lot myself but I don't think I'd recommend it for someone new to the hobby.  Its a very simple system if you have some experience.  I recommend good ol' D&D for its archetypal gameplay or Savage Worlds for it simplicity and speed of play.

Savage Worlds might not be the best RPG, but it is the best for at least one thing

1-shot convention games

The game is so quick and simple that you can sit down with a table of total strangers, hand them all a pre-gen character (with a combat options cheat sheet on the back), give them a nice 60 second rules explanation, and then jump right in on the game.

And you can run anything you can think of, you don't have to be tied down to any specific genre.

Just this last weekend at a con I jumped in on two different SW games. First one was a down and dirty western and the second was a down and dirty sci-fi/horror story.