Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 4842713" data-attributes="member: 19675">Not that I know of.Patience and E-mail.I was in a multicultural MBA program, and many of my teammates on various group projects were ESL (English as a second language)- I worked with Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian and various African and South Americans.  Sometimes, I was the only native English speaker on the team.While verbal communication was pretty good, I often found myself volunteering to be the copy-editor for our submissions- too many times, they couldn't quite express in print what they could in person.Start slowly, explaining the core concepts verbally, possibly providing simplified examples.  You may also wish to simplify certain things, like the weapons lists, just to avoid the terminology barrage.As a standing HR, you might want to let people redo their characters without penalty for the first 3 sessions or so- sometimes, you just don't understand what you've done with your PC until you've played him.Give everyone your e-mail to ask for clarification.If you're committed to running 3.X, you may also wish to include some source material they may be more familiar with- Oriental Adventures (updated to 3.5 in Dragon #318) and Rokugan may be easier for them to grasp- even though they're essentially the same as the PHB- just because some of the concepts within will resonate a bit better, more of the weapons and visuals will be familiar.  They'll also add a lot of more familiar nomenclature- they may better understand what a 2HD sword is after you say its essentially a European Katana, for instance.  (And overall, the books will probably prove to be just as distorted to them as the PHB classes are to lovers of European history.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />)OTOH, there are other systems out there that may be more accessible.  Lot5R and other Asian-centric games might work.  Exalted has merit, as does Scion.  Toolkit systems, while complex, generally run smoothly after PC gen.  Another choice would be to run a game in a system based on fiction they're already familiar with: as I recall, LotR, Harry Potter, Buffy tVS, Star Trek, Star Wars, and many other "franchises" have RPGs, and familiarity with the source fiction may facilitate learning the game material.One of the simplest quality RPGs of all time was Metagames' The Fantasy Trip.  It is one of the foundational games that eventually evolved into GURPS but it is long OoP.  (FWIW, I lovt TFT, but hate GURPS- go figure!)However, someone else on these boards pointed out to me that a company has essentially revived TFT in a slightly altered form at this website:<a href="http://www.darkcitygames.com/display.php?series=law&id=19" target="_blank">http://www.darkcitygames.com/display.php?series=law&id=19</a>Beyond that, I'd go for a toolkit system: HERO, M&M, GURPS.  As I recall, each one has either some stripped-down rules or quick-start PC gen systems, and their flexibility means you can do almost anything with only 1 book, which minimizes costs- meaning both $$$ AND time investments in learning the systems.</blockquote>

Verification