The options, as far as I was concerned, were Iron Heroes or Black Company. I moved away from Black Company as the magic rules are more complex than Iron Heroes but given the rest of the crunch in IH… I may reconsider my decision. I may simply “drift” the tokens mechanic from IH to BC in the form of generic action points (try something dynamic/cool, receive an action point token), group skills in the same manner and up feat acquisition to every other level as per 4e and IH.

That said, I don’t think it’s a bad first choice at all. I’m in a roleplaying-intensive game of Iron Heroes right now, with two guys who’ve never gamed before. One of them still mostly sticks to “I hit it with my axe,” but the other one spends more time by far dreaming up moving speeches than he does rolling dice.

Looking back on the chronicle so far, the DoW system would actually have come in handy, but I have a great group — they’ve done really well at roleplaying their intra-party conflicts without a system.

There’s nothing really comparable in nMage, no; I didn’t want to tie the whole post series directly to my own game, just use it as the baseline for my observations. (The Hubris — now Wisdom — system does fit nicely with the idea of encouraging roleplaying through mechanics.)

@Rafe – I’d start by making sure that’s something that the two non-gamers are interested in, and that will work for them. I’d also recommend running a one shot, so they can experiment with no lasting consequences, and I’d strongly consider running that one shot with a system other than D&D.

As a system, D&D isn’t great at encouraging roleplaying — that doesn’t mean you can’t roleplay the heck out of a D&D game, just that the system itself doesn’t help you much. White Wolf offers a host of free one shots for their nWoD line that include quickstart rules; you might also consider something like Spirit of the Century.

http://indie-rpgs.com/_articles/glossary.html

The second part is how I usually see it used: “deciding to ignore or alter the use of a given rule”

My question is this (and I’d love for it to be addressed as a separate post): How do you start a roleplaying-intensive game with players who are not only new to roleplaying but to table-top RPGs?

I’m looking to start a game with four relatively new players. Two are in my 4e game and have played about 6 sessions. Both have taken well to roleplaying encouragement and are getting into it. This is has shown bigtime in their co-mingled backgrounds for their Arcanist and Executioner (I’m starting up an Iron Heroes campaign). The other two, however, have never played a TT game. . . they’ve only played WoW.

The one thing I’m going to do is de-emphasize the rules/mechanics. Ie, “Tell me what you want to do and I’ll tell you what you need to do to make it happen” (if it involves rolls/rules).

Thoughts?

Did you find similar mechanics in nMage? I haven’t read through my copy thoroughly– did Hubris or other mechanics fill the gap?

Terms aside, grafting/swiping/transplanting/kitbashing rules is good stuff.