Flip The Table! It's the BOARD GAME THREAD!

[Phred]

Thx to woody for RTing Keith Law to see Amazon is having a big board game sale today.

Damn, I missed it.

My son has started showing the first glimmer of interest in board game - in that, he likes to pull them out of the boxes and play with the parts. But I'll take it; I miss board games.

It is a long time between that and him actually playing the game while following the rules. Little kids love to #$!&@ cheat at board games and most are really sore losers when you kick their ass at them.

[Werthless]

Not sure how old your son is, but my 4 year old is able to pick up the concepts of a few games... you might consider starting with Ticket to Ride, Blokus, and King Domino for games that do not have complex game mechanics. For Ticket to Ride, we first played without the destination tickets. Then, we added the destination tickets (but without a penalty for failing to complete it). He enjoys it.

[Frank Grimes]

been in a big board game drought. seems like my old standbys are getting tired. even had to drag housh to the table for a card game over the holidays. seems like everyone wants to do these jackbox games... which are fine... but meh.

anybody got some good hauls over xmas? or played something fun?

[Werthless]

I got my wife "Evolution," which both looks like a fun game and is a jab at her Christian upbringing (we used to debate the literalness of the Bible back in the day). Why I bought it (I havent played it yet):

Allegedly a decent 2 player game
Game is much different each time, based on the card combinations distributed
Estimated game time is only 30 minutes

An overview here:

[Soren]

Absolutely love Evolution. Simple enough to pick up, plenty of depth to the gameplay and doesn't get old quick either.

[CalvinBall]

Played DnD for the first time in my life tonight. What an absolutely insane game. It is endlessly complicated. Just randomly picked things about my character. A mountain dwarf wizard!

[Soren]

Played DnD for the first time in my life tonight. What an absolutely insane game. It is endlessly complicated. Just randomly picked things about my character. A mountain dwarf wizard!

Welcome to the party. We've got mountain dew and cheetos.

[CalvinBall]

Played DnD for the first time in my life tonight. What an absolutely insane game. It is endlessly complicated. Just randomly picked things about my character. A mountain dwarf wizard!

Welcome to the party. We've got mountain dew and cheetos.

What are some good characters to start with?

The spell slot thing confused me a lot. Also the little circles next to all the attributes. Why do you fill some in?

[thephan]

go with some muscle and a healthy smashing and slashing weapon wielder like a barbarian. Back in the day I dug playing Paladins. Leave the wizard/magic stuff to dyed in the wool geeks.

[Soren]

Played DnD for the first time in my life tonight. What an absolutely insane game. It is endlessly complicated. Just randomly picked things about my character. A mountain dwarf wizard!

Welcome to the party. We've got mountain dew and cheetos.

What are some good characters to start with?

The spell slot thing confused me a lot. Also the little circles next to all the attributes. Why do you fill some in?

Take my advice with a grain of salt since I only play Pathfinder (which is based on an older edition of DnD) but:

Casters are hard, especially when it's your first character. There's a ton of extra #$!&@ you need to know how to do plus all the resource management involved in when you decide to cast your spells for the day. It's almost always easiest to just try to hit things hard with a big sword or some such. Just be a fighter or a barbarian and if you play long enough to get to a high enough level where casters start taking over then it's worth the effort to learn how to play as one.

Wizards are prepared casters, which means at the beginning of the day a Wizard sits down with his book and decides what he needs to cast for the day (as opposed to spontaneous characters that just have innate magical abilities they draw from). Your spell slots basically represent an individually prepared spell. So, if I have a Wizard with five level 1 spell slots and I want to cast Magic Missile five times that day I have to prepare an instance of magic missile for each spell slot.

I don't know enough about DnD's skills but in Pathfinder at least you get skill ranks per level and putting ranks in a certain skill makes you better at it. There are some skills you can't use if you haven't put a rank in them. A lot of times if a character of mine is #$!&@ at something (like a caster trying to do anything strength related) I won't bother to fill in the value for that since I won't be using it.

My friends and I have been talking about trying 5e. Pathfinder is very fun but also ridiculously complicated. I also enjoy talking about this for hours at a time so I'm glad to answer as many questions as I can.

[Uncle Milty]

Definitely go with Paladin. Great character on Have Gun - Will Travel.

[Phred]

This game seems to have gotten infinitely more complicated than the version of it that I played in 1981.

[CalvinBall]

Thanks Soren

Friend is a teacher and some kids play in his room after school. He wrote a quest or whatever it is called for them. We are playing that. Started on some boat and had to fight some fish monster things. Took a long time to beat them despite being the weakest monsters in the whole thing.

[WheelsFellOff]

Played DnD for the first time in my life tonight. What an absolutely insane game. It is endlessly complicated. Just randomly picked things about my character. A mountain dwarf wizard!

Welcome to the party. We've got mountain dew and cheetos.

What are some good characters to start with?

The spell slot thing confused me a lot. Also the little circles next to all the attributes. Why do you fill some in?

It sounds trite, but the best character to start with is one you think you'd have fun playing. It's always kind of awkward at first with characters being one note until the players figure out who they are.

Combat tips-wise, the biggest thing in 5e is the numerical difference between players and enemies. If you're outnumbered, you can very quickly get in trouble and have an encounter start snowballing away so be careful and try not to split your attacks to too many targets. It's better to kill one than wound two when both would get attacks.

You can think of spell slots like ammo and your spells like an equipment loadout. How you use and choose them can vary a bit from class to class to keep all casters from feeling the same. So a wizard selects a number of spells each day (dependent on how smart they are) from those in their spellbook like ordering from a menu. A cleric or druid chooses a number (based on wisdom) from any cleric spell and also gets their domain spells prepared for free. Sorcerers and bards don't prepare but it's very difficult for them to change out a spell. the spell slots are used based on what level a spell is cast at. You can't cast a spell below the level it's listed as, so you can cast the 1st level spell magic missile using a 3rd level slot, but you can cast the 3rd level spell fireball with a 1st level slot. Many spells get a power boost when using a higher level slot which will be part of the spells description. If you're a warlock, that's a separate paragraph...

The circle thing by skills is actually pretty simple, it marks if you're proficient in the skill or not. Proficiency is the games way of saying a 15th level character is generally better at everything than a 3rd level character, it's a bonus that increases every four levels (from +2 at lvl 1 to +6 at level 17) and gets added to attack rolls, skill checks, saves, or spell DCs when you're "proficient" with them instead of older editions making you subtract when not trained in something. So for your skills, if you're proficient your skill check is the d20 roll + your proficiency modifier + your ability score modifier. If you're not proficient its just the d20 + ability. Some classes, like rogues and bards, get expertise in a skill which means they get double the proficiency bonus in the thing their specialized in.