AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic

Hello.

I'm somewhat new to D&D. While I have played a number of P&P games in the past, for some reason I never really got into D&D.

I've got an RP itch right now that I just can't get rid of. Problem is I have no outlet at the moment other then NwN (sad, I know). Only thing that's keeping me from jumping into the server is the setting. I know nothing of the Forgotten Realms setting other then what I've played in a handful of PC games. Last thing that I want to do is ruin anything by not knowing the lore. Simple fix would to read every book that I could find about the Forgotten Realms setting, but I just don't have that kind of time at the moment.

Welcome to Amia sir/ma'am!

I say just hold your nose and jump on in game! If questions arise about the setting, be sure to check out the Varia on the forums here for guides to Gods and such in the setting. If those don't have the answers you seek, check out the Lore Questions Thread and fire away! Dont be bashful either as there is no such thing as a "dumb question," only bad answers.

In any case it is always exciting to see new players!

I didn't know anything either and am still here. Just look up things when necessary and you'll learn.

Just make a human and learn as you go along. Worked for me!

I totally agree, my first plunge into amia, -first- plunge, I made a human and acted as though I was from the back end of nowhere mountains and went from there, its deffinatly the best way to learn

Glyph wrote:

I totally agree, my first plunge into amia, -first- plunge, I made a human and acted as though I was from the back end of nowhere mountains and went from there, its deffinatly the best way to learn

That was going to be my approach as well. Though I was thinking more along the line of a Rogue-type build that isn't very open about talking about his past.

Ah well, just another case of my over-analyzing of everything; lol.

I bought NWN on a strange feeling. I had money, wanted a game and bought it, I knew absolutely nothing about it. I didnt even know what D&D was when I bought it.

I started on action servers after the campaign got boring. Finally settled into RP, and now I love it.

I also jumped into Amia, found the player base to be friendly for the most part and plan on staying for many years.

I didn't know anything about Forgotten Realms either (too NEW for me!) I knew only what I'd picked up from playing the original NWN campaign, as my previous server was 'home-grown' lore. The first character I created on Amia was a Halfling.....without even knowing they were called Hin....

It really doesn't matter, and you even have an advantage over some of the players here in that you have roleplayed before, & p'n'p at that.... plenty of people here never have, prior to this.

If you are worried, then try a character who can be expected to know nothing.....I'm having a lot of fun at the moment playing a character who's an illiterate peasant from one of the outlying islands of Amia, who had never left his tiny village before, and that village the only one on that remote island. Played one before who was an ignorant 'barbarian' from up in the mountains. As you can probably imagine, when you look at it from that angle, knowing nothing can be a fun aspect to be playing anyway.

Hope to see you in-game!

.....Just seen your second post:

Ioskeha wrote:

.....I was thinking more along the line of a Rogue-type build that isn't very open about talking about his past.

Ah well, just another case of my over-analyzing of everything; lol.

Problem solved!

(and yeah, I over-analyze too!)

Many of us are veteran D&D PnP players, and will gladly help where needed.
Try and learn what you can in-game of course, but do read up on the Amia rules.

Welcome!

Well if you are wondering if you should play here then ... you should! :3

But yeah when I started here I had some DnD background but I didn't really know any lore. And I didn't know any Forgotten Realms stuff either. I just looked up what I needed to and read downloaded stuff.

Remember! These are your friends:
Forgotten Realms wiki
NWN wiki

I would link but I'm on my phone lol

I had about as much knowledge about Forgotten Realms as I do about the finer points of breeding llamas, but I jumped into the deep end head first and managed to come up for air and swim around pretty easily. You're definitely over-analyzing and over-thinking it. Just jump in... the water's fine!

Hello, welcome, feel free to go down the list here. You learn information about the game systems about D&D and some extraneous information there.
http://www.otherworlders.org/srd/basics.html

General time-line about things which occurred in the FR universe:
http://www.o-love.net/realms/fr_time_dr.html

Amian specific lore is below, and more available in the lore forums.

If you are playing a human, centric around Cordor, which has come from there, you may wish to pay special attention to DM story posts by DM's Yossarin/Leggomi.

I believe we're around 1380DR (Dale Reckoning) at the moment. Dale Reckoning, is the name for the years. (Sort of like how we say AD or BC.)
There is an Amian specific timeline:

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=55961&p=918628#p918628

Check the DM story board, to get a good grasp of most of the big goings on in the history.

<- You can get basic racial information from the Subrace sidepanel; it is located to the left under Systems.

I only knew what I'd gleaned from a handful of novels when I started. I'd never role-played before, either. I still don't know anything but I know where to look, and that has people fooled.

Amia is definetely worth playing on. You won't have much easier a time, lorewise, on other high quality RP servers. They tend to be set in the Realms just as well. It's probably not smart to jump headfirst into playing an intense religious class or something else lore-steeped (unless you intend to find mentors In Character, which would be really cool), but you really don't need to know much to play a run-of-the-mill adventurer. If you know which end of the sword goes into the monster, you're pretty much set.

Play and ask questions, you'll be fine. We're all pretty patient on here and so long as you enjoy yourself the rest of us will as well!

Arrghhh seeing the timeline reminds me of all the stuff we lost that I wrote in there....

TormakSaber wrote:

Arrghhh seeing the timeline reminds me of all the stuff we lost that I wrote in there....

I know ;-;

Dwagin wrote:

TormakSaber wrote:

Arrghhh seeing the timeline reminds me of all the stuff we lost that I wrote in there....

I know ;-;

"If I could turn back time..."

start as something simple.
I started with superdumb half-orc barb

he became a knight xD

My previous server was a non-Faerun type fantasy setting that differed very very greatly from the setting here, with the god setup and whatnot... so I knew nothing when I came here, and I still don't, but I am learning as I go. Welcome!

forget what everyone said,
start requesting half-fey mindflayer with dragon descent and is the cousin of elminster. also go with druid/monk/shifter build.
Can't go wrong with that.

TeroSNS wrote:

forget what everyone said,
start requesting half-fey mindflayer with dragon descent and is the cousin of elminster. also go with druid/monk/shifter build.
Can't go wrong with that.

Murex wrote:

TeroSNS wrote:

forget what everyone said,
start requesting half-fey mindflayer with dragon descent and is the cousin of elminster. also go with druid/monk/shifter build.
Can't go wrong with that.

It'll be done eventually so why not now?

You can often learn from other people, that or the actual game.

I started on here after reading a case of FR novels, loved elves but didn't know quite enough about them to make a "real" one so I made one who had been raised by humans. It... didn't turn out that great. In retrospect. Starting out as a human is smarter. Learn as you go along and have lots of fun!

Everyone said enough- I just wanted to add if you have any questions while in game within reason (I won't totally spoil anything for you) feel free to give me a private message or ask in Roleplay. Characters in my siggy.

Heh, even to this day I really don't know alot about D&D or Faerun and constantly play with my internet browser open with Google at my fingertips to find whatever info I need to educate myself on the moment's question/lore.

I only bought NWN since my cousin wanted me to join him online to play the Original Campaign in multi-player, to only finish the game in a little more than a weeks time. Shortly there after he lost interest and I was left with a game I never even wanted.

If fate would have it, I decided to check the server lobby and clicked on Roleplay then searched for the most populated server I saw. Amia was the winner and here I am still playing here on Amia nearly 6 years later. (I was such a noob to online gaming, I never even realized there was even a website/forum until months later)

Just about everything I know about D&D I've learned here and am always cross-referencing back to NWN spells and mechanics when play PnP.

So in short, YES, PLAY HERE!!

Ioskeha wrote:

Hello.

I'm somewhat new to D&D. While I have played a number of P&P games in the past, for some reason I never really got into D&D.

I've got an RP itch right now that I just can't get rid of. Problem is I have no outlet at the moment other then NwN (sad, I know). Only thing that's keeping me from jumping into the server is the setting. I know nothing of the Forgotten Realms setting other then what I've played in a handful of PC games. Last thing that I want to do is ruin anything by not knowing the lore. Simple fix would to read every book that I could find about the Forgotten Realms setting, but I just don't have that kind of time at the moment.

Before I joined I had played Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale... and those not even till the end and I had no clue of whats going on. When I joined amia I aswell had zero knowledge about /anything/ concerning D&D!... I still have zero knowledge and since I am a in general confused and lazy person I will never cease to mess things up, but its nevertheless fun, because you learn stuff by doing it!

There is also lots of lore info on this forum and Nwn/FR Wikis that helped me out alot, too. you should probably just start with a character and gather up all the info you need for your roleplay while you play. Best if you also read the server rules, but thats pretty much it.

Nivo wrote:

"If I could turn back time..."

What you really mean is, If I could turn back time...

...gnoB.

Be our friend.

Heh, I half expected to see at least 10% of all replied posts telling me not to ruin their RP.

I don't even think I played any PnP games that came close to a D&D setting. I've mostly played Shadowrun, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, and a few games of Call of Cthulhu - which is based off of d20 if I recall right but very different from a D&D setting.

Thanks for the URLs. Got them bookmarked. Not going to have time to make a PC tonight and play, but I will go though what I can about the lore in the mean time.

I didn't know anything but bits and pieces from dating nerds in highschool and having about a year where I decided D&D was cool. NOW I R A DM.

DERP.

Many of us started here without knowing a single thing about D&D. I was one of those people. I didn't know -anything- about it. My only experience with anything the related to D&D were what little I knew about Garden Gnomes, Elves, LoTR and Diablo I and II. In other words, I knew nothing. I'd only ever RPed twice in my life and it was that old Marvel PnP game with three friends who wanted to try it.

To this day, I have zero RP experience outside of NWN multiplayer and those two PnP sessions.

Grab yourself a Human, pick a simple enough class like fighter, rogue or something and enjoy! You'll learn as you go.

I had real life extensive roleplaying experience, from FR even, so I was pretty much the noobie in my first PnP games. Seeing what others replied, it's not hard for a total ignorant person to start here.

First of all, welcome! Amia is a rather n00b-friendly server. You'll pick up on things eventually along gameplay, and if you feel uncertain, you can always start with a character who doesn't know much about anything at all. That's how I personally started playing on the server. It's not so horrible if you screw up with something; as long as you try to comprehend the setting, it'll surely pay off.

Don't be shy to use internet material, either. In case you wanted to play a dwarf, for example, I'd advise you to scour the world wide web a teensy bit, and you could possibly end up with a site like this: http://www.nj-pbem.com/

Then you could type "dwarf" in the search box, which is represented in the main page, and you would end up with this: http://www.nj-pbem.com/data/Races/DwarfInfo.htm

Awfully handy and easy.

One bit of advice: if you're looking stuff up online as far as Faerunian lore goes, be careful of your source. The server is based in editions 3.0/3.5, and a lot of lore out there now is 4th edition, which is almost entirely ignored by Amia (since 4e sucks). Anything that mentions stuff like the Spellplague, the refounding of Miyeritar, the death of Tyr/Helm/Mystra/Eilistraee/50% of the other gods is likely wrong, unless it specifies that it's talking about the Time of Troubles or the Godswar.

For example, a good portion of the D&D wiki is unuseable due to it being 4e.

What Gers said. That's why we have the Lore Questions Topic where we'll refer you to reliable sources or dig the info up ourselves.

Ahh... the early days.

I bought my copy of NWN around May of 2003. I had just moved home after college and was looking for a good RPG to kill some time. I don't remember exactly, but I think I was looking at reviews on Gamespot or one of the magazines, MaximumPC or something. NWN had rave reviews, so I bought it!

I remember back then, action servers were where it was at, and I made a character on Zombieland 24/7... which amazingly enough is still up although there are zero people on it... ever. But back then, you had to wait in line to get in! We had names like ==zzZZ+pwNz0r killer Zephiroth+ZZzz== and talked about soccer while we were hunting. DM's were totally half-ass and most just came on to piss people off with random dragon encounters or to buff the hell out of their friends and make custom items. Ahh... the bad old days. But just grinding and leveling and getting uber l00t in a total anarchy server started to suck.

Flip forward 8 years. Finding Amia has been great. The RP is wonderful, and people are always willing to include you in their story arc... or at least tolerate you if you force yourself into it. There's not a lot of metagaming or griefing. I wish there were more people on when I play (GMT +8), but when I play on the weekends, I see all the great RP'ers and players!

I'm actually surprised at how dedicated and disciplined the DM team is. If you're here to RP and have a good time in your free time, Amia is great. I work a very stressful, full-time job, and my free time is precious. It's a great way to decompress. I have to say buying NWN and finding Amia has been the wisest purchase I ever made. $90 (and you can get the Diamond edition now for like... almost nothing) for all the games = thousands and thousand of hours of *fun* for over 8 years and counting!!!

What ever you do don't have your first character join a radical group *Nods* Causes problems for them

dont listen to the doctor!!

Go ahead! Join the crew.

Welcome!

Don't worry about not knowing the details. Just learn as you play! It's what most of us did, and still do.

I would like to add my own personal ground rules that I use, read 3.0/3.5 dnd materials where possible, 1st ed is semi valid, as is 2nd ed, avoid 4th edition with a passion.

also once you have a grasp of the rough story of how the forgotten realms came into being with the gods and the elemental chaos and that war, and then the time of troubles, the only thing that is any different in amia is that the spellplague never happened.

unfortunatly the avoid 4th ed like a passion means reading FR wiki isn't usually a good idea, tormak had to correct me a billion times on small things I picked up there, its better to find a hard copy of the forgotten realms settings and other 3/3.5 manuals.

ed: that said, FR wiki is still pretty awesome to get a feel for things, and the geographic map of the world including past events is semi valid. however some of the history is not, so its best to just use it as a rough map and a lil' bit of culture referance.

Glyph wrote:

unfortunatly the avoid 4th ed like a passion means reading FR wiki isn't usually a good idea, tormak had to correct me a billion times on small things I picked up there, its better to find a hard copy of the forgotten realms settings and other 3/3.5 manuals.

ed: that said, FR wiki is still pretty awesome to get a feel for things, and the geographic map of the world including past events is semi valid. however some of the history is not, so its best to just use it as a rough map and a lil' bit of culture referance.

The Amian Wiki is also quite nice!
The link is there:

<-----------------------

Gers wrote:

(since 4e sucks). Anything that mentions stuff like the Spellplague, the refounding of Miyeritar, the death of Tyr/Helm/Mystra/Eilistraee/50% of the other gods is likely wrong, unless it specifies that it's talking about the Time of Troubles or the Godswar.

For example, a good portion of the D&D wiki is unuseable due to it being 4e.

But you have to admit Those gods really needed to die... especially Eilistraee!

Eilistraee's Jesus-death was lame, though.

And Mystra getting killed in the heart of her realm, and three other gods of magic dying as a result is like the equivalent of a five year old stomping on a Lego fort, yelling, "Boom smash wee! I make lore."

Just not as entertaining.

:roll:

Anyway. >> I'll add to the list of people who started playing Amia knowing very little about Forgotten Realms lore. I knew the basics, but, had a lot to pick up. Playing a high lore character did not make it easier, especially when I became a faction leader! but, it is certainly nothing to worry about. Just jump in, keep your browser open, and have fun. You'll be downloading PDFs and picking up the finer details in no time. :wink:

Yes, you're spoiling half the game for me. Thanks guys, I'll go sob in a corner and wish you were all dead.

Yeaah I don't care for what 4th Ed did to Forgotten Realms lore.. but at the same time I don't nescessarily mind the system and mechanics so if I ran my own Faerun based 4th Ed game I'd come up with my own custom needed feats for Eilistraee, Mystra and any gods people'd wanna play that're poofed. (In point of fact I already did)

you guys should see what 5th edition will do.

Last edited by Dwagin on Sat, Jun 04 2011, 1:48 AM, edited 1 time in total.

4.0E has Tiamat as servant of Bane.

I'm wondering if I should play here.

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