Making D&D more attractive for TTRPG beginners.

[sabs]

Do you remember the initial adventure in the D&D Red Set?

You fought some skeletons, some goblins, and a rust monster.

[mean_liar]

[shadzar]

Do you remember the initial adventure in the D&D Red Set?

You fought some skeletons, some goblins, and a rust monster.

That is the Solo adventure in the Players book.

The DM book has a group adventure, Your first game.

I like this part best from the DM book on the adventure, to remind DMs they have a job to do..

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PRE-GAME CHECKLIST

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1. Do all the players know how to play? Have they played the Solo Adventure in the PLAYERS’ MANUAL?
2. Have you read this book up to this point? Have you looked through the rest of this booklet?
3. Do you and the players know the “Who-Why-What-Where-When” of the adventure?
4. Are all the characters ready to go, including equipment?
5. Have the players chosen a Caller and a Mapper? Do they have a piece of graph paper and a pencil. to map with?

---

If any answer is “No,” stop and fix the problem.

[Sarandosil]

D&D 3.0 was my first TTRPG. I played a lot of computer games so a lot of the concepts weren't new, but it still took a very long time to understand the game. A lot of the system mastery came from making characters, the sheets by Joonas Hirvonen were great for me because they were basically a walkthrough of character creation.

For any game this complex, you seriously need a newbie character sheet. One that's horribly space inefficient with boxes for every possible modifier and with rules reminders printed in smallish text next to the stuff you have to fill in. The gear list, for example, should have a separate box for every item slot instead of just an empty list. And it should be the default character sheet in the book, because seriously, everyone I introduced to the game was going to use that until I handed them a better one.

[Maj]

Huh. I wonder; would including a 'Tutorial Adventure' as well as premade characters would be a good idea? It feels like it would make teaching the game easier and provide some common ground for most players, as well as setting a tone.

I don't know that you necessarily need a prepackaged tutorial adventure so much as you need to have a tutorial mode for the DM.

Unless you go through character creation like Sarandosil mentioned, when you get a character sheet made up already for you, you are essentially being handed a vocab lesson and piles of math that you don't understand. The DM can't expect a new player to ask for a spot check - they don't know what a spot check is. So the flow of the game has to be altered slightly to teach the players the terminology, the location of the information on the character sheet, and the circumstance in which the information is used.

Of course, if the DM has a hard time getting into tutorial mode, then a beginner's adventure would probably be a good idea.

[Sarandosil]

At first I thought she was wearing chainmail and I was like "holy shit, properly armored female?", and then I noticed the bra and realized that was bare skin.

Son I am disappoint.

Anyway in my experience it's usually better to have people make their first character and learn the combat during the game itself. I've introduced about sixty billion people to the game, and usually I'd hand them the Joonas character sheet and sit around while they made their character. Most people didn't want you hovering around actively helping, but some do, and everyone appreciates having you around to answer questions regardless of how much hand holding they want through the creation process.

My experience with giving people ready made character sheets is like Maj says, they have no idea what's on it and don't know where to look for something when it pops up in game.

[Shazbot79]

I completely agree with the notion that D&D should make the non-combat mini-games just as big a part of the overall experience as the combat mini-game. I've never thought that D&D should shy away from videogame influences IF they can be implemented properly in the system, but I also believe that first and foremost, the game should accentuate the things that make it unique when compared to other forms of media.

However, one thing I don't get is why people assume that D&D just HAS to have complex character creation at all. It's not that I don't personally enjoy games that have nearly infinite axes of character customization and I can see the appeal of such games, but what I don't understand is why D&D specifically has to be one of those games.

My viewpoint stems from the notion that D&D is likely to be the first TTRPG that most burgeoning gamers will play, and therefore should be as accessible and user-friendly as possible. This means that decision points should be based-thematically and be as distinct as possible. Even if you were to include a section of pregens, to a newer player it will merely look like numbers interposed between paragraphs of utter gibberish, unless you manage to head each selection with an evocative elevator pitch that adequately differentiates between the other options.

Thinking back on my days of playing 3.x when it first came out, the prospect of feats, skill ranks, prestige classes, et al was an exciting one...but after the new game sheen faded, it became more about bookkeeping than anything else (not that this aspect of the game improved much with 4th edition either).

In retrospect, I think that I would have been more happy with modular character creation, wherein you pick race, then class (say, fighter), then subclass/build/kit (gladiator, knight, berserker, captain, tempest, ronin, master-of-arms, etc.), then trained skills...and you're ready to play. This would have maintained the utility of class-based progression while still ensuring that you could have a party of Dwarven Fighters that were all unique on paper in a way that wasn't intimidating to people who aren't used to poring through feat lists and spells.

[Winnah]

Archetype was probably the wrong word to use. Iconic Role might have been a better term, but sounds a little pretentious.

I think it would be a good idea to avoid labelling sample characters by their class. For example:

don't include a sample Rogue character, who happens to be called Nico and is a Halfling. Include a character named Nico, who happens to be a rogue.

don't include a guide on how to play rogues with Nico's character sheet. Simply give advice on where Nico's strengths and talents lie.

Give some pointers on how Nico can advance into Nico the Deadly Grifter or Nico the Bandit King, but encourage the player to come up with their own path of advancement. Just my opinion.

Boxed adventures were a great tool when I was getting into the hobby. They tend to be a little simple though, and as a rough rule, simple systems don't support sudden variations. While an experienced GM can react to an unanticipated event and incorperate it into a story, not everyone has this ability to roll with it. This has to be kept in mind when dealing with an introductory scenario. Stuffer Shack is a good example. It can be played as short and sweet or can be the starting point for a longer story arc.

[K]

If I was going to make a new edition, I'd make sure that all the important character choices at creation were things like "is the picture of the ax more badass than the sword for my armored knight like the cool female knight on the cover, or should I be a naked barbarian who kill things with a lightning spear like the full-color picture of the barbarian dude killing a hydra in the Barbarian write-up?"

The instant you start forcing Trevor to pick where to put a +1 among their eight to ten stats and then forcing him to calculate a cascade of bonuses that then apply to other stats, you've already caused his eyes to glaze over and the Smash Bros. to begins its sweet call.

[K]

At first I thought she was wearing chainmail and I was like "holy shit, properly armored female?", and then I noticed the bra and realized that was bare skin.

No, that's chainmail and a bra. The bra is over her chainmail, so I assume she is actually wearing platemail and has boobie protectors and other plate pieces.

[Username17]

That was the age of Madonna, wearing a bra over your chainmail just wasn't that weird. If she didn't have a helmet, we could see how her feathered hair had been sprayed to poof up.

-Username17

[hogarth]

A pre-written back story and motivations does provide some time outside of the game to really study and understand the world the characters are in. Ideally I think a back story sould be a give and take dialogue with the DM, so that one can come up with a good character concept that fits well in the current campaign world. That requires a modicum of time and efforts on everyone's part.

In general, I'm not a big fan of "50 pages of back story" characters, so I would go the other way -- have a simple back story and motivation so that the GM can seamlessly drop it into his world.

By the way, there is one genre of game that usually has pre-built sample characters complete with back stories -- superhero RPGs. Having said that, I've never seen anyone play using a generic pre-built superhero (as opposed to Spider-Man in MSH or Cyborg in DC, say).

[tzor]

No, that's chainmail and a bra. The bra is over her chainmail, so I assume she is actually wearing platemail and has boobie protectors and other plate pieces.

No, that's not a bra. She appears to be wearing a (I HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE) piece of armor over her shoulders that would be where modern people put epaulettes (normally pauldrons also covered the upper sholder as well, but this appears to be stand alone. The leather strap seems to be connecting the front part with a belt mid waist. Thus the straps are keeping the armor secured as opposed to the boobs up.

I have no idea what the acutal armor is. The drawing is too finely detailed for it to be chain ... from that I'm assuming that it is mithril chain. Mithril chain is, probably the best armor fashion statement for any properly dressed female fighter, light, flexible, and so darn stylish.

[shadzar]

At first I thought she was wearing chainmail and I was like "holy shit, properly armored female?", and then I noticed the bra and realized that was bare skin.

No, that's chainmail and a bra. The bra is over her chainmail, so I assume she is actually wearing platemail and has boobie protectors and other plate pieces.

Laurana often wore chainmail with breast plate and cuisses, covered with some sort of tabard over it all.

[JigokuBosatsu]

This is making me think back to my roots... when I was 8 or so my mom worked as the head of a groundskeeping crew at a snooty boys' boarding school. I was aware of fantasy from novels and computer games, but my first encounter with RPGs proper came when I was being babysat (rather, completely left to amuse myself in the den) by the headmaster's wife. What should I discover but the Red Box, in all its crappy glory. I didn't have much time with it, but took what I found there to my best friend at the time, and we spent months making our own little shitty dungeons on steno pads. You know- everything was randomized by closing your eyes and pointing at a table, etc. This was great fun until I ended up getting several of the box sets on discount at a bookstore. I remember being a little disappointed by how flat and stilted the setting/rules were, and it was only when I discovered the AD&D books did I thrash around in my bed with NPC attitude generation tables and truly become a nerd.