GMforPowergamers
Legend
in my tight group we have 3 'old timers' all from the late 80's early 90s. we then have a few 3e but also some 4e and 5e newibie players that ONLY have been playing 6+ years...It's an important thing to keep in mind, that the vast majority of gamers right now are younger. Totaling up all the players in my gaming groups, other than the one guy that started gaming before I did, and my brother who started at the same time, every single player got their start with 3e or later. Heck, when I include the other groups those players are in, that statistic remains the same.
outside of my tight group my experience at gaming store and cons is that I am old enough to be the father of several players and dms
(useing the fact that my sister has children older then many I have met in last few months who play shows this to be very easy to see)
yup... we tried to run a game once without a healer... pre 4e I would never do that again.It also bears mentioning that without a cleric, and sometimes even with, healing back to full HP at higher levels could potentially take weeks or months of in-game time, if you wanted to be a stickler about HP. With a large group of rotating players AND probably rotating characters as well, saying "well, it's been two weeks of real time since Ranulf came back from the dungeon, so you've recovered 14 HP," is a fairly elegant solution to the problem of tracking recovery. It's either that or keeping an in-game calendar. And as someone that once did that in 2e, I can say that I would prefer not to.