D&D 5E What have you found to be the hardest thing for new players to understand about 5e systems?

Another vote for generalised spell level/caster level/spell slot confusion.

The other issue that slows down my table is confusion about the way some spells force saves, some you roll to hit and some use hp thresholds. I have found that players get slowed down by the inconsistency of the rules.

Hmm... I actually haven't had too many brand new players to teach 5E to. Most of my teaching has gone to players of prior editions, or at least players of other RPGs.

I think the major focus I put for brand new players is how to locate & use their ability scores and proficiencies. I don't like to use the standard character sheets with brand new players, because they have a lot of information that's just going to confuse them. I usually just provide them with an index card size sheet with a pre-generated character, showing ability score modifiers, proficiencies (with bonus), HP, AC, and a combat actions section (listing weapon attacks and cantrips). Any major ability not listed elsewhere will receive a mention, but usually I try to keep track of it myself (in case it comes up). If spellcasting, that will be on a separate card.

Why do some people find it so difficult to learn 5e? Anybody that can read should be able to learn how to play this relatively simple game. This must be symptomatic of the difference in culture between 1980 and 2018.

Seriously. As a 10 year old boy I taught myself how to play a much more complicated and less logical system than 5e. My mother bought me the game because that was the only thing that she could interest me in reading. Anecdotally, almost everybody that I have met from my generation went through the same process and learning curve.

I know I sound like an old man ranting about younger generations, but with all of the resources available online for free how can anybody possibly have any trouble learning 5e?

10 year olds are a lot smarter than people think. At 10 you are probably at your peak of learning powers and have the ability to accept and absorb anything. That's why kids can learn languages in a snap, and your grandmother can't work the remote.

1. BONUS ACTIONS

2. Attack rolls, ability checks, and saving throws are three different things, and the difference matters. Something that disadvantages ability checks doesn't affect saving throws, sorry.

5. No, 3 sir!

3. BONUS ACTIONS

The difference between ability checks and saving throws.

Wulffolk said:

Seriously. As a 10 year old boy I taught myself how to play a much more complicated and less logical system than 5e. My mother bought me the game because that was the only thing that she could interest me in reading. Anecdotally, almost everybody that I have met from my generation went through the same process and learning curve.

I know I sound like an old man ranting about younger generations, but with all of the resources available online for free how can anybody possibly have any trouble learning 5e?

Click to expand...

But there less free time and all games have to make things easier than back in the day. I went through that very same process, but I have never had as much free time as I did in my early teens. Now I only have time to work, work, prudently contemplate rpg things on the internet!

Wulffolk said:

Anecdotally, almost everybody that I have met from my generation went through the same process and learning curve.

I know I sound like an old man ranting about younger generations, but with all of the resources available online for free how can anybody possibly have any trouble learning 5e?

Click to expand...

You are of course speaking only of those from your generation who successfully learned the game and persisted in playing it for nearly three decades. The self-selection here is self-evident. Consider how many people in 1980 might have picked up the game and maybe tried to play once or twice, but ran into difficulty understanding it and so dropped it and never looked back. No internet on which ask for help also means no internet on which you could see them asking for help. They'd have been effectively invisible to you. For all you know, the failure rate for learning D&D was ten times higher back then than it is today.

Or maybe people born after 1980 are just some sort of lesser subspecies of human. Could be either hypothesis, really. No way to tell.

[MENTION=82596]ConflictGames[/MENTION] You are right there is a possible opportunity attack by the goblin. But really RAW this is only limited by the distances, if it is within modified movement distance (I cannot look it up atm, climbing is slower but jumping Counts as normal movement afaik) this does not exceed the allowed Actions a character might make during his turn. Backstabbing does not even require stealth if the char is a swashbuckler.

5E is designed to allow such Stunts, you can break up movement into several segments to apply your Actions. Climbing and jumping (and Swimming and flying) are part of the movement on your turn.

Never seen a serious problem with understanding spellcasting, except forgetting concentration (but it doesn't come up that often at level 1)... I would never tell a beginner "you shall not play a wizard until you've first learned how to play something else", it's horrible advice IMO and does a bad service to the game.

One thing I did encounter problems with, is managing the whole set of character abilities. Beginners do often have a hard time keeping in mind everything that their PC can do. And there are 2 (related) reasons for that:

(a) 1st level characters already have a large amount of abilities
(b) character sheets are designed from the point of view of building a PC instead of playing a PC

I typically try to mitigate problem (a) by encouraging players to play human characters or let them freely choose the race from a narrative point of view, but still use the human stats for all races (I also tried the middle ground, and kept 1 or 2 features per race instead of the full set).

With relation to problem (b) I designed my own character sheets (link below). They aren't perfect, and I still update them every now and then as I notice issues while playing. But at least they try to address a couple of typical problems with character sheets: having more stuff on them than the player really needs, being difficult to use proactively (i.e. as a source of ideas about what to do), helping you keep in mind reactive abilities. I really think that this is because they are designed more to help the player fill the sheet at character creation than use the sheet during the game; a typical character sheet flaw is to organize features by source (e.g. class features vs racial features vs feats...) instead of organizing them by usage (e.g. combat/exploration/rest/social/downtime).

http://www.enworld.org/forum/rpgdownloads.php?do=download&downloadid=1415

Edit: I forgot to mention another issue... beginners can really struggle with the general amount of rules, if the DM gives them the impression that they actually need to know a lot of them. This is very commonly the result of the DM explaining way too many things before the game starts. Now, you might think you are helping the players by teaching them how to play the game, but the truth is that with beginners you might very well not helping them at all, but instead making them feel unsuited to play. Don't do it! Don't explain a rule until such rule is required to be used in the game. Minimize the time spend preparing the first game session and creating a character, and jump into the game as early as possible.