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This right here. "Play what you want to play" is my mantra and my dumb story isn't so important that I get to take away somebody's fun because of it.

You shouldn't. Nobody should. Solo monsters are near impossible to run in 5E against a "normal" sized party of four. Against eight, the action economy advantage will absolutely wreck you. Lair actions and legendary actions can only go so far. If you've got eight fully-rested level 10 PCs, I...

I think the discussion went to "well, this is how I would amp up the challenge" because nobody here knows what you should do. That's a DM/player dynamics question that can only be answered by you having a discussion with your group in which you lead off by asking "would this be more fun for you...

Not everybody plays RPGs to win.

Almost nobody walks into a game and says "I'm going to find out what this DM is allowing and then play something that doesn't fit that". What actually happens is that they walk into a game saying "I want to be X". When they hear the DM say "in this world, you can't be X", they say to themselves...

It seems like "D&D would be better if it was easier to learn" should be an uncontroversial statement, but here we are spending two dozen internet pages arguing about it. It's just gatekeeping. That's all "back in my day", "it's supposed to be difficult", and "if I could do it, so can you"...

What this tells me is that lots of people really want to play this cool game that we all play but the presentation for a n00b sucks. This isn't like showing up to Scrabble night without having invested 3 minutes in reading the two-page rulesheet. I don't fault people for wanting to play this...

1. The very first thing I'd present to a new player would be a pre-generated character. Meet Becky the Fighter Lady and her sidekick Ralph the Religious Dude. She's a pretty strong lady and she's got this cool sword that she can do rad things with. Here, we'll show you. 2. A scripted combat...

Well, you fix it by making it easier to learn the game without having to go to a gaming store to find a veteran that's willing to teach you. Yeah I can agree that that phrasing is overstating the point. I don't think the new user experience is anything to brag about, but I'd much rather be a...

There are board games that have tutorial modes that gradually introduce more rules on top of what has been covered so as not to overwhelm the new player with everything all at once. There's little reason that a TTRPG couldn't adopt a similar model.

You're definitely right that it's come a long way. The starter sets, the sample builds in the PHBs, those are big improvements from the way many of us had to learn to play the game. While we don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, we don't want "well, it's better than it used to be"...

That's exactly the point, though. It shouldn't be "work" to learn the game. Knowing her as I do and the games that we do play, I think she would like the game. But when she sees me doing DM prep, she asks me about my "homework". Relying on your users to teach your users limits your growth...

Yeah, exactly. The brand new player is overwhelmed with options before they even start playing by making them figure out which starter set they should get.

It is exactly this. My fiancee loves games but even with me being a decades-long veteran there to teach her, she's not interested in putting in the work to learn D&D. There is a ton of terminology, rules, processes, tropes, and very unintuitive things that we don't think about twice because we...

You're not a new player, though. All those new players that you're playing with have you to lean on and guide them through learning the game.

The only one we've finished is Storm King's Thunder. I ran my group through it and it was a lot of fun. The PCs ended up with a reputation as a group that would help you when they showed up, but they were also going to make things worse in their own way before leaving. They would typically...

Have you asked them? If I proposed this to my group, they would probably look at me funny and roll their eyes over having another thing to track on their character sheets. Yours might be different, but you should probably make sure that you don't waste your time developing a system that your...

I haven't. This strikes me as being fiddly and doesn't really add much to the game other than grinding roleplaying situations to a halt while charts are checked and cross-referenced. It's probably better to make such adjustments on the fly, and only when it's going to matter. PCs in 5E already...

I meant "complicated" as compared to other resource management games, not other editions of D&D or even other RPGs. However, D&D, no matter the edition, is not an easy game. Many of us forget this because we've been playing this game for years or even decades and it's become second nature to...

And that's a fine way to play tabletop RPGs. It's just that you're working against this particular game's core assumptions. D&D 5e is a very complicated resource management game. I totally understand people who don't want to play a very complicated resource management game yet are attracted to...