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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 5804990" data-attributes="member: 8835">The story Bill was an observer, correct?I can see someone not knowing how to read the dice.  that is something very basic to cover with new players, both in how to reference then (2d6, 1d8) and in how to read them since non-d6 dice might be a new concept to a new player.The grid causing confusion for Bill is unexpected.Many games have squares denoting where you can move, and the nicer tiles usually make the grid be unobtrusive to the larger picture of the layout.  It's not a complicated concept to see a dungeon layout in tiles and grasp that it represents the playspace and these figures are your guys.I'm not going to call Bill an idiot.  I have seen non-stupid people be stumped by simple concepts.  It seems to happen most often when there are a lot of side details present.  Things that their brain is trying to integrate as related information, that can really be discarded as tangential to the main concept.Thus, when you killed the grid, you removed an aspect from the presentation, that was confusing his understanding.  It wasn't the grid itself.  It was most likely that you kept putting out map elements that made no sense to him how or why they were put out there.Look at it from a no-battlemat perspective.  If you saw D&D played in a group that used no map, battlemat or other on-table representation of where people are, how confusing would that be for the first time?  Especially if you didn't really pay close attention and didn't know what things the GM said meant or were significant.Now slide that to watching a group play D&D.  You would think it's easier, there's a map, showing what's happening.But to the observer, the map usage is random and intermittent.  The players will talk for a while, then suddenly the guy in charge starts putting out the mat, and then they move their figures around, and after an hour, they ignore the map (because nobody bothers removing it until the next encounter).It's basically a distracting element to what's really going on.  Especially as an observer, not as a new player at the table who is getting talked through the whole time.</blockquote>

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