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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5606842" data-attributes="member: 54877">I have introduced a lot of players to roleplaying games, and my experience supports your skepticism on this point.  Almost universally, the new players are not interested in the tactical, operational, or stategic concerns involved in kicking doors or killing monsters.  A significant minority show strong interest out of the gate in the exploration of the world, often prompted by tropes from popular fictions.  And while certainly a lot of them ultimately want to confront the monster and emerge victorious, they want to feel that it was a close run thing.  Note, "feel" instead of "know".  But mainly they want to go into something like Moria because it is creepy/exciting/evocative/etc. This is over 150 people.  Probably closer to 250.  Although, most of these were before video games became ubiquitious.  So I'm not sure how a generation of kicking down the door and slaying the monsters in video games might have changed things, if at all.  It hasn't for the handful of younger people that I've introduced to gaming recently, but they might be atypical. Interestingly, I catered to this instinct very early, because of something Gygax wrote about introducing new players.  I forget if it was in a book or Dragon.  But the thing that stuck with me was his injunction to be very careful and selective about mixing experienced players with beginners, because if the experienced players were jaded, this would tend to ruin the sense of wonder too fast for the beginners. You want people to get jaded at their own speed. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> I didn't let this stop me from including experienced players, of course.  There are some advantages to bringing out wall flowers if you have help.  But I did make sure the experienced players in that situation knew that their job was to prompt and help, not direct.</blockquote>

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