Tony Vargas
Legend
Compared to teaching them what? ;PBut I'm an oldhat DM running 5e for a newbie group of players and it is crazy easy to teach the game to them.
From 2010 through 2017 I ran a /lot/ of intro games, Encounters, conventions, AL, for genuinely-new as well as returning players, or long-time players 'new' to the current ed.
/New/ players picked up 4e much more readily than other eds, 5e included. Long-time & returning players ranged from being bemused for a bit before grokking it, to insurmountable perplexity, to violent rejection. Conversely, 5e sucks returning players right in, and their enthusiasm is infectious to new players. (Honestly, for a lot of us long-time loyal D&Ders, 5e's sometimes a tad 'meh' - not disappointing, not offensive, just not quite everything some past edition was to us - but still evocative enough of those past editions to make us want to see it succeed.)
It's not two of them (because that's two very different things).Any flaws 5th edition has, attracting new players and teaching them the rules is NOT one of them.
5e has it really good as far as drawing new players in - if it drives some of them away, plenty more where they came from.
The accessibility of the rules once they're sitting down, and the meeting of expectations if they haven't been exposed to the peculiar D&D sub-genre of fantasy through an MMO or something before, not so much. They're not as baroque and unintuitive as 1e (and 1e managed to be hugely successful too, don't forget, so it's can't be that significant a flaw when it comes moving product), but it's exactly clear, concise, or intuitive, either.
Familiarity to returning players, OTOH, more than makes up for that.
(I think one thing that's overlooked when considering 'appeal to new players,' is, however ironically, the importance of nostalgia. With a property that has a history & rep from a decades-ago fad, even new players often are drawn to it wanting that bygone experience - out of curiosity rather than nostalgia, but it demands the design make similar sacrifices. That kind of new player needs to hear the old-timers, however grumpily, acknowledging that, yes, this is the real thing.)
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