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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 6057689" data-attributes="member: 6680772">First, thanks to Mercurius for the thoughtful post.  I've had similar thoughts.I think Mercurius's point would be better understood not in the perspective of "simplicity vs complexity", but rather with the concept of "buy-in".  There are all sorts of popular complex games out there, but they all have an easy buy-in.  Video games used to come with manuals that you were meant to read before you started playing, so you knew how the game worked.  That has been largely abandoned in favor of the tutorial or introductory level.  The static nature of board games make the buy-in easy; a classic example is chess, which lends itself to much study and analysis, but learning how to play is just a matter of learning how six pieces move in fairly straightforward ways.  Card games such as Magic also have a pretty easy buy-in.  The basic rules are easily explained, and the effects of each card are written on them, so you easily learn as you go, using cards you've never seen before.Of course, RPGs have an extremely easy buy-in if you're playing with an already established group.  Give the newbie a pre-gen, and tell him just to do what he imagines, and the GM will adjudicate and/or ask for a die roll accordingly.  But D&D can't rely purely on that to grow the fan base.  It needs something that allows people to do what they can do with the above games: have a group of people who've never played before pick up the game and fairly easily start playing.D&DN has been raked over the coals for not being innovative, for running back to old, out-dated concepts in a short-sighted bid to grab players who have fallen away, be that OSR or Pathfinder.  IMO, D&DN has in fact shown incredible innovation in the development of specialties and backgrounds (among other things).  In the TSR-era, the Basic and Expert Sets provided an easy buy-in for AD&D.  WotC wants something like that.  But, they don't want two competing lines running concurrently.  The problem is that chargen in WotC-era has become a much larger part of the game.  Introduction and chargen in Moldvay Basic is 13 pages.  1e is 38 pages.  2e is 79 pages.  I don't have 3e books, but Pathfinder is about 160 pages.  4e is over 200, not even counting equipment.  There are no few people playing complex games, and enjoying building characters for MMORPGs, but none of them involve flipping through 150-200 pages.Pre-gens are of course one easy way to avoid this, but then you're depriving the new players one of the great appeals of role-playing: creating and relating to a character all your own.  There are video games that offer this up-front, with a much easier buy-in.  So what the specialties & backgrounds do for D&DN is allow them to re-create the ultra-simple buy-in of TSR-D&D, but within the same game allow for the kind of ultra-customizeable chargen that WotC-D&D lovers enjoy, and that some new players will undoubtedly enjoy.Related design goals are theater-of-the-mind, ease of one-on-one play, and the ability to run a whole adventure in an hour.  These are also things that ease the buy-in.  I was introduced to D&D with a one-on-one game, and much of my earliest play was one-on-one with my sister, or two-on-one with my sister and my friend.  We had but the Moldvay/Cook Basic and Expert sets -- no minis, with our dungeons plotted on graph paper, and our characters written out on notebook paper.  None of this has anything to do with simplicity or complexity, but with an easy buy-in.Edit: to give a further example.  I was introduced to D&D with a one-on-one game of Moldvay Basic.  After that one session, I borrowed my friend's copy, read it, and introduced my sister to the game with a one-on-one adventure.  That's how easy the buy-in was, even though for someone who's never played or DM'd before, Moldvay Basic doesn't really come across as "simple".</blockquote>

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