Easing in a rules-shy player.

[Umbran]

She's DEFINITELY not going to like the templating, the weaving and unravelling, the heightening and diminishing, or the "spells known each day" part.

Templating, luckily, is a function of feats. Unless she specifically sets out to use templates, they won't be relevant. And it won't be a case where she has to worry about hamstringing herself, as if she doesn't use the feat for templating, she's using it for something else so isn't "losing out" on things everyone else gets.

Weaving and unravelling spell slots seems to me to be more an issue of "Crap, I need this spell now, but I've cast all my 3rd level spells for the day!", than of soemthing that's used regularly by all spellcasters. If so, that's a situation that the GM will generally see, and be able to give her the solution.

Heightening and diminishing is a tool that she might miss out on a bit, but not too much, especially at lower levels. She's not trying to be a Magister or a Witch. As a Mageblade, she can probably get away with tossing most of her spells straight.

 

[Krellic]

I agree with most of the above. Allow her to keep it simple even if this does not optimise her character and give her plenty of role-play/story options. As she starts to enjoy/enthuse over the character encourage a bit by bit introduce more options.

You might even make an initially limited spell selection part of her back story and give some minor compensating bonus in the early stages of the game.

If she's really having a good time I'm sure she'll start to come round and get a little more sophisticated in her play.

Patience and kidology.

 

[Von Ether]

Although an ideal player would be the perfect roleplayer AND a rules-monkey, I've got no problem with a player who just does an exceptional job at the character end of things.

Daniel

Theoreticly ...

I had one, but he also had attidude because no one could match his level in both spheres. His biggest flaw, however, was an uninterest in "niching" his character so as to offer everyone else a speciality for the team.

d20 is one of his favorite systems, but he hates the idea of playing something like a combat weak caster, or a non-magic fighter, becuase it is "cliche" and designs things like Dwarven clerics with the Travel domain so he can zip around the battle field and do as much damage the fighters, while he casts 3rd party d20 published spells so he can do as much spell damage as the wizard.

If anyone else can't stop him from stepping on their niche, then it's their fault for not making a "optimal" character.

And on the other hand, he also got into story and even used it for his benefit metagaming style. Once he had a SF character who recently became psionic and could transform to an "astral form." For balance, he gave the form a "Kryptonite" weakness, until he learned a human looking alien race also had an astral form, but with a different weakness. From that point, he went masqurading as the alien race to keep villians guessing and making errors (so much for letting me run "realistic villians" who lasted long in the game.)

So long story, short, such players can be fun, but they can also make both the rules AND the story their b****.