Has Anyone Introduced New Gamers to 4E?

[Jools]

I have some advice, make sure their characters have good stats. Letting noobs choose their own stats is a recipe for disaster. They can choose pretty much any powers and feats and their characters will still be great, but bad stats can ruin the whole experience for them. One of 4e's few mechanical faults IMO.

 

[Retreater]

Post Game Update

We ended up having 2 girls and 1 guy completely new to tabletop and 1 guy who has played a lot of tabletop but is not partial to 4e.

I brought along pre-generated characters since only I had a copy of the PHB and no one had the time to download the character generator trial. We started at 1st level. I printed out the power cards that came with the character generator.

The first encounter introduced the basic mechanics, the different types of actions, and the different categories of powers. They slayed a lot of goblins - including about 6 minions to make them feel uberpowerful. The next encounter - against several different types of skeletons - I introduced the concept of opportunity attacks, forced movement, and difficult terrain. (The cleric got to use her Turn Undead ability and feel uberpowerful.)

We had time for a fight against spiretop drake skirmishers, which enforced delayed actions and the order of combat as well as ranged attacks. Then we had time for some brief roleplaying encounters and a fight with a dragon (which they narrowly defeated).

The short of it - they loved the game. One of the girls - a coworker of mine - talked about the game several times today. The other new guy (the coworker's brother) is talking up the game to his friend to get him to come to a regular weekly session ... which is sort of springing up around the one-shot training game. (The new guy said he could follow the rules because of his familiarity with WoW - but he said that he would rather play D&D any day.)

You have to understand that I've not played 4e since August 08 ... it just never caught on with my old (now defunct) group. Today I subscribed to DDI.

I don't care what system or edition we're playing ... it's fun to be gaming again. That these new players are enthusiastic and excited is a big plus.

Retreater

 

[samursus]

I have introduced 2 new people personally to D&D...both women. Soon going to be part of a group that introduces a 3rd woman to D&D and RPG's in general. Only 1 of the 3 played WoW... the other 2 are complete neophytes.

One of the women picked up 4e quite easily, probably because of her WoW experience... (remember WoW is essentially based on D&D)

The other, my gf, suffered from the anxiety mentioned in an earlier post. She was afraid of playing "wrong" and not being able to "role play" (which in her eyes meant doing funny voices and dressing up like your character )

Now that we have made up her character (took awhile..patiently answering every question she had) and playing out a combat...she is getting quite confident ... and tells her GF's..."I am going to play D&D. I am a Changeling Bard.. I have a Longsword!"

They look at her oddly.

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

Let them pick powers by reading the flavor text

This is a very good idea, thanks!

 

[Amphimir Míriel]

edit: Nevermind... Hairfoot is entitled to his opinion