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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ourph" data-source="post: 1619508" data-attributes="member: 20239">Hey Dru, don't feel bad, from what I know a lot of people were in the same boat at age 12, me included.  A thread at DF (in the Classic D&D forum) brought up an interesting point.Basic D&D was a perfect intro game for kids just getting into RPGs.  It contained most of the core concepts of AD&D, but left out a lot of the details while simplifying and streamlining some of the systems.  If you played and got to understand Basic really well, moving to AD&D was a lot less confusing.  It also meant you were better prepared to pick and choose which parts of AD&D you wanted to use, because you had a stripped down version of the game to compare the advanced version to.Unfortunately, a lot of kids either skipped Basic or graduated too soon.  A lot of this can be blamed on the way TSR marketed the two games.  The general point of view was that Basic was a "kids game" and "advanced" meant "better".  What 12 year old thinks he needs to play a "kids game"?   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> If TSR had done a better job of explaining that Basic D&D was the stripped down, easy to learn, easy to teach, easy to tweak version of the game and AD&D was the more complex version for people who liked more "crunch" (in much the same way that SJG markets GURPS and GURPS-lite), I think a lot of people who were confused by the various rules and organization of AD&D might have made the choice to start with or stick with Basic.If current D&D has "lost its way" in any form, it's in making the same mistake as TSR when it comes to an intro game for the hobby.  It's taken 4 years to bring a "Basic" game to the market, and instead of being a stripped down version of the game, its more or less a "starter kit".  Starter kits have their place, but they're not a replacement for having a less "crunchy" alternative (IMO).</blockquote>

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