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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5029218" data-attributes="member: 4937">Oh good grief.  Then I apologize.  Clearly the designers were more influenced by the Magic card team than I had realized.  Yeah, that's ridiculous.  I've taken MaRo to task for popularizing this notion.  I didn't realize how far it had spread about the company.  I figured in D&D's case it was post hoc reasoning.  Apparantly, it wasn't.PrCs did more to damage 3e than any other single thing except......the 3.5e revision.  For every one thing that they fixed (haste), they broke 10 other things that they shouldn't have meddled with.  I avoided so many problems by not converting to the 3.5.  Likewise, I'm so glad that I kept PrCs out of my game.  All these horror stories I hear about, they just weren't an issue for me.I agree.  M&M tries to addess this with prehab hero/archetypes.  My preferences would be for the GM to guide a new M&M player through the process using a simple character based off one of the archetypes.  You can always later on in a Supers game have the character's powers change as the result of some plot device - happens in the comics all the time.  However, I wouldn't consider M&M to be an ideal newbie game simply because a newbie will have such a hard time creating the character that they want.  M&M has an enormous amount of unintentional system mastery built into character creation, and a new player is very likely to end up with a character which is decidedly suboptimal compared to what an old hand can come up with.My preference as a DM teaching D&D has always been to throw the player into the game with absolutely no knowledge of the rules whatsoever.  I firmly believe that knowledge of the rules actually gets in the way of a new players ability to learn the most fundamental skills of role-playing, namely things role-playing itself, immersion, being interactive with the mind-space, being creative, etc.  If the player learns the rules first, he learns to interact with the rules rather than the mind-space and coaches all of his propositions in terms of rules requests.  The result is practically an imagination lobotomized player who develops a skill set that is almost entirely detrimental to the game.In my experience, people - especially children - are natural role-players.  Immersion in the rules prior to immersion in the game is just lethal to their ability to role-play.  I'm always amazed at how much better new players with no experience play than many 'old hats' who have been playing for many years.  Some of the best sessions I've ever had the pleasure to DM where with players with zero experience and zero knowledge of the rules who drew upon their experience as children playing 'let's pretend' and who were absolutely a joy to DM.  Conversely, some of the worst I've ever had was with players who'd been playing for 8 or 10 years and who literally had no idea what role-playing was nonetheless.Even 3e gets going very quickly and plays very simply at levels below 6th or so.  A 1st level character is not an enormous burden to create compared to most systems.  Generally, it's about as hard or slightly easier than most point by systems (that often require calculators and double checking math).  I don't feel that a 3e character takes any longer to get 'up and running' than 1e character, as the biggest time sink in both cases is purchasing equipment.  Distribution of skill points and feats is no more time consuming than proficiencies and NWPs in early systems.   One potential problem though is that its very hard to join midgame compared to other systems, as character creation of a high level character eventually becomes every bit as complex as the most complex systems on the market.  But, if you start from the beginning all that complexity creeps up on you comparitively slowly.</blockquote>

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