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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Silam" data-source="post: 9875952" data-attributes="member: 7055898">For sure it’s a judgment call, and to each their own…But I’m not trying to say build complexity outweighs round-to-round complexity.I’m just trying to relate my own empirical evidence of actually teaching the game to two players whose first classes they’ve ever played were Monk and Wizard. It’s a fairly different game to learn based on which class you’re coming into it with, I think we can all agree at least on that. So my question then is: why was the game so much harder to learn for the Wizard player than the Monk player? Maybe it’s build or this or that, I don’t really know, I’m just speculating. Maybe it’s a skill issue also, or motivation, or anything else. Possible. Whatever the explanation is, it’s still a fact that the learning curve was vastly different.Anyway, I get your point that my anecdata is outweighed by the large amounts of data WotC received during their playtest. Sample size-wise, it’s a no contest. But also, I am tempted to ask: who made up the play tester sample? Is it a fair hypothesis that 95%+ of the play testers were veteran TTRPG players willing to put up with alpha quality material, and not many were newbie players? If so, we have to wonder what does complexity mean to a veteran TTRPG players who played at least one but maybe several previous editions of the game? Maybe for them it’s a matter of relative power levels: Monk is a relatively weak class and Wizard a relatively powerful class, therefore it is "complex" to perform competitively in a high powered game with a Monk and comparatively easy to do so with a Wizard. And maybe that is 100% true, but then that definition of complexity has no relation to my definition, which was: how hard is it to teach the game to someone who never played D&D if their first class was X?</blockquote>

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