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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6112935" data-attributes="member: 42582">Heard it? I lived it - although with Modlvay Basic more than AD&D.Perhaps. But do we then get this weird change of tone when you graduate from "beginner" to "seasoned" and it's less murder mystery and more White Plume Mountain (which will strip the hit points of anyone)?That said, I can see that what you say can be true, but I don't feel it responds to my basic point. I'll have one more go, but completely understand if you think it's a waste of your time to reply - from your point of view I'm sure I'm the one whose missing the point!For me, the basic issue is this:Newbies need low complexity PCs compared to seasoned players. I think this is not in dispute.But there is nothing about being a newbie which makes it desirable for them to play PCs who are less robust than those of seasoned players. Or to play throught scenarios that are less engaging, or full of fantasy tropes like undead and goblins and dragons erring-do, than seasoned players.Under Mearls' original plan, of allowing PCs to be at the same level but of different complexity, it was completely viable to satisfy the need for low complexity without that having any impact on the robustness of the newbie's PC, or the sorts of adventures the newbie could participate in. At least for me, this seemed like a clever design approach.But now, Mearls seems to be saying "If you want the simple PC experience, you also have to have the less robust PC experience, and only a limited range of scenarios will be viable, which may not include the full range of fantasy tropes."This strikes me as a strictly backwards step - from an innovative solution to a well-known problem that would be maximially inclusive, to a recycled solution that has some known issues for at least some of the player base, and is less than maximal in the range of play it permits.As best I can tell, the cause of the backward step is that Apprentice levels have been created to deliver a sort of OSR-ish experience plus solve the multi-classing problem, and then someone's decided to retrofit them as a newbie solution as well. At least to me, it smacks of a solution looking for a wider range of problems than it started with, so as to better entrench its place in the design. Now that's clearly not irrational - if you've got to have these Apprentice levels in your game to handle some other issue anway, you may as well get them doing as much work as possible. For the reasons I've given, though, I think that as far as the newbie thing is concerned this is a strictly backwards step from earlier approaches that they talked about, and I think that's a pity.</blockquote>

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