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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6117891" data-attributes="member: 2067">Put yourself in the mind of a kid who knows absolutely jack nothing about D&D, but whose parents bought him The D&D Game for his birthday because they found the kid reading Harry Potter and heard it talked about on a website they frequent. Now imagine that kid reading the rules and being a little paralyzed by all the new information they're absorbing, seeing all those first level abilities, not really grokking them on first read, putting the book away, and having it gather dust because the game just seems way too complicated for a make-believe elf game.That kid never even groks the idea of modular rules because the first rules he encountered were opaque and awkward and complex and involved a lot of up-front investment. The simplest rules have to be THE RULES, the first rules, the rules that every new player is exposed to if they read the book on their own. If the simplest rules aren't the first rules such a player encounters, it stacks the deck against getting new players invested. They cannot be optional, beginner's, introductory, or in any way not the ACTUAL rules of the game.That's not worth giving up, even if most of the experienced player base isn't going to be that interested in introductory play. They don't actually functionally lose anything by it, so including it is a substantial net positive, without much of an actual down side.</blockquote>