Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9213969" data-attributes="member: 18">I feel like this varies so wildly based on the players, the DM, how they're taught and so on (not intended as a critique, too many variables for that to be remotely fair).I've introduced new-to-RPGs players to 4E before and seen them have absolutely no problems engaging with it and playing properly. I've also introduced experienced RPG players to certain relatively simple RPGs (including Dungeon World) and seen them basically go "BWUH!?!?!" (I was delighted one of them brought up Amber Diceless highly positively at a recent session at least!).I think 5E does have a real problem here in that it does not present the rules well, the rules are not as consistent in how they function or are applied as they could be - they're not even as consistent as 4E was - and further a smaller number of rules are actively counter-intuitive in ways that are very hard to engage with (surprise and stealth are just trashfires imho). Going from 4E and DW to 5E, I saw players get distinctly worse at the rules. 2024 can fix and I suspect will fix the presentation, last I saw it was also simplifying stealth in a way that would make it more OP but less counterintuitive. However some seem to becoming even less consistent.4E was actually particularly interesting for me, because I have two players who largely matched your description - i.e. couldn't keep 2E or 3E straight, even with character sheets in front of them, and generally struggled with rules in a lot of RPGs. In 4E, they both transformed from being inept with rules and never having done any charop in their life (indeed one consistently produced accidentally anti-optimized PCs in 3.XE/PF), to be actual badasses, both of them with better-optimized PCs than the guy who has consistently been a "power gamer" since the early 1990s. It was a bizarre and slightly uncanny experience, like seeing Clark Kent transforming into Superman or something. They then got better at the rules than I was. I eventually checked to see if they were just getting builds out of a guide or something, but it appears not (and they did have some maloptimizations).Part if this, I know, was that the rules were accessible to them online via the DDI, where in previous editions they could only access them in-person or via emailed PDFs which were rapidly lost/forgotten. But another part of it, I'm fairly certain, was the way the rules were designed made hugely more sense to them, and that caused them to engage more.</blockquote>

Verification