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Message: <blockquote data-quote="draquila" data-source="post: 5224383" data-attributes="member: 90912">I just played my first ever game of D&D (4e) in my life. I was the DM, and all 5 PCs had never played before as well. I had fun and I think most of them did, but man it was painstakingly slow just trying to figure out how it all works!! And only afterwards did I realise I got half the rules wrong!I was using the D&D 4E starter kit and I found the starter rules it came with woefully inadequate in terms of rules and clarity. I guess I should've done a lot more research beforehand, but as a starter kit that claims to have everything you need to run your first adventure, I'd say it's a bit of false advertising.Only after the game did I realise that:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">adjacent includes diagonal squares, by default I assumed it was only 4 squares!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">if an attack roll exactly equals the defense score, it was still considered a hit (I guess this is implied in the Core Mechanics section, but under Attack Rolls all it said was "Your result is compared against the target's defense score" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" />, WTG on the clarity!)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When an ability is Str vs AC or something, the Str includes weapon proficiency bonuses - I guess this confusion could've been avoided if we'd just used the premades.</li> </ul>The net result was a really slow game since the players kept missing plus they didn't know enough about their abilities to maximise their efficiency.I kept getting asked questions that I didn't know the answer to (can I shoot if I'm blocked by an ally? Do I get OA against me if I move around the other side of the goblin? etc) and so I just house ruled it all (mostly incorrectly) so as not to bog down the game further. We were suffering rule overload as it is, in the end it took nearly 4 hours to get through 2 encounters.I guess WotC really sold that starter kit so they'd force you to buy the PHB once you tried to play using it. But either way, now that I've read more about the rules (grabbing, bullrushing, ready actions, line of sight/effect, cover system etc etc...) I'm afraid we'll just have the same rule overload problems again next session.So after such a TL;DR whine, my question is, how did you guys reduce this feeling of being overwhelmed by rules when you guys first started playing/introduced the game to other people? What advice do you have for me when I run the next game.</blockquote>

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