D&D 5E Observations of a new player

[Uchawi]

For new players I would offer to roll up their characters and start them at level 3 at a minimum. The rest is a standard experience for the types of players you have at the table. With hindsight, you may want to warn them about playing in a dangerous world (to account for the randomness of the dice)

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

Hi everyone. Recently, I was asked to run a game for my siblings and their significant others. They have never played actual D&D before

Hi Xeviat. A warm welcome to the hobby to your new players!

Playing level 1 didn't allow him to feel heroic like he had envisioned his character.

For play at levels 1 and 2 you should use the average damage for monsters instead of rolling. It makes things less butal by reducing the chances a level 1 PC is going to get one-shotted.

But yeah, level 1 is not all that heroic. It is training wheels for new players (either new to the hobby or new to 5th edition). Level 1 should only last one session and level 2 two sessions. Then the PC gets some more HP, gets an archetype, gets level 2 spells, and things start feeling heroic.

 

[Bacon Bits]

I'm pretty sure "level appropriate challenge" === "the game scenarios encountered increase in absolute difficulty to compensate for the relative increase in power level of the PCs."

A level 10 party can easily overcome a bottomless gorge 50 feet across. A level 1 party probably cannot. That doesn't mean the bottomless gorge is a less difficult situation for the level 10 party -- that's kind of what challenge rating is supposed to mean -- it means it's a difficultly that the party can overcome at higher levels.

The only games that I can think of that actually get harder as the game progresses are MMOs. At the beginning of the game, you can solo every quest. By the end of the game, you need raids of 20 or more people to accomplish a single quest. The games will literally punish players at higher level who solo with worse loot, so even if you can accomplish the same goal on your own your rewards will not be commensurate. This is why people complain that they feel weaker during the endgame for an MMO than they did at level 1.

 

[Tony Vargas]

And I disagree... A DC 15 lock is more difficult than a DC 10 lock and yet neither is more deadly... There are plenty of examples in D&D where difficulty and deadliness don't equate 1:1.

:sigh: True. A campaign where PCs went around making tough, but perfectly safe, checks to do stuff, instead of getting in life-threatening combats, could still be 'difficult.'

So would one where they're in constant danger of death from overwhelming enemy forces.

The expectation of a D&Der familiar with 1e and/or 5e, is that the game will be way more difficult, in both the 'I'm having difficulty picking this lock' (because my pick-locks 'special' ability is only 25%) and the 'Oh, my god, we're all going to die' (because combat is pretty deadly) sense, early on, and slide more into 'easy mode' as it progresses.

A non-D&Der might expect an introduction to the game to be the easy version. Or not. I haven't been a non-D&Der in a very long time.

I'm pretty sure "level appropriate challenge" === "the game scenarios encountered increase in absolute difficulty to compensate for the relative increase in power level of the PCs."

It means challenging for the level of the party. So, in 3e, a single same-CR critter, in theory. At high level, that'd mean a creature with tons of hps, an AC only the figther could hit consistently, etc...

In 5e BA, it means an encounter of a certain exp budget, with a multiplier for number of foes, that could be a single higher-CR creature or a bunch of lower-CR critters. FWIW.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I don't think it is. I actually don't think most new players have a problem with the lower levels being hard, it's kind of implicit that if there are 20 levels that the lowest levels will be the hardest...

It's not exactly implicit. I mean, if you look at video games, they tend to be all over the place in where the difficulty lies. Zelda certainly follows the formula where things get way easier when you have a couple of extra hearts, but something like a Final Fantasy tends to save its hardest bosses for the late game.

The difference between D&D and a video game is that failing at a video game doesn't cost you anything. If you die, you can just load a save file and try again. With D&D, if you lose a character then that's the end of the character and it's time to make a new one, traditionally at level 1. Given that, the cost of losing a low-level character is far less than the cost of losing a high-level character. Making the high levels very deadly would only ensure that nobody survives to high levels, while making the low levels very deadly would still allow a player to reach high levels eventually.