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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 5472780" data-attributes="member: 7006">Ah yes... the achilles heel of the roleplaying game genre.It's probably one of the most difficult decisions you have to make when putting together an RPG book... deciding whether the book should spend valuable page space trying to help the new player who's never played (or even heard about) an RPG.There are countless game books out there where you get several pages of the same exact "Here's a description of what an RPG is, and here's what an example of gameplay looks like."  They're all the same, they all give a somewhat clearish idea of what you'd get into if you tried to play it, and of course they all get completely skipped over by 97% of the reading audience.  At some point... these pages just become wastes of space, and thus most people would feel those pages might better be used for some new rules or additional details that otherwise would have gotten cut out of the game.That's the $64,000 question for the book editors:  REALISTICALLY how many people will actually pick this type book up for the first time without having ANY idea what it (or this style of game) is about?  And will this book actually inspire someone to try and play it JUST based on the book alone (with no friends or other gamers with experience to "help along" the new person in figuring this game out)?Honestly?  I believe in this day and age the odds of someone coming into these kinds of books absolutely blind with NO NOTIONS of what they are getting into (thus making these pages actually serve a useful purpose) has become increasingly smaller and smaller.  Too many RPG video games, too many blogging sites, book reviews, friend's social media comments etc. make it exceedingly unlikely.  If someone truly hears about this game of D&D for the first time... the possibility of just googling it and getting a complete download of information about it clears the fog of what this game is much, much quicker and easier.  And thus those four pages at the front of the Player's Handbook on "Here's an example of a party going through a dungeon crawl!" is even more superfluous for everyone involved.  Yeah, you might lose A person or two... but the overwhelming majority would just as soon have a couple more pages of items or feats.</blockquote>

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