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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 6241331" data-attributes="member: 1165">Rules opaqueness/consistency and personality can determine how quickly you advance.I found 2e's rules opaqueness/consistency really slowed down my understanding of the game. I once ran a short campaign where I didn't even understand the saving throw rules. (Or initiative. Or surprise... Pretty much anything that didn't involve a d20 or damage dice except saving throws.) Not actually owning the rulebook at the time made things worse (didn't have a high school job). I learned more 3e and 4e in one year than six years of 2e.Some people in my group just don't bother learning beyond the basics. My group finished Kingmaker a year or so ago, in Pathfinder, and by the end I realized several other players didn't know things like the Big Six items. They just sort of assumed that a certain PC will always fail a certain save (and never bought a Cloak of Resistance).We had only one corebook with us, so no one could just sit down and read it, and even if you did, certain things like the Big Six you won't pick up on. Making matters worse, reading the SRD is just not as good as reading the rulebook, and pretty much no one touched the corebook because they were using Hero Tools or other character builders... even people who could make 3rd edition PCs without electronic assistance (and were usually very familiar with the rules).When it came to transparency, 4e's biggest failing might have been the Character Builder. For a group I played in through Meetup, half the group were completely new to 4e. One player had a Character Builder sheet for a PC that someone designed for him, a pretty good way of ensuring he wouldn't know the rules. He asked me (the rules guru of the group) to explain how his ranger's attack bonus got so high (it was actually on par) and I got confused too. He didn't know about proficiency bonuses (he hadn't bought a book yet, and the CB did not explain it to a complete newbie) and he was using a khopesh, a weapon I didn't know enough about and wasn't in the Player's Handbook that I had brought specifically to answer questions. I taught two other players how to build a character sheet by hand as well. The khopesh-using ranger player eventually became a DM of the group, only a few months in, which I'm happy about <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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