Player skill vs character skill?

[zakael19]

Also, if you have actual new players there’a a host of “teach the paradigm” content out there these days! Shadowdark even does this right in the player facing material and further in its free dungeon.

 

[Koloth]

My experience is the opposite. New players can't always make sense of a character sheet, but they know how to engage with the fiction. If I compare years of teaching new players D&D, versus more recently using Shadowdark, when playing Shadowdark with it's sparse character sheets they are more likely to come up with creative plans. If they are looking at their character sheet it's probably at their equipment. With D&D they keep looking at their character sheet and tentatively asking, "Can I....?"



Yeah I think part of the problem is systems that focus too much on "character build".

EDIT: The "consequence" of putting a 6 in a stat is that (in some systems) you get a 10% penalty to rolls that rely on that stat. That's it; that's all it means. If somebody wants to choose to roleplay that stat as being more meaningful than a 10% penalty, that's entirely up to them. But I find attempts to arbitrarily impose additional constraints, "...and you are especially bad at X, Y, and Z...." to be, in effect, dictating to people how they should roleplay being 10% worse than average at something, and I don't agree with that.

I have seen the same with new players and story. Fun to watch. But still, if that player took a Hulk Smash character, no amount of fiction engagement should allow Hulk to delicately sneak across a fragile bridge. That is where the GM needs to explain the choices have consequences concept. Perhaps with a "As soon as Hulk gets on the bridge, it collapses...."

Agree that later versions of D&D linage games are less stat strict. Earlier versions had a much wider spread of stat based penalties and bonuses.

Have had success with a 'build it as you go' GURPS game. Start with 10 in each stat, a few basic advantages/disadvantages defined, and a large pool of unspent character points. If a character fails a roll, the player has the option to spend character points on things that will turn it into a success. If the character pisses off a NPC, the player might take "Enemy" disadvantage. One big advantage to this is everything on a character sheet has been used at least once.