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<blockquote data-quote="Dustin Cooper" data-source="post: 8953800" data-attributes="member: 6922447">You couldn't specifically pick those people out, but what you could do is focus groups of people who have no experience with D&amp;D.&nbsp; Have them try to make characters or run a small one shot with pre-gens and take note of what speed bumps you see.&nbsp; Then make adjustments to smooth those out and try again with new people.&nbsp; If they were doing something like this, the kind of change I'd expect is for them to drop ability scores and just have ability bonuses.&nbsp; That's something I've seen new players confused about, both in terms of which numbers they're supposed to reference and stopping everything in its tracks to ask why they did all that work for the first set of number when its only point was to make a series of second numbers, then the DM having to explain that it's a weird holdover from the 70s that they keep around for tradition.&nbsp; Every pain point is one where some percentage of potential players, even a very small one, go &quot;naughty word this,&quot; and the smoother the fun parts are, the more likely they are to stick around.This of course could still be combined with the kinds of surveys we're seeing.&nbsp; Like you want to make sure the changes you implement to smooth out onboarding aren't breaking the balance or compatibility or whatever.&nbsp; There's a few things that look like they could be for something like this, such as reducing &quot;mother may I?&quot; stuff or simplifying wild shape, but from the way they talk about it, it's still due to what regular players tell them, and that already selects out people who were turned off by the game's underlying mechanics or who found onboarding not worth it.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dustin Cooper, post: 8953800, member: 6922447"] You couldn't specifically pick those people out, but what you could do is focus groups of people who have no experience with D&D. Have them try to make characters or run a small one shot with pre-gens and take note of what speed bumps you see. Then make adjustments to smooth those out and try again with new people. If they were doing something like this, the kind of change I'd expect is for them to drop ability scores and just have ability bonuses. That's something I've seen new players confused about, both in terms of which numbers they're supposed to reference and stopping everything in its tracks to ask why they did all that work for the first set of number when its only point was to make a series of second numbers, then the DM having to explain that it's a weird holdover from the 70s that they keep around for tradition. Every pain point is one where some percentage of potential players, even a very small one, go "naughty word this," and the smoother the fun parts are, the more likely they are to stick around. This of course could still be combined with the kinds of surveys we're seeing. Like you want to make sure the changes you implement to smooth out onboarding aren't breaking the balance or compatibility or whatever. There's a few things that look like they could be for something like this, such as reducing "mother may I?" stuff or simplifying wild shape, but from the way they talk about it, it's still due to what regular players tell them, and that already selects out people who were turned off by the game's underlying mechanics or who found onboarding not worth it. [/QUOTE]

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