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<blockquote data-quote="Benjamin Olson" data-source="post: 8763951" data-attributes="member: 6988941">The cited proposal seems like serious overkill, but I am someone who teaches a lot of new players (often young children) the game and I have made a few moves to simplify things. For equipment I just have them start with the basic things central to their function (weapons, armor, wand, etc.), and give them 50 gold. The set background items and class equipment packs are nice character building tools for players who have plenty of time to sit with the book and pour over the list, but for a new player they add a solid 10 minutes of crossreferrencing the PHB to put a bunch of random items on your character sheet that probably won't actually matter. Obviously if a player wants to obsess over starting equipment that's fine, but I'd rather get them in the game.I usually skip writing down &quot;background feature&quot; abilities. I have, when rolling up characters for young children, sometimes purposefully ommited more minor racial features (like Fey Ancestry) unlikely to come up in the first few sessions.If I was designing the game I would cull or simplify a lot of racial or other first level features only applicable to certain narrow circumstances, because they just get forgotten by people without system mastery and make for one more thing to learn right at the outset. Flavorful &quot;ribbon&quot; features are awesome, but dumping them on someone rolling up a new character and starting a new campaign who, whether new to the game or not, has more important things on their mind, is a poor design choice. Save the minor ribbon abilities for levels 3+.Anything that streamlines character creation reduces the time a new player is stuck trying to digest the PHB and gets them to actually playing, at which point they are learning by doing and learning things that are immediately applicable, which is generally much easier for humans than trying to learn a system abstractly from the book.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Benjamin Olson, post: 8763951, member: 6988941"] The cited proposal seems like serious overkill, but I am someone who teaches a lot of new players (often young children) the game and I have made a few moves to simplify things. For equipment I just have them start with the basic things central to their function (weapons, armor, wand, etc.), and give them 50 gold. The set background items and class equipment packs are nice character building tools for players who have plenty of time to sit with the book and pour over the list, but for a new player they add a solid 10 minutes of crossreferrencing the PHB to put a bunch of random items on your character sheet that probably won't actually matter. Obviously if a player wants to obsess over starting equipment that's fine, but I'd rather get them in the game. I usually skip writing down "background feature" abilities. I have, when rolling up characters for young children, sometimes purposefully ommited more minor racial features (like Fey Ancestry) unlikely to come up in the first few sessions. If I was designing the game I would cull or simplify a lot of racial or other first level features only applicable to certain narrow circumstances, because they just get forgotten by people without system mastery and make for one more thing to learn right at the outset. Flavorful "ribbon" features are awesome, but dumping them on someone rolling up a new character and starting a new campaign who, whether new to the game or not, has more important things on their mind, is a poor design choice. Save the minor ribbon abilities for levels 3+. Anything that streamlines character creation reduces the time a new player is stuck trying to digest the PHB and gets them to actually playing, at which point they are learning by doing and learning things that are immediately applicable, which is generally much easier for humans than trying to learn a system abstractly from the book. [/QUOTE]

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