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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 8803061" data-attributes="member: 7035894">As previously posted, I am a teacher, and I run the D&D Club at my school, as well as D&D camp in the summer. I've run D&D pro-D sessions for other teachers who wanted to know what the game is all about.You don't know what you are talking about, and your argument is almost entirely a straw man.Nobody has claimed that D&D requires exceptional intellect. No one has claimed that new players can't grasp the rage mechanic. So calling ideas "toxic" that literally no one has put forward in this discussion is just a means of substituting ad hominem attack for actual argument. It is, in fact, toxic. If you want to actually argue, see if you can do so against actual positions that people hold, rather than ones you are making up.Incidentally, my campaigns typically get to Level 3 in 3-4 sessions.D&D is an extremely complicated game. You may have noted, for example, that there are many rulebooks together totalling hundreds, nay thousands of pages of text. But to a truly new player, even concepts that seem obvious to us veterans are not. None of them individually are particularly hard. But in aggregate, they are a lot. When I want to teach the basic concept of an RPG to a large group, I don't use D&D at all. I use Dread, because everyone already understands Jenga.There are a great many new players who are interested in D&D, try it, and decide it's not for them. For some, it's just the entire nature of the game. Maybe roleplaying makes them uncomfortable. But there are some who have point blank told me that the amount of rules and new concepts just seemed overwhelming.People learn at different paces and in different styles. But any experienced teacher will tell you that it is good teaching to scaffold learning so that students can develop incremental mastery by building on what they learn in logical steps.My actual arguments against doing sub-classes at level 1 are straightforward:1. It adds further complication to an already complicated task - not only does a new player have to understand the basic concepts of D&D (weird dice! hit points! saving throws! armour class! etc.), PLUS the basic differences between 12 different classes, they then have to further understand those classes enough to make an informed choice between many different sub-classes for each, all before even playing the game.2. Many veteran players, such as me, don't want to be forced into a sub-class right away. We see character creation as an ongoing process rather than something that is complete before the first game, and enjoy seeing how the journey unfolds. Learning what choice feels best for a new character is a fun part of early levelling.</blockquote>

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