NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6304236" data-attributes="member: 5143">My very first game of D&D was on a message board on a BBS where I was told that I was playing one of the Companions of the Lance from Dragonlance.  I had no idea what I was doing or what any of the numbers on my character sheet meant but I was given a premade because the DM didn't want to explain character creation to me and didn't think it was necessary.  My first real life D&D session, I was handed one of the other PCs characters because they didn't want to have to go through character creation with me.  They made up a character and I got to take over theirs.I had been playing for weeks before they'd consider letting me make up my own characters.  Even then I was guided through the process in a way that made no sense to me at all:"What race do you want to be?""Race?  What do you mean?  Like Elf?""Yes, which one of these?""I don't know...what do they all do?""Don't worry about that, just pick one that sounds interesting...you'll figure it out as you go.""Uhh...Drow then, they are black elves?""Yes.  So, write down exactly what I say on your character sheet.  You get a +1 to Dex....."By the end, I had a piece of paper with random text all over the place that made no sense to me at all.  I looked at that sheet years later and wondered what the heck I was thinking.  But I knew nowhere near enough about the game to make up my own character without their help until after I had played for months.I haven't run an adventure I've created myself in...years.  I've ran entirely adventures I've bought or downloaded from some place or another.  Your implication appears to be that I'm not playing D&D.  Which I take to be rather insulting.  Maybe your way of playing isn't the only one.As for the Starter Set.  Everything we've heard says that the book contains enough DM information to come up with new adventures after running the one in the book...or not running the one in the book at all.  So, it fulfills that part.The rules have become quite a bit more complicated in the last 34 years.  The rules back then were "Elf;+4 to hit for 1d8 damage;12 hp;ac 8".  Great, I made a character take one line and built it in about a minute.5e's rules are not that simple.  You need to choose a race, a class, a background, spells, equipment, class features, bonds, traits, flaws.  For each of those categories, you need at least a couple of choices for it to be considered "creation".Just imagine the uproar about how much of a trailer the Starter Set was if there was ONLY 2 choices for background:  "That's not really character creation.  That's simply a preview of all the backgrounds that will be in the FULL product."  Or if there were no choices for class features and choosing a class automatically gave you abilities with no customization.  People would be going on about how those are just glorified premades.In the D&D of the past, there were a lot less rules so they took up less space.  There were no skills, there were almost no class or race options, there were no "conditions", art was often small and sparse.  A lot of stuff that exists in a modern RPG were not in those books so they could take up less space and cost less.  We don't live in that era anymore.And yet, people sign up for games at conventions all over the place to play precisely this sort of game.  There are likely hundreds or thousands of "premade character, spoon fed one and done adventure" sessions at GenCon this year.I know people who do this outside of conventions as well.  They have a good idea for an adventure and give everyone premades to get quicker into the game(and to provide the PCs with backgrounds that work well together with each other and the plot of the adventure).  They finish the adventure and move on to a different game.It's self contained, but I certainly wouldn't call it "not a game".</blockquote>

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