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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 9661353" data-attributes="member: 2013">So much this. While I think a little prep can be okay ("here are four possible pregenerated characters, roll to decide which one you will use"), it had better be "5 minutes or less." I think the biggest barrier to new folks discovering RPGs is that character creation has become completely unwieldly.Compare the "onboarding material" from the 1983 Mentzger Set with today's stuff. Ignoring the "Solo Adventure" (which was mostly there to introduce you to game terminology), you had 5 pages (pp. 48-52) to follow for character creation. Class descriptions, INCLUDING SPELLS for casters, took a total of 17 pages, with most classes (excluding spell descriptions) taking up less than a single page.Compare with the 2024 PHB... 384 pages. It's too much. We're killing new players thanks to paralysis by analysis.I know there are a lot of experienced players for whom the fun of gaming is meticulously planning out, optimizing, and otherwise working on their character, and they love having 384 pages of options.But they already know the rules... the 384 pages are a place to search for details they might have overlooked, ways in which they can express their cleverness or inventiveness or personality or what have you by finding the precise combination of mechanics that allow them to express exactly what they want to express in their character.But a new player sees 384 pages not as something to reference for details they already know... they see it as the bar to entry in a world that has become increasingly short-attention-span theater and their eyes glaze over... "I'll never read all this."I think the rules got to this unwieldly point thanks to a vicious circle that originally stemmed from adversarial play, whereby GMs and Players mistrusted the "other side" and thought the point of the game was to "win" and therefore players demanded more rules be laid down so they could "rules lawyer" to deny GM fiat... over time, GMs felt beholden to know all the rules lest a more knowledgeable player badger them with the rules... so GMs demanded to have rules for everything so they'd never need to result to GM fiat, leading for more rules to be laid down for players to "rules lawyer" with etc. and there's also some level of competition among players as to who can make the most broken but still "legal by the rules as written" character, lather rinse repeat...)We've lost track of the fact that D&D was originally designed to be an ABSTRACTION of reality, not a SIMULATION of reality. We demand ever-more realistic rules to simulate things better, rather than ever-more vague rules to abstract things out of the way so we can get on with the real reason we're getting together... to have fun creating collaborative stories in a fantasy world with our friends. That's "winning" in D&D, having fun with friends.</blockquote>

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