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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 9661960" data-attributes="member: 2013">Fair. But I would counter that since D&D is the largest player in the space, D&D can be used as a proxy to show what the "average" introductory RPG experience is like - I am not going to try to average the page count of every single PHB-equivalent in the RPG space because someone would object to my inclusion or exclusion of <Book X>.I disagree, but NN has said it better than I could...The RPG Hobby would get along just fine for a very long time if every single RPG publisher shuttered its doors today and no new ones ever sprang up - goodness only knows there are millions of pages of material already in existence devoted to RPGs.The RPG Industry may need new members who will buy stuff. The RPG Hobby needs more people playing stuff... and with the 5e SRD in CC, the Archives of Nethys for PF, etc., it's clear the barrier to play is not price. I think complexity is the current barrier to entry, particularly in the current short-attention-span world.I would posit that a good game (RPG or otherwise) is easy to learn, but difficult to master. When I think of some of the most influential video games (I'm deliberately limiting this to older games because we have long enough to know they have stood the test of time; games released recently may be "better" but we haven't had enough time to measure their influence), for example, I think of: Pong, Pac Man, Tetris, Street Fighter, Doom, Ocarina of Time, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Wii Sports.Each of these is in a totally different genre, but they have one thing in common - they are all relatively simple to grok immediately. Mastery takes longer. But you can plop anyone down in front of one of these games and they'll "get the hang of it" almost immediately. You generally know immediately what you want to do and once you are shown the button that does it, you're fine. "Explaining the controls" can be done, as was said upthread, with a 3x5 card.In some ways, Jd Smith1's comment that some players want to "kill stuff and gain loot" is right on - it's a simple goal that players can immediately understand, even if you have to show them which dice to roll to do it.Of course, the community sometimes derisively refers to this goal as "murderhobo," so maybe we're the problem?Specifically, the OP has some very salient questions (emphasis mine)...What would make it easier for new players to get into the hobby? What makes it easier for existing players and game masters to engage in the hobby? What products do we think are missing or underserved?I have been focusing a lot on "new players" and I think the answer there is "reduce system complexity" but possibly also "make the goals more obvious" - of course, existing players and game masters seem to be up in arms when you do that because they say they want "more sophistication" in their hobby, so you would think that puts the two groups at odds with each other.I still think one of the best series that has ever been written on Game Design in general comes from Mark Rosewater of Magic: The Gathering - it's his 20 Years, 20 Lessons series (or view the hourlong talk). Specifically, I'd focus on...Human nature, for better or worse, is "short attention span" - if you want new players, you need to be able to onboard them into your game in a matter of a few minutes - or better yet, seconds. A "character creation session zero" that lasts 3 hours fails that. For hardcore RPGer's that may be "interesting" and "fun" but usually for a new player, even if it's "interesting" it's not "fun" (because the hardcore player has fun imagining how his selections at character creation will interact with the game, the new gamer has no context in which to imagine that). So I think the best thing to do, because I'm blunt, even if it is "murderhobo"-y, is to throw a character sheet at a new player, show them their Armor Class (defense), Attack Bonus and weapons (offense), and then immediately throw them into a combat encounter. If you haven't "rolled to hit the monster" in the first five minutes of your RPG experience, I have failed as someone trying to onboard you.And I include the last lesson to point out I'm good at recognizing problems ("game's complexity makes it hard to onboard new players") and bad at solving them ("what should you simplify the game to? I dunno.") <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I will say, though, as a player with 40+ years of experience under my belt, a simpler ruleset would mean I didn't have to devote as much time to prepping for my sessions, which would leave me more time to, you know, actually PARTICIPATE in said sessions. When I was younger and had time and energy but no money, I wanted more complexity and more rulebooks. As I got older and had energy and money, I was able to buy those rulebooks but lacked the time to play as much as I'd like. Now I find I have a tiny bit more time but much less energy, so I want something where I can get a game session going immediately and get a lot of fun out of it, I don't want to be wasting energy or time chasing minutiae.</blockquote>

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