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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MNblockhead" data-source="post: 7406818" data-attributes="member: 6796661">I played Red Box D&D and 1st edition AD&D, and a few other RPGs from the 80s, then went without playing any TTRPGs until about 3 years ago when I started a 5e game. In my experience, most people can pick up the basic mechanics quickly. Spells can be an issue and I have spell cards to lend players to avoid time wasted flipping pages. Having cards or some other physical representation of spell points helps, as does having character sheets with checkboxes to tick off spell slots used.  I'll often create the characters in Herolab and print them out, since I find the Herolab character sheet, plus the ability to print out short summaries of spells and powers to be far more convenient than the official character sheet. Some younger players dislike spell slots and would rather have spell points, mana, etc. Personally, I think having spell points would make it take even longer to make casting decisions as you calculate your magic-juice resources. I find 5e's spell slots plus cantrips system to work very well. As for younger generations being too distracted or too dumb to learn D&D, that's just silly. For one, as I remember it, throughout the 80s we often just made things up and mostly learned the rules through arguments over them. And 1e was mostly tables anyway. "Learning the rules" was more about learning where the table you needed was. My books had lots of stick-on tabs and I remember that in addition to text-heavy DM screens crammed with charts, there were also rules workflows. Sure, some players and DMs memorized most of the rules, but I think very few had everything in their heads. Besides, today's generation has higher IQ than my generation. Each generation's IQ has increased over the prior generations since. A person in 2012 had a higher IQ than 95% of the population in 1900. Google the "Flynn Effect".  With a patient DM and perhaps some aids such as spell cards, game pieces representing spell points, etc., anyone can pick up the game quickly. Most of the complaints that I agree with have little to do with the game being hard or people being stupid, but more about table etiquette and DM expectations.</blockquote>

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