What they think of as a wizard and expect and what they actually get from 5E are very different experience, though, aren't they?
Especially at creation where you have to comb through 40+ spells (not counting cantrips!) that wizards have access to. Do you find yourself hand-holding at this stage? I understand you work with younger kids IIRC??
They don't really comb through the spells that much, though. What they do is see the ones that look simple and obvious, and they ask a friend or me. I try not to tell them what they should take, though, and just encourage them to go with what sounds fun. So they almost always take
firebolt, for example, I think because the name alone just sounds like a thing a wizard would do. Lots take
sleep because it sounds simple and obvious, though the first few times they cast it is usually a PITA.
And then there's how to role-play a character. Most newbies come in with a good idea of what a wizard is because, again, Harry Potter, Gandalf, and so on. Most don't come in with a clear concept of a cleric, bard, or warlock; if they pick sorcerer it's generally as a synonym for wizard and they play it exactly like a wizard, totally ignoring sorcery points at first (last year, one went the entire campaign, up to level 5, without once using a sorcery point).
I have years of experience teaching D&D to new players. Some come in with a broad understanding of RPGs, often from video games, and have maybe talked D&D with friends or been exposed to it a little bit. Some, like me back in the day, just click with it immediately and start voraciously learning everything they can about it. And a lot are there because they are trying to make friends, or a parent has suggested that they try it, or even enrolled them in the camp without asking them, or because their friend wanted to play and they are tagging along.
I think most of the folks who are passionate enough about TTRPGs to post on this forum are very much coming from the subset of folks that I came from: the ones for who D&D (probably) was like a lightning bolt, a revelation. And so I think we have a tendency underestimate how challenging it is for a lot of brains that don't work like ours.
I see a similar problem in the school system: most teachers are people who were good at school, and we do a great job teaching the kids who are good at school. Of course we do: schools are built in our image and reward brains like ours. The challenge is to make school work for other kinds of thinkers, and we often fail them.
Well, D&D was originally built in the image of its creators, and for minds that worked a lot like theirs. And this has been reflected in decades of how it is written and presented. To be blunt: it has always been a terribly written game if the purpose is to make it more accessible. The latest edition (5e) is by far the best written it that sense, and the 2024 rules are a massive improvement over the 2014 ones. But there is still a ton of complexity that I think we tend to underestimate, and that becomes very apparent when you are teaching the game to players that lack almost any context for it.
