Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 8384543" data-attributes="member: 86653">Which is why having a solid understanding of how the world works first is so important. D&D is its own genre. It’s not really emulated in anything else but D&D. But when you grab a group of friends who are Avatar fans, Star Wars fans, or Star Trek fans and sit down to play in those worlds you can be up and running in minutes.Right. No one’s saying the player can’t or shouldn’t know how the world works. Dig into the setting to understand how the world works. The mechanics should support and emulate the world. If they don’t they’re badly designed rules and should be tossed. Default to everyone’s basic understanding of the real world and change things from there. This causes a lot of confusion for D&D players because to a large degree, with D&D the mechanics are the world. Exactly. It’s a big problem. Which is why you should ditch those bits of the D&D rules and go with the players’ understanding of the real world first, then add in the fantastic elements on top of that.You get a lot more understanding and engagement a lot faster when the players grok the world. The world is vastly more important than the rules. If you talk to a non-player and say D&D they might vaguely know what that is or what an RPG is. But they will draw a blank on the world and how it works. If you say Lord of the Rings, they’ll most likely know exactly what you mean. Then you’ll have to spend a heap of time explaining all the ways D&D is not LotR.New players are hit with both barrels because they don’t know how the world works or how the game works. The mechanics don’t emulate a recognizable world to most. Even fantasy fans can have a hard time with the D&Disms.But if you start with a world they know and understand and/or one that works mostly like the one they’re most familiar with, then they don’t have anywhere near as much confusion. You don’t have to say “you can try anything” as many times. Or remind them that the answer isn’t on the character sheet or in the rule book. The answer is what makes sense for your character in that world. Not what the rules tell you your character can do. D&D has built itself into this unique thing, so much so it required a lot of explaining. Which is sometimes good and sometimes bad...especially bad with onboarding new players.</blockquote>

Verification