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alexandraerinSo, one of the things I brought with me when I fled here several weeks ago was the 4E PHB, which I've been re-reading to get inspiration not so much for game design but more for game presentation... I have these rules, I have these structures, I have a loose outline for the world, how do I introduce players to it?
And one thing that's appallingly clear is that 4E was not designed with the idea that such an introduction would be necessary.
There's the obligatory Why Timmy, A Roleplaying Game Is Just Like When You Played Cops And Robbers As A Kid But Instead Of Arguing About Whether A Forcefield Dog Beats A Dinosaur You Roll Dice And Do Math chapter, of course, and this introductory chapter contains the sole example of actual play given in the entire book, which barely fills more than a single column on a page. Given that this is before any rules have been introduced, obviously, this is more about covering the idea of gameplay than showing how it works.
The rest of the book? There's no step-by-step example of character creation. The skill checks aren't paired with examples. There's no example of combat.
I'd imagine that at some point they asked their players--either in the sense of customer surveys or in the sense that everybody involved in making this was a player who knows other players--whether or not they ever read the examples in RPG books and were told "Nah, man. Waste of space." If they emphasized D&D in the question, then it was probably even more so... these people have been playing D&D for decades.
And more examples would take up space, in an already densely crowded book... but it's the dense crowdedness that necessitates the examples in the first place. And examples aren't there for the people who already get this stuff.
Even more than that, though... reading the PHB, it's really quite apparent that the designers either gave no thought to what the entry point into the game would be for new players, or else concluded the answer was "People who are already playing, obviously. How else would they get into it?"
The description of Dragonborn... a core player race introduced to get the iconic monster that forms half the name of D&D more closely tied into the game's identity... assumes the reader is already familiar with "chromatic and metallic dragons", which it tells you that Dragonborn don't resemble.
If you're a new player, the pages that briefly detail the existence of Dragonborn, Dwarves, Eladrin, Elves, Half-Elves, Halflings, Humans, and Tieflings may be your first glimpse of the D&D world as anything more than a sitcom punchline or a distant ancestor of a video game. And the Dragonborn are alphabetically first. And then here's this mention of D&D's signature monster and a reference to the unique taxonomy that every existing player knows, the thing that makes them D&D dragons, and it's just a throwaway line letting players know that Dragonborn don't actually look like them.
That's an important piece of information to put out there if you're concerned with making sure that established players don't get the wrong idea from the dragon/born connection... but it does nothing to help brand new players understand how Dragonborn fit into this strange world with its dungeons and its dragons.
(As a side note, given how iconic D&D's dragons and their color schemes are, I really have to wonder at the decision to make Dragonborn dull-scaled and have their elemental breath attacks not be keyed into the color scheme. Especially given that they were explicitly added as a way of emphasizing the & Dragons.)
I remember one of the old boxed "starter kits" that came out in the late 80s or early 90s had not just an example of play but a solo adventure that started out as a choose your own adventure type booklet with a prefab character and then graduated into the player setting up a map and putting tokens on it at the directions of the booklet, introducing them to both the role of player and DM and easing them into how the game is played. My memories aren't clear enough to speak to the execution, but I think that's brilliant.
While it's not something I'm going to focus on before playtesting (writing examples for rules that aren't finalized is bound to lead to tricky editing or a lot of redundant work later on), I think I'm going to make my approach for the published version of the Basic Player's Guide be to try to make it live up to its name. Established gamers will probably be able to jump into the Character Guide with only a few glances at the BPG, but I want it to work as an entry point for people who are new to both this game and the hobby.
And one thing that's appallingly clear is that 4E was not designed with the idea that such an introduction would be necessary.
There's the obligatory Why Timmy, A Roleplaying Game Is Just Like When You Played Cops And Robbers As A Kid But Instead Of Arguing About Whether A Forcefield Dog Beats A Dinosaur You Roll Dice And Do Math chapter, of course, and this introductory chapter contains the sole example of actual play given in the entire book, which barely fills more than a single column on a page. Given that this is before any rules have been introduced, obviously, this is more about covering the idea of gameplay than showing how it works.
The rest of the book? There's no step-by-step example of character creation. The skill checks aren't paired with examples. There's no example of combat.
I'd imagine that at some point they asked their players--either in the sense of customer surveys or in the sense that everybody involved in making this was a player who knows other players--whether or not they ever read the examples in RPG books and were told "Nah, man. Waste of space." If they emphasized D&D in the question, then it was probably even more so... these people have been playing D&D for decades.
And more examples would take up space, in an already densely crowded book... but it's the dense crowdedness that necessitates the examples in the first place. And examples aren't there for the people who already get this stuff.
Even more than that, though... reading the PHB, it's really quite apparent that the designers either gave no thought to what the entry point into the game would be for new players, or else concluded the answer was "People who are already playing, obviously. How else would they get into it?"
The description of Dragonborn... a core player race introduced to get the iconic monster that forms half the name of D&D more closely tied into the game's identity... assumes the reader is already familiar with "chromatic and metallic dragons", which it tells you that Dragonborn don't resemble.
If you're a new player, the pages that briefly detail the existence of Dragonborn, Dwarves, Eladrin, Elves, Half-Elves, Halflings, Humans, and Tieflings may be your first glimpse of the D&D world as anything more than a sitcom punchline or a distant ancestor of a video game. And the Dragonborn are alphabetically first. And then here's this mention of D&D's signature monster and a reference to the unique taxonomy that every existing player knows, the thing that makes them D&D dragons, and it's just a throwaway line letting players know that Dragonborn don't actually look like them.
That's an important piece of information to put out there if you're concerned with making sure that established players don't get the wrong idea from the dragon/born connection... but it does nothing to help brand new players understand how Dragonborn fit into this strange world with its dungeons and its dragons.
(As a side note, given how iconic D&D's dragons and their color schemes are, I really have to wonder at the decision to make Dragonborn dull-scaled and have their elemental breath attacks not be keyed into the color scheme. Especially given that they were explicitly added as a way of emphasizing the & Dragons.)
I remember one of the old boxed "starter kits" that came out in the late 80s or early 90s had not just an example of play but a solo adventure that started out as a choose your own adventure type booklet with a prefab character and then graduated into the player setting up a map and putting tokens on it at the directions of the booklet, introducing them to both the role of player and DM and easing them into how the game is played. My memories aren't clear enough to speak to the execution, but I think that's brilliant.
While it's not something I'm going to focus on before playtesting (writing examples for rules that aren't finalized is bound to lead to tricky editing or a lot of redundant work later on), I think I'm going to make my approach for the published version of the Basic Player's Guide be to try to make it live up to its name. Established gamers will probably be able to jump into the Character Guide with only a few glances at the BPG, but I want it to work as an entry point for people who are new to both this game and the hobby.