Help with/for a new player

[Wookie-ranger]

I am going to help someone getting started with D&D (3.5). she is very interested and understands more or less the mechanics of the game is and such. We played through the “Basic Game” (the dnd starter box) with one other person and each player was controlling two characters.
I have been playing 3.0/3.5 since about 2004 and know my way around the dice; from both sides, DM and Player.
I want to make some houserules with objective of minimizing micro-management. We want to speed up to game and make it more fun. What are some good suggestions? What are other things that I could change/tweak to make the game 'easier' without changing the game completely?

Something that I already did was:
No encumberment. Easier for everyone's bookkeeping and after they have access to port-holes / bags of holding and such it wouldn't really matter anyway. Basically “you can carry as much as you want but keep it reasonable when shopping and don't try to swim without dropping your backpack first”

All of those houserules will probably fall away as some goes on and 'raises her knowledge (gaming) skill' :smallwink:



PS: why is the search function saying '500 Internal Server Error' so often?

[Lonely Tylenol]

Allow retraining of class levels for the first few. If she picks a class concept that isn't working for her, or if what you guys agree on is sound in terms of character concept initially, but turns out to be a mess later on and you find another way to do it later on, let her retrain out of it. Sometimes the exploration of concepts can be just good in theory, bad on paper, and worse at the table.

Example:
I have a person in my group who basically wanted to do sneaky, cloak-and-dagger stuff, like blackmail and eventually assassinations. He also wanted to have his character be shadow-themed, and have a number of shadow-themed powers, the most important of which was the ability to teleport short ranges through shadow. Suddenly, a light bulb went off in my head: "Hey, I think the Shadowdancer does that," I said. He agreed that that's basically the kind of fluff he's looking for, so we went for it.

Later, while I was perusing Tome of Battle for another character (a Warblade), I stumbled upon the Shadow Jaunt maneuver in the Shadow Hand discipline, and noted that it's basically what my player wanted, but done better and coming online at an earlier level, plus he can grab a number of other combat-useful tricks (and if he wants, he can stay in Shadow Hand and make them all shadow-themed). I told him about it, and let him retrain away his crappy feat and his ranks in Perform (Dance) so that he wouldn't have to worry about divulging into a class that is going to be behind almost all the players in the long run (most everybody in the game is high T3 to high T4; the lowest I have are the Shadowcaster, which I gave a straight power increase in spells/day; a Swashbuckler/Rogue, which I'm trying to convince Factotum might be better for; and him).

This should probably be something that happens less and less as time goes on, but the first few levels of a new PC are fluid, and people at this stage are still exploring character concepts. Let them do so more freely and everyone can only stand to benefit from it.