Quote Originally Posted by Nu View Post
That sounds good in theory, but in practice I have never seen a new player that actually wants to have their options chosen for them.

Maybe that's just the crowd I hang out with, but then again, that's mostly new players as well, and they still want to choose their own stuff.
I have: Last year during a power outage my younger sister got bored enough that she agreed to letting me run a solo session for her, with her as player and me as DM. She got really confused when I tried to explain what attribute scores were, so I just said "**** it" and made her character for her, just letting her roll dice whenever she needed to.


My experience with this revealed three problems with WotC's mindset here.

1. My sis is not stupid. She's capable of grasping things much more complicated than D&D when she wants to. But that's precisely the problem, she was only playing because she was bored and wasn't invested at all in learning the system, so rather than try to puzzle it out she just filtered the mechanics talk like it was just noise. Pre-gen options are useful for people like that but is this really the demographic WotC wants to try to appeal to? I guess the idea is after letting them play a few sessions like this they'll get interested in how the game actually works, but even though she seemed to have fun with it she's never asked me to play with her again.

2. For people who find the char-gen process too complicated, even the act of picking pre-generated packages is still too complicated.

3. Our session was practically freeform: After the char-gen choices are gone, the complexity of the system in use no longer has anything that remotely resembles a justification. It would have been much better for both of us if we played something like Wushu or Risus or even FATE instead. And yes, the much simpler core system 5E sports is still way too complicated for this type of game.