Quote Originally Posted by Kvess View Post
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. It's not that the Champion Fighter doesn't have to have a character sheet, but the player doesn't have to look at it. Being a strong person with a sword can be incredibly simple and immersive, in the sense of "What do you want to do?", and you can spend more time engaged with the story than your spell list. I've had great experiences with the subclass and I'm an adult who also DMs and plays casters. A typical campaign world is full of objects just waiting to be climbed on and toppled over, and there's fun in that.

A kid could just say: "I want to smash open the door!" And the DM can say: "Alright, that's an Athletics check, roll a d20."

With a Warlock casting Hideous Laughter, the kid needs to know what a spellslot is and how to manage them, how line of sight and range works, which creatures have an intelligence score of 5 or more, which creatures are more likely to fail Wisdom Saving Throws, and what the Prone and Incapacitated Conditions mean. It requires more rules knowledge and book keeping than, "I want to wrestle that dragon!"

And I don't think smashing open doors or wrestling dragons has to be boring.
I'm not sure why you think that spells can't just work narratively the same way as interacting with objects. If the kid needs to metagame THL in order to cast it, then he needs to metagame trapped objects and jumping distances. Also no, there is no need for book keeping. The only thing the kid needs to know is that he can use his spells 2 times and everytime he and his friends takes a break, he can use them 2 times more.

Once he knows what the spell does narratively, the only thing he needs to do is to describe it: "I want to make that person laugh!". He may even find social situations where he will cast this and create funny scenarios. Similarly, he can say that he is going supersayan or whatever kids watch these days, and make his attacks stronger, through casting hex. He doesn't need to understand what hex does mechanically or how to debuff STR skill checks to assist the grappler.