4 Geeks 4e Episode 07 – How to get started in D&D

One Response to 4 Geeks 4e Episode 07 – How to get started in D&D

1. msouth says:

   June 6, 2011 at 12:24 pm

   Thanks for posting this, I listened to it when I was deep in the frustration phase of having purchased the red box and three-book kit and felt like I was endlessly spinning my wheels trying to get going. My group is myself and four sons. I played a handful of times when I was younger, one of my sons played many times with a friend whose dad would DM for them (I don’t think they were using 4e), and no one else had any experience.

   Just trying to fill out the character sheet was a huge pain. The wording in the PHB is confusing all by itself, and the mental weight of trying to figure out what a feat, power, racial ability, etc etc all meant was daunting.

   We spent, over the course of several days, at least a couple of hours just trying to get characters set up. We decided to play the red box’s first group adventure to get going. After all the hours of setup and trying to figure out what everything meant, our three characters (a cleric, a wizard, and a ranger–because it took so long to get going my other son who was going play a paladin wasn’t able to be there) died in the first encounter. Admittedly, this was partly because the goblins flanked me and rolled a natural 20. But still. NOT a good introduction to the game, esp when I’m trying to convince my oldest, a decidedly non-geeky teen, to keep participating.

   So, here are my recommendations, if you have a group full of novices:

   (1) Start with pre-generated characters. When people are trying to decide if they like the game or not, they don’t want to spend an hour figuring out what a feat is, how it’s different from a power, what the implications will be of picking one feat over another, whether this feat complements that power or works well for that race. You feel like you’re making all kinds of really important decisions and you have zero knowledge about how to make them. Or maybe that’s only something that old people worry about. In any case, even if you are starting with the PHB classes, people should be advised to pick the class, use the suggested feats and powers they list with the class, and then pick a race based on what helps the class the most. This way they can spend their initial time learning about what their character can do rather than trying to fill in a blank slate from a bewildering universe of possibilities.

   (2) Since death is (apparently) a very real possibility on your very first time out, it would be really good for at least one person to know in advance what happens when you die. Are you supposed to discard that character and create a new one? If you re-use the character do your experience points go to zero? People are used to online games where it’s very clear what happens in these situations and, especially if you just spent hours trying to figure out how to even make all the decisions for one character, it’s a really bad idea to have a whole group sitting there not knowing if all that effort and anticipation was completely wasted. Even a simple couple of sentences, like “you can re-use the character, just zero out the experience points, which means if you died right away you didn’t really lose anything. The party can [must? who knows? it doesn't say] go back to town to find ‘the new you’.”.

   (3) I don’t know how realistic it is for the three characters we created to survive that first encounter (maybe if the only healer hadn’t got hit with a natural 20 and died first?). Either they need to be strongly encouraged to have at least four members (having one or more people play two or more characters if necessary) or the DM (keep in mind our DM was DM-ing his first campaign) needs to be encouraged to modify the encounter when the group is weaker. I’m not sure I even want to know what the other encounters are like. Next time we’ll just play the fourth character anyway, but I have doubts that it will be enough.

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