New Player

I know this has been said before, but it bears repeating. 4th Edition is intuitive, and easy to learn, and especially friendly to new players. The girlfriend of one of my players was recently convinced to try playing D&D with us. She previously knew very little, almost nothing of what D&D is. And on top of that, she knew very little of Roleplaying Games in general. Some of the more seasoned MMO and RPG players tend to take to D&D very well, but not all.

She made her character in about an hour and a half. It was her very first, and she had a little help from Apples. They worked together on making their character while we waited for our late comer, and I ran out of ink on all my dry erase markers, so we needed a trip to take care of that. Also there was an apple pie being made. It was a busy night, so the game didn't start until much later than scheduled. However! You would hardly believe this was her first time playing.

The party was ambushed by goblins in the mushroom forest, and since the new girl, Val, was the ranger, and in the back, she was shot down by goblin sharpshooters from on top of a mushroom. She was rendered unconcious before her first round of combat, but the group brought her up and alive almost immediately. Her first course of action was to spot the goblins on the mushroom, and use her daily to try to split her shots and hit both at once. This failed due to a bad roll, but a nice attempt. The warlord was an Eladrin like herself, and before long they had both teleported up to the top of the mushroom and were taking out the sharpshooters. She was shooting across the battlefield to the archers on the other side, while the warlord took out the two on their mushrooms with melee. It wasn't until the warlord got knocked off the mushroom due to blindness from a hexer below that she started panicking. She was being threatened by a goblin with a sword, and had no melee weapon on her. She wanted to take out the goblin next to her, and the goblin on the other mushroom at the same time, but couldn't decide because anything she did would provoke an opportunity attack. For a newbie in a crappy spot, she did well, but had to go to bed early that night for work. She left the battle early, but still managed to have fun.

Did she have fun? Yes. Was she a burden? (Other than not having a character already made at start time) No. Her turns took about the same amount of time as the veterans around her, if not less, and she came out of it with a yearning to learn more about the rules. It took a good while before she ever became flustered, and this was due to encouragement from the other players, and because of the very practical and intuitive gaming system that 4th Edition has provided us. I will continue to provide more updates on the success of the 4E ruleset as our game gets more sophisticated over the months.

/endrant

-Lance of the New People