Newbies In Our Midst
New (and I mean truly new) players can be the most challenging and rewarding addition to a group. Your biggest hurdles will be teaching the most basic rules – once the framework is established, the learning curve becomes so much simpler. Some of us take for granted the pivotal d20 roll, or even knowing which die is the d20! My suggestion is to start simply, and try not to just drop the newbie right into the party. This doesn’t mean you should start a battle with just one minion for them to toy with, but go one step further: start them off with a skill roll. In 4E this is the simplest thing to do but contains all the rules of combat without any of the stress (unless you’re climbing a rock face at 200 feet and it’s raining, of course).
The first building block (understanding the core d20 mechanic) is the most critical. Once you can say to the player, “this is just like that Endurance check you had to make to get over your hangover,” you can start making things more complex. At this point, you as the DM can stop focusing on that player so much. I suggest the buddy system from here on out, it’s much easier (on the group and on the new member) if they have only one person quoting rules to them, instead of the entire table. Too many times have I seen a new player sitting there with a blank expression while 5 people try to explain the same rule at the same time. Keep it one-on-one. The newbie will learn to trust their “mentor,” and the mentor will feel like they’ve done a good deed.
New players will often come up with things that will make your head spin. As an example, we have Gertie the Goblin Sorceress. Gertie is played by a woman in her 60s whose last experience with traditional gaming was when my Half-Orc Magic User died (she killed him, accidentally. That’s a story for another day). Gertie was introduced to the game world in a humble kitchenette which happened to be inside an old unused sewer. Eventually, she wound up with the party and during combat decided she was going to run back into her kitchen and get some salt to use on the oozes that were attacking. Your average player might consider that, but they’d question its effectiveness and just go with a normal combat ability. Not so with this player. Later in the same battle, a sewer monster shot a poisoned barb at her. It missed, but she decided she was going to find it and shoot it back at the thing. Of course, she crit. Trying to keep the players excited about the game, I roll with it. I decided that the barb would act in the same way that it would have if the creature were using it, but it would be immune to the poison itself. The attack still did a good amount of damage, but that isn’t the real victory here. The real victory is the grin on her face, and the laughter from the other players when I described what happened.
After all, the most important thing is to have fun.
August 6, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Oh yes, Gertie was pretty awesome. What I really liked though was that you were willing to roll with it, instead of just saying “No, you can’t do that!” all the time. She started being very creative in her fighting methods, and I imagine we’ll continue to see that.
I can empathize with the problems of being dropped into a party and having a whole table of people telling you how to play. It’s very daunting.