Re: I love new players.


In reply to T.S. (msg # 5):
I shouldn't be posting to public forums, but I'll quickly chime in.
The comment about card games at LGS. I haven't read past that (yet). I would often let players play with my "dragon" deck in Warlord TCG or CCG, whichever acronym your prefer. I'd always play a viable deck, never anything "easy" but the dragon deck was built to show three things; levels, ranks, and build. It is much more difficult to beat a "build" deck without blitz. So my deck was some blitz. As in it had some blitz cards in it, but it was mainly a focused foil of the dragon deck, dealing extra wounds, equipping dragons as armor. Stuff like that. Those were my go to decks. The Dragon deck was, I'll admit, a harder deck to learn on, but it really taught you the basics to the extreme. I guess it would be like MTG and having ramp with 12 CMC creatures, to show mana values, but also let the player speed through it. I never, not once, beat my dragon deck with my Uthanak deck, which was paired to face it with newbies. Players new to the game sometimes felt overwhelmed, and so in that way it wasn't best, but those that naturally worked their way through asking questions and figuring out their own strategy were able to sit down with bounty hunter (an official judge) and be able to play their first tournament.
Another player I knew, great guy up until he got "too cool for us" and just went through a total 180; he had three decks he would use to teach new players. Each was a bane to the other side, so he'd let them pick and then pick the one that was weaker, but still had a good chance. Deck building can be complicated, and I applauded him for figuring out a 70%/30% win rate. Sometimes new players would lose, that was part of what was better about his set up, because a little less than a third of the time this guy's deck would win. That's part of learning too, so he'd urge them to retry.
As for welcoming new players, I haven't the skill to explain rules like I used to, but I welcome new players if they know, coming in, I have aphasia, or to simply put bad communication. It's my failing, not their putting me off. That said, some games, like was said of D&D, do cater to a certain level of brutality. I agree 100% were they not editions, but originals they'd not make it with contemporary audiences getting into new systems. Unlike many editions of games, D&D is more namesake than anything. SR, L5R, HERO, etc... many of these are updates on systems, more than totally new systems that rely on the same lore.