New DM Handbook: Old New Players
Last week I DMed my first game. I originally didn’t have any intention of addressing it right away, and I won’t get right back to it. I still have a number of things I wanted to talk about how I see things before getting to it, but this is something that new DMs should be aware of.
This article is written based just on one session, with two players being completely new, and two having played a long time ago. It’s not a very effective sample size, but what I observed is worth consideration for other new DMs.
The Old New Player
What do I mean when I say Old New Player? They’re someone who played a long time ago but fell out of the hobby, and are now coming back after many years (if not decades). Why they left doesn’t matter. Maybe they stopped playing because they felt they grew out of it, they didn’t have time for it anymore, or maybe they stopped playing due to peer pressure. It doesn’t matter. You’re
putting together a game, and they’re excited to get back into something they really enjoyed a very long time ago.
Why are they considered new players even when they have tons of experience? There are any number of factors in there. I can say from experience that going back to a game has a degradation of skill factor. Whether it’s chess or Call of Duty, you lose a lot when you stop playing. You don’t need to rebuild your skill set, but it takes time to readjust. Even if you’re playing the same game, reacquiring those skills and relearning the rules puts you in a table dynamic very similar to that of a completely new player.
Old new players can come from older versions of the game, a game that has been left to the ravages of time, or one rooted in older mentalities. Gaming communities grow and evolve. Systems, and ways of doing things, evolve as well. Using a current reference, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare came packaged with Modern Warfare (in the deluxe editions). I played Call of Duty a long time ago, but abandoned it sometime around Black Ops. I picked up Infinite Warfare to get Modern Warfare Remastered, but I’ve played a few rounds of Infinite Warfare with old friends at their request. Everything was natural for them, from battle tactics to game mechanics, having stayed with the series, but it felt like an entirely new series to me. Dungeons & Dragons is no different than any other game. Third Edition is almost an entirely different game compared to Fifth Edition, and the mentalities are different, too.
The Good
There’s a lot of good old new players bring to the table. For one, you don’t have to explain entire concepts to them. My two brand new players sometimes struggled with the more basic concepts, like player knowledge vs character knowledge, the separation between the real world and the table, or staying true to their characters, not to mention mechanical concepts. It’s not their fault. They don’t know what they don’t know. They’re learning, but it takes time. For my old new players, it’s all about getting them to translate their previous knowledge into the new system.
Old new players understand the necessary balance between role playing and game needs, as well as party composition, especially when the party is composed entirely of some version of new players. They’re going to be inclined to be open to balance, or at least maximizing their characters, so the brand new players can have fun with their character concepts, like my Forrest Gnome Ranger Beast Master player who has a Wolf Companion named Snoopy.
The Bad
My only history with previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons was over 20 years ago, which was very antagonistic, even if unintentionally. In my personal limited experience, D&D was a full contact sport. My anecdotal surveying of the many advice videos I’ve seen, from both Nerdarchy and others, has at least indicated that the culture was a lot more aggressive in the past. Old new players who played under that culture are likely going to carry that old mentality with them, being that they didn’t evolve with the hobby, much in the same way that I didn’t evolve with the Call of Duty community.
One of my old new players seemed to be convinced that I was out to kill them all before the first encounter. He looked for every angle of attack, including climbing up to the top of the mast (someone was occupying the crow’s nest) of the ship they were on that was taking them to the actual quest. He wanted to see if there were other ships intent on attacking them. Obviously, there weren’t. I was running what was essentially a tutorial quest, allowing them time to figure out how the game functions, and attacking them on the way there would’ve been the antithesis of what I was trying to do. However, I think it was just how he was trained to think based on the way the culture of his group used to play.
The Ugly
The ugly part isn’t the player, it was me. An experienced DM would’ve been able to recognize the pitfalls and redirect focuses properly. What took the party two hours to get through the first encounter with him, took the party to get through the next three encounters after he had to leave for work.
I was trying to be hands-off so my players, especially my brand new players, discover things for themselves. They did. In that first encounter, they witnessed a critical failure when trying to stealth for a surprise round, and a critical success on an intimidation check while trying to get information out of the surviving pirate. I felt I did an effective job relaying the information she would have, but I didn’t do a good job of putting the players back on track. I tried to do it in-game, which didn’t work, and I was too slow to act to have them move on, thinking they would get that this super low-level (by challenge rating and by organization) pirate wouldn’t know anything about the boss’ operations.
In The End
New DMs, this is a direct message to you. Remember the Good and the Bad of Old New Players. Allow their good to shine and make sure they understand how their old mentality fits in your new campaign. Just try not to be the Ugly.
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