Introducing New Players

During my time as a gamemaster, I have had to teach new players on more than one occasion, and I'm about to do it again.  I always like to introduce D&D to new players, however, on this occasion, I'll be working with a group that will consist of four new players.  I've never attempted to work with four newbies at once before, and it's made me alter my way of thinking.

In the past, when running an introductory game, I suggested the new player play a fighter, because fighters are very straightforward, simple to make, and simple to play.  I would run a typical dungeon crawl with a few combat encounters, a trap or two, low light conditions, and hidden things to search for.  I had thought that since combat is one of the most complex things in D&D, I needed to expose the new player to combat so they could learn the rules.  Even with the skill checks and dungeon crawl, the entire adventure was designed to expose the player to the rules.

However, I have recently realized that this isn't the best way to introduce a new player.  D&D has come a long way since its beginnings.  There is so much more to the game than dungeons.  This time around, I have decided to write an adventure that has almost no combat, focusing instead on trying to immerse the new players in the story instead of throwing rules at them.  I figured, this is the real test of whether they'd want to play or not, since, after all, D&D is a roleplaying game, it's about characters in a story, the rules can come later.

While working with one of the new players to create their character, I first asked him what experience he had with fantasy gaming on PC and console, then asked him what was his favorite type of character to play in those games.  He responded with wizard.  I warned him that playing a wizard in D&D was one of the most complicated classes to play, but he wanted to try it anyway.  It was then that I realized that this wasn't going to be about just teaching people the rules.  This player wasn't concerned with how difficult it would be to play a complex class in his first game ever.  He was going to enjoy the experience by playing his favorite type of character, rather than play something simple.  Really, that's what D&D is about, the experience, not the rules.