I like your soccer analogy. The question is:
Both are perfectly valid uses for a soccer ball but if the expectations don't align you gonna get problems.
I very much agree. I would not have started with D&D if our GM gave me a 300 page book and said I needed to read this before we play.
Now if you're VERY into the game and want to play at a high level I think it's entirely fair to look for a group that brings this level of investment. Some other user brought up the analogy to a soccer team.
Ultimately you have to decide whether your focus is playing the best soccer you can or if you just want to kick a ball around with your friends. The former means you've got to look for players who take it as serious as you do. The later means you've got to make compromises to keep the group engaged.
Neither is inherently more right than the other.
I had them down cold in a week.
At 8 or 9 you also had a lot less on your plate than a group in their 30s / 40s.
I strongly disagree.
0.0.37 is completely unusable for me. It crashes on startup. And the updates before are terrible when it comes to playing with anything but the bleeding edge of lemmy versions. Switching profiles is also shit.
The mobile infantry has made me the man I am today!
We were exploring the Lost Mine of Phandelver and to into a particularly nasty fight. With one AoE attack the (mini)-"boss" knocked me and our wizard out and put the other two at 1 and 2 HP respectively. Knight quaffed a potion of invisibility, picked up the wizard and tried to ram open a door to a neighboring room. The door didn't budge and he took 1 HP damage, dropping both to the floor and ending his invisibility. The halfling kicked me down the stairs and made it seem like she stumbled and we were now all out of action. The enemies did not pursue but we were all on death's door. Luckily she remembered that I was carrying a healing potion. She gave it to me and I managed to heal everyone up to a reasonable degree.
Slinking away from that room our knight thought "oh let's go exploring, we gonna have to do that anyway at some point" and alerted another horde of monsters to our presence. Less than a handful of turns later the party was again down to a total of 1 HP and at least one of us NOT doing well with his death saving throws. But halfling came in clutch once more and we actually survived.
DM later asked us if this was too much. Our consensus was that it was really exciting but if we had died then our answer would probably be different.
The problem isn't cars. The problem is land use deliberately designed to make anything that's not a car non-viable.
Imagine if you will urban planning that doesn't surround every business with a concrete moat and every pancaked home with a football field of yard that most will rarely ever use. Planning that doesn't segregate every building function into distinct zones and make each zone as large as possible so you have no choice but to travel long distances for EVERYTHING.
though it was completely leveled
So were a lot of American cities... The only difference: it was self inflicted - to make room for cars.
Adam Something, dat you?
When I bring in a new board game I also teach it to the group. I fully expect that as a DM it is similarly a part of my responsibilities to coach the players about these rules. After all I want to play this with them.
At some point though, I indeed expect my players to have the initiative to look some things up for themselves. But the D&D PHB is 320 friggin pages. That's not a casual "give it a quick read before our next session" kind of thing.
But I think it also depends on your schedule. We occasionally had a month or more between sessions and it's quite natural to forget some aspects of a game (any game really) when you've been off for that long.
I believe that the lives we all lead are the only thing that truly matters. As such:
I don't care what label you slap on this.
Good fun! Not an amazing movie but thoroughly watchable. I don't know a lot about D&D and at no point did I feel like I was missing some necessary background info.