It's Supposed to be Fun

We're going to take a break and have fun for a second, but with very rigid, boring rules. As long as you follow the rigid rules, you too, can have fun.

A person invited me into a D&D group, and we've only done character creation and I already want to shoot myself.

Let's remember, that making a level 5 character, should, in theory, take a grand total of about no time at all. 10,000 gold to spend, you roll a grand total of ten sets of dice (6 4d6 for stats, and 4 HD dice for HP) and you should be done. Buying things should just be letting people run around and get whatever they want, and there's a grand total of three feats that you should have to worry about getting.

That's it.

Nothing too complicated, nothing too mind numbing, and certainly nothing that should last for almost three hours.

Apparently, that's not enough "fun" because I didn't look at EVERYTHING at every single step.

The guy who's our DM thinks it'll be fun to invite our wives to play with us. I love Alicia, but there's not a chance in the world that she'll enjoy D&D. She did it once, when we were younger just because she wanted to hang out and have fun, but she didn't do it because she loves reading through text books of rules that do nothing but tell you about all of the rules you could follow. She does it to interact, laugh, and have fun. His wife, is in the exact same boat. They're not super nerds.

He is treating it like it is the most serious game that he is ever going to play, and instead of keeping things as simple as he can, he's making them more convoluted and complex than he possibly can handle.

Let's start work this out together, just so you can see the stupid that he ran last night trying to bore me to death. Honestly, if last night was my introduction to the game, I would never play.

The first thing you have to do is figure out what race you are. Normally there's only a few options, human, half elf, elf, halfling, gnome, dwarf, and half orc are your only options. When he asked his wife what race she wanted to be, she asked the response of what her options was. Instead of sticking her with those options and giving BRIEF summaries of who they are, he started with fayes, minataurs, pucks, pixies, half celestials, dragons, and pretty much anything else other than what anyone would consider normal. With each introduction of a new race, he would give a full historical background of who they were, what to expect out of both genders within that race, assuming that that race had genders, and the full social complexity that we would never worry about.

The same thing happened with classes. "What class do you want to be?"

"What are my options?"

"Well. . . " cue a montage of a detailed historical background of classes and talking about things that could only happen at maximum level with unlimited gold to spend on items.

And then he decided to build her backwards. "What skills do you want?"

"What does that mean? Just put them in whatever will help me the most."

Cue another montage of detailed descriptions of skill rolls that his wife will never use or see. The amount of useless information was at a new time high.

"What armor do you want?"

You guessed it! Another montage of going through every single armor option that he could find.

This went on through every single element of character creation. Weapon, feats, magical items, known languages, gear, and everything else that you ever wanted to see about dungeons and dragons was brought up in VIVID explicit detail.

He is basically setting things up for the most high of high adventures. In his mind we are living the ultimate extreme fantasy story of all history, and what he doesn't understand is that's not what his players want.

To put it into gamer terms, he's running a AAA game with a minimum of 40 mods on it, plus a full DLC patch, on the most updated top tier over clocked gaming system . . . and the rest of the people that he's playing with just want to open up Microsoft Hearts and play a few rounds, and any time that we're not on board with his view of how D&D should be played, he's not having it.

This lead me to setting up everything that I could, in my best way possible, to screw up his plan. If there's anything that a DM like him loves, it's character based rich background motivation. My character is a nomad that worships the diety of travel. My wife's character is a druid who also worships travel and seeing new parts of nature. Neither of us have a connection to any part of the story line that he's going to throw at us, and I will walk away from his forced story line in a heart beat because I want to show him that D&D is supposed to be player driven, not DM driven. Players want to have fun, relax, and enjoy a good time together. They do not want to be told about the stupidity that is trying to sort out whatever it was that he was doing.