Dungeons and Dragons

Our normal every other Saturday gaming group is going to be starting up a new game on the alternate Saturdays. It is a game that is going to be a mix of the Dungeons and Dragons universe and the Disney universe. Several of the players are going to be playing established Disney characters and the others of us are making standard Dungeons and Dragons characters.

We have known about the game for several weeks now. The first session is tomorrow evening. As far as I know, most of the players have had their characters done for quite awhile.One other player and I did most of our preparation for the game today. We both had a generalized concept for what we wanted to do ahead of time. But, I have nearly thirty years of experience playing a vast array of different role-playing systems with Dungeons and Dragons being the one game I have the most knowledge about. He has only been playing for a couple of years.

The difference between the complexity level of our characters and the overall amount of work done by each of us should not, but kind of does surprise me. He is playing a paladin which is pretty much a straight up fighter with a couple of spells and some nifty abilities granted by his fealty to a cause. It is one of the easier classes to set up a character for. It would probably take me a total of maybe an hour to do including generating stats, picking out equipment, choosing necessary feats, deciding which spells to use and copying down any game relevant info about the character from the two or maybe three books that were needed.

The character that I am playing is a wizard and if you know anything about fantasy role-playing games you know wizards are a complex lot. Any class that is primarily spell focused has a lot of calculation and bookkeeping that goes along with it, even at character creation.You have to decide and keep track of all the spells that they know, which ones they have memorized, how many they can cast per day and what bonus spells they get for having high stats.

Determining all of the data associated with the casting of spells often takes longer than setting up a complete character that does not cast. And from the very beginning I knew that this character was going to take even more work. I won't go into all the details, but to do what I wanted required the source material from at least nine different books that I had in .pdf format on my hard drive as well as thirteen open tabs in Firefox on my desktop.

I knew in my head that the idea that I had in for my character was doable and that there were bits and pieces in different places to support my concept. I was cross-referencing and comparing and jotting down notes on what would and would not work and how much of what to put where. We both started around the same time. I have been done for several hours and he is still working at it. The actual writing down and creating of the character took me about an hour and a half once I knew for sure that the rules supported what I wanted to do.The difference for each of us is that I know enough about the system to know where to look for the things that I want and he does not.

I suppose as far as playing Dungeons and Dragons goes I am familiar enough with it that I could be considered an expert. And many things within this system that seem easy for me are a great struggle for a lot others. I wonder how many other areas of life in general this shows up in.

How often do we get upset at others for taking a long time to do or to figure out something that we think is "easy" and obvious?