Why are new Players the best Players?
Playing with new Players is one of the best experiences a DM1 can have.
I have for the last two years introduced a dozen people into TTRPGs, with more than half of them becoming regular Players for past or current campaigns.
Every new Player shines a new light into games and into the hobby, bringing the unexpected with effortless naturality.
It is a counterproductive desire, though.
If you continually pursue games with non-Players, eventually you will end up with, well, experienced people.
The mere act of playing changes their inherent qualities into the deep, pervasive, evil vices of experienced Players!
They soon will be looking into systems on their own or, god forbid, making 5e builds by themselves, choosing every spell they want to pick until level 20.
But. Why are New Players more fun to play with? What are, then, the deep vices of experience?
In search of Player advice for the How to be a Good Player Blogwagon, let's reflect on what a New Player brings - or doesn't bring - to the table, and what Players of long time can learn with them.
"We Can Just do Anything?"
Yes. Yes you can. Follow the reality of the events put in the scene, don't trample over other Players (including the DM), and yes, there are no specific actions at every giving moment!
Experienced Players may have more... background. They may know Player Stances. GNS Theory. Or at worst, they will have cheat sheet of available actions. A best sequencing turn for every combat.
Or the worst of all.
They might know how to calculate the odds of a roll before executing an idea in order to do it or not.
New Players, on the other hand, for not knowing what is impossible, live only by the narrative and their working imagination, and not by expected behaviors of the TTRPG world.
Natural Rules Eliding
How can a New Player be constrained by rules of a system if they don't even know what a system defines by nature?
An experienced Player may not know the one system at play in this campaign, and allow themselves to be blackboxed into playing diegetically. But they still know combat usually has rules and complex turns. They know the difference between Acrobatics and Athletics. They know a monster may have a HP, and armor they may need to target, or that the Lancer RPG is not a Combat as War system, even if they didn't read it fully.
By not understanding a OSR rulebook usually makes reaction checks, Players will interact with a new group unchecked to the 50 year of accumulated knowledge of how a reaction check works; the new group is simply a new group.
New Players don't play the system. In fact, the consequence here is quite close to the one above: an earnest consideration for the rules of the narrative as the only ones applied to the game.
The Thief of Joy
A New Player won't expect you to DM like his exact irreplaceable childhood memory game. They don't need 3D printed minis with a A3 map and two hourglasses with ticking clocks for a battle with 5 phases.
For a New Player, a Dragon may very well be their first dragon they have to kill with their own hands. A gelatinous cube may be an unknown challenge.
Even beyond the virtue of novelty, a New Player may be simply blessed by their own incapability of comparing.
An experienced Player may have lived a campaign where everything just fell into place. Or a DM that was a good friend and so the sessions were smoother. Or even, they could have watched Critical Role and expected a multiyear story with 8 players.
The Lesson
You know what a New Player is? Someone that is trying out a niche hobby, one which by design requires a deep trust in the others playing with them. A hobby with homework, with a pinch of theater, and math.
You know who tries out new weird stuff? A cool person.
Experienced Players should approach every game as if it was their first, just like when they were - back then - that cool person.
They should strive to treat the world as unbounded by rulebooks and the collective TTRPG unconscious. Of how to Do a Turn, or how to Roll for Stealth, or how a room probably has a mimic or a chest.
And lastly, they should strip away any previous expectation. Each game is a new game. No group is the same, and not even a new campaign with the same group will work the same.