Bad intro to necromunda

[hivefleetkerrigan]

The title says it all. A friend is really into necromunda and has been trying to get everyone to try it out. I know a couple of other mutual friends tried it and liked it. I had a free evening and decided to give it a go. I'd heard about the kitbashing opportunities for necromunda and was excited to try the game to see if I liked it.

Basically, I got thrown straight I to the fire rather than getting an intro game. My friend organizes games at the FLGS and basically everyone else bailed but me and my opponent (who seemed really nice despite my bad experience with the game).

Due to time constraints (somehow my friend missed me sending over when I'd be arriving) I basically got told "just deploy and go" with no knowledge of how cover or anything else worked. I had watched GWs intro video, but that was it.

The board setup was terrible for me: either way to open or requiring me to climb over terrain leaving me out of range or entirely exposed on the terrain. Parts of it were not marked well so what appeared to be a solid wall had LoS through a crack.

Despite being a newbie and having nothing explained to me, I wasn't really given an option to be able to redo things or premeasure.

By turn 2 I'd lost a few fighters and a lot of the fun ones I had were pinned or injured so they couldn't do anything with my opponent having lost maybe 2 fighters totaled.

The rules were a confusing mess. "Well this person has X special rule" great, what does that mean, it's not on their card so I won't know.

To top it off, my dice rolls were terrible (failing to wound with a mining laser 2x).

All in all, it was an absolutely terrible learning experience. I'm not sure if I want to even try to learn the game now, despite having been excited for the kitbashing opportunities.

What do people like about necromunda?
How should an intro game go?
Are there ways to reduce the complexity of the game without removing it's spirit?

[infornography]

Necromunda is enormously complex for a skirmish game. It is honestly SUPER intimidating to newbies in no small part due to GW publishing so many different books for it which have different systems in place and some of the books not having critical information printed in them which you have to find elsewhere.

As terrible as GWs 40k books are laid out, Necromunda books are often worse.

That said, once you climb mount learning curve it has a ton of potential for fun, but that fun of course would be partially dependent on friendly opponents and a good Arbitrator. The factions are super interesting and fun and the leveling up aspect of it is pretty awesome. I am currently about halfway up mount learning curve myself and haven't had time to try to play, but have been spending some time lurking on the Necromunda reddit page and watching videos of some of the gameplay. I don't have as much hobby time as I used to so I am taking it slow.