That's a useful datum, but there are lots of ways to be bad at something. Simple lack of experience is an obvious one; discomfort with arithmetic could do it too. It's Bayesian evidence against my theory that similar faculties are needed for both, but without the ability to examine you and the specific ways in which you're bad at debugging, it's fairly weak evidence. Let's say it nudges my subjective confidence in my theory down from 65%ish to 63%ish.
For my own part I've noticed that the same people who don't do well when I try to teach them programming also struggle with planning in roleplaying (as opposed to reactive, "do something and see what happens" roleplaying). That's why my initial prior is pretty high. But my sample size is also small.
Pretty comfortable with arithmetic, probably not much experience. Basic in high school, a semester or two of Pascal in university, writing very simple macros in MapTools. Once anything gets remotely complicated I have trouble predicting the results, which makes it quite hard to identify errors.
A lot of the people I played with are not technically inclined, for instance our most dedicated players would have included people who grew up to be a salesperson, a manager in the hospitality industry, a financial services rep and a construction worker. My job is also not technical in nature.
I've never seen anyone have any problem with that part, even kids who hate being spotlighted in real life. They may not want to act out a character and "do the voices" but there's no performance anxiety about whether to e.g. accept the giant's invitation to come inside the house and have a cup of hot chocolate. If anything there's a relative absence of fear, compared to those who think a few steps ahead about escape routes or poisoning the giant.
Sure, but those are people who agreed to show up to the game in the first place. And the kid who dones't like being spotligthed in RL could find in liberating; I would actually expect that kid to be more open to it than the popular kid who is used to be in the spotlight
and wants to stay there.
My main group group was unusual in that the social convener got hooked at a young age, and he was popular enough that he made it ok for others in that group to play. But I went to a different school, and when I roped one of the popular crowd into my game, they tended to be the jokey disruptors in the party.
It's one reason pregens are important IMO. It lets new players skip over the chargen minigame and get right into playing the game.
Yeah, pregens are good for starting, but a faster system for generating new characters helps continue that type of game after the pregens run out, and help players to attain system mastery. Plus I would hope it would bleed into some of the other games, and maybe those players could learn the joy of playing the character that fate and the dice have given you.
I think WotC tried this with Dungeons of the Mad Mage, although I wasn't impressed with the product. And maybe you're thinking of much higher lethality than Mad Mage, which... actually could be a lot of fun if you combine it with high XP and decent treasure, even if certain quarters would deride it as a "hack and slash" game. I don't think WotC is capable of writing this sort of game well, but I think you're right, it would sell well if done well[1]. After all, people did seem to like the YouTube videos they did before Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes where people took control of big monsters like demon lords and made them fight each other.
[1] I think part of "doing it well" must include simple rules for character stables. Something along the lines of "make six characters, and whenever one goes up a level they all go up a level; play one character at a time; when one dies, the next one shows up at the start of the next dungeon level; when you run out, another player may donate a backup PC to you, otherwise you're eliminated from the game." Not complex, but showing people how you're expected to approach the game.
I'm not familiar with Dungeons of the Mad Mage, so I can't comment. If it was me I would make a product where death was common enough that it was normalized, so that the chances are better than not that you wouldn't be finishing the module with the same character that you started with. I would also want lots of opportunities for those deaths to be entertaining. It is a lot less likely that you will be upset over the death of a character if you are laughing about it. So some advice to the DM to narrate these deaths as less tragic and more over the top would be helpful.
Honestly, I would probably release a Hommlet conversion - but not the normal, milquetoast conversations, something as lethal as the original - with better support for playing in the village (yes, squeen I already know what you are going to say). That partially solves the "character stables" issue, since there are a number of replacement characters in the village. And I might make the parties bigger, with DMs helping to turn the supporting characters at first ("I'm sorry your fighter died, here, take over this NPC.") with the option for more experienced players to run a main character and their dogsbody.
But I entirely agree that WotC is not up to this task. It was clear to me from their treatment of some elements they brought back onto 5e (I can't remember which, it has been a while since I looked at it) that they don't understand the actual function of a lot of those elements, other than "MOAR fights! Randomness is fun!"
Like, if you want to have random encounters as a semi-realistic timer, you need to slow down movement. The way I do that is to slow it way down if characters are using a 10' pole to check for pits and/or mapping (I don't think a modern crowd would tolerate player-mapping, but there are alternatives) and/or checking for secret doors as they go along. Proceed at an ordinary 3e/4e/5e pace and you will move too quickly to trigger a random encounter, but you will miss stuff, get lost, and fall into traps (which need to be upgraded to account for higher 5e HP). Move at a 1e pace and you are safer but risk random encounters. These sorts of basic math changes between editions never seem to be taken into account.
For XP, to simulate level progression from older editions, and give first level replacement characters a chance to catch up, I double XP awarded to characters below average party level, and halve it for characters above average party level.