Frustrations Galore

Prior to playing D&D I dabbled in some online forum RPG's with friends. Back when Gaia was still free and still full of cool people. So, in all my human wisdom and hardwiring I thought it'd work out just fine to use the same concept in a table top RPG.
One thing I seriously overlooked was the little things like Dice, Level restrictions, and turns. And it frustrated me to NO END. As things happened around my character I'd want to have her react, but it wasn't my turn. Other characters were yelling at her to do something (i.e. RUN!), but it wasn't my turn. I had this great idea and everything was perfect, but it wasn't my turn. AAAHHH! and just in case you missed it: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

On a forum RPG there isn't really much of a turn based system. Yeah you wait for other people to post to answer a question or react to a described attack, but when you post you can have your character respond to everything the other character did. Not so with D&D; unless you have an immediate reaction move, which at this point I didn't even know existed.

Rolling Dice: I'm not a god-modder. I make a character and stick to it. If they have a weakness it is a real debilitating weakness. If s/he dies, well then, they die and I can tuck them into one of my stories later. For me rolling dice killed the character at first. I mean how on earth can a play a character who's fairly accurate with a sword if I'm having a bad roll day and can't get above a 4?! (In Mr. Silver's words: "Punish this die.") So I spent a lot of time on the feats figuring out what to take to help Cynica be the 'accurate' character she was built to be. (I hate feats!)

Level Restrictions: So a level 2 character can do three things, unless you're human then you can do 4, suckah. This was very frustrating with a recent character in a new campaign. My character is older than the usual new character, mid 30's give or take. So I wanted her to be a quick study, you know all full of wisdom and stuff from just living life. This is not so, for there are no feats you can take to double the experience gained from an encounter; at least none that I have found.

Then there came the description of the deed. I wanted to go all out like I had previously on the forum RPG's but decided to just kind of lay low with a little "She slashes with her long sword and slams the hilt of her short sword into his eye." Then I'd lean over and whisper to my husband something like: "Kobold's do have eyes, right?"
The describing I've learned greatly depends on the group you're playing with. Some players get super into it with their bards and actually try to sing. Others don't and only announce their attack roll, and go on from there.
But at the time I'd been told these great stories about how Valien's player actually sang and this and that. So I was really nervous about how to describe Cynica; I mean, honestly, how many ways can one fairly quickly describe slashing or stabbing before it becomes boring then the encounter turns into nothing but a series of numbers. I like visuals!
At any rate half my nerves were just being new to everything while everyone around me had played since the 9th or 10th grade.

So these were my learning curves. To this day I still have a few faux pas now and again. But I'm glad I did it, all my little mistakes taught me things. Like read an entire description of a magical item twice to make SURE it says what you think it says. *laughs*