#edit: one of our irl friends turned out to be a system as well. we're system magnets

[cat-madhouse]

Congrats on the systemification

*another one bites the dust plays /silly*

Thanks 👍

[yetanotherrogue]

If you are going to be the kind of player who doesn't know the rules and expects the dm to do the work for you, you at least need to like, acknowledge you're doing that and appreciate that the dm is doing that for you. I ended up in a pathfinder game with friends and had no prior experience with pathfinder. I did learn the basic rules but I was not going to have the time to learn how to build a good character so I worked with my dm and gave him the framework/concept I wanted and he picked out my classes and feats & such. and I paid him for doing so with a really nice set of dice. I forget whether they were stone or metal but they were nice enough that I felt they were proportionate to the amount of extra work he had to do for me so I could jump into this new system

if you play dnd with me irl maybe don't read under the cut I say some kinda harsh things abt some of the group's difference in play styles under there

also I know a lot of people who think the fewer rules there are the less the players have to learn. we were playing around with a heavily modified version of open legend which is a fairly open ended, moderately rules-light, and classless system. I ended up writing out notecards of what my character could do on her turn with flavor specific to her and the manifestations of her magic and specific limitations I imposed on her abilities to keep them in her particular character design. I figured out what she could do fairly reliably and what was a huge stretch for her to try. I figured out what it looked like when certain powers failed and what her miss actions would be. some of the other players also got a solid handle of what they wanted their characters to do. but other players who were more used to the rules just coming from the dm didn't and would take forever trying to figure out what they could and could not do and shifted that work onto the dm. and when we did a part 2 of the campaign the dm made the whole system more crunchy and laid out more rules that applied broadly and standardized a lot of the miss actions in ways that I feel made the system suffer. it limited the kinds of character builds actually worked in the game to the point that my highly powerful and effective character was essentially useless and all forms of magic worked pretty much the same except one that had all the power. but they had to do that because some of our group is only able to function within a rigid framework and they were doing so much work as the dm each session having to reinvent the wheel with the same characters abilities over and over again.

and the reality is that some people in our group do well with open ended systems and are willing to put in the work on those while others do well with a lot of really detailed structure and are willing to put in the work to learn the granularities of those (frankly, I hate doing that) and so we keep coming back to dnd and srd based systems because nothing (including dnd) actually is going to make all of us happy but unfortunately some of the players I like playing with are on the opposite side of the divide and some of the players that enjoy the open ended stuff use it to make character types that I don't love playing with and there are also like 2 people that do well with both and so while we should maybe break into two different groups based on play styles I think that may actually make us miserable so I think we're ging to be trapped in 10 player 5th edition games forever...

I think an important part of the "D&D is easy to learn" argument is that a lot of those people don't actually know how to play D&D. They know they need to roll a d20 and add some numbers and sometimes they need to roll another type of die for damage. A part of it is the culture of basically fucking around and letting the GM sort it out. Players don't actually feel the need to learn the rules.

Now I don't think the above actually counts as knowing the rules. D&D is a relatively crunchy game that actually rewards system mastery and actually learning how to play D&D well, as in to make mechanically informed tactical decisions and utilizing the mechanics to your advantage, is actually a skill that needs to be learned and cultivated. None of that is to say that you need to be a perfectly tuned CharOp machine to know how to play D&D. But to actually start to make the sorts of decisions D&D as a game rewards you kind of need to know the rules.

And like, a lot of people don't seem to know the rules. They know how to play D&D in the most abstract sense of knowing that they need to say things and sometimes the person scowling at them from behind the screen will ask them to roll a die. But that's hardly engaging with the mechanics of the game, like the actual game part.

And to paraphrase @prokopetz this also contributes to the impression that other games are hard to learn: because a lot of other games don't have the same culture of play of D&D so like instead of letting new players coast by with a shallow understanding of the rules and letting the GM do all the work, they ask players to start making mechanically informed decisions right away. Sure, it can suck for onboarding, but learning from your mistakes can often be a great way to learn.