The real problem with D&D's contemporary culture of play is that it's basically a worse version of what Paranoia was doing forty years ago. It's a faux pas for players to display knowledge of the mechanics and the GM is expected to maintain an elaborate kayfabe where they merely pretend to be moderating a game with rules while actually doing something completely different, and they're not even allowed to kill players with orbital laser strikes for talking back.
Like, I'm not keen on any framing of play where the GM is expected to do literally 100% of the work of making the game happen, but it seems to me that if you're going to do that anyway, the GM being both allowed and encouraged to kill you with lasers whenever they want is only fair compensation.
@danwhat replied:
The number of people willing to accept players who won't read the rules even though they come back week after week is bizarre - you wouldn't accept it for any other game, and RPGs are just a kind of game! If the rules of one game are 'too complex' just switch to a different game! If they claim they 'don't have time' - cancel one session. That 3 hour block is now dedicated game-learning time, and 3 hours is plenty. Easy.
See, "RPGs are [...] a kind of game" is where the disconnect lies. There's a large chunk of the present D&D fandom who don't think of tabletop RPGs as games; they think of them as performances being put on by the GM for the audience of the players, who – like any audience – are obliged only to be physically present. In this understanding, the "game-ness" of the activity is part of the performance – i.e., the GM is merely pretending to moderate a game with rules as an act of kayfabe; there's no point learning the rules because there aren't "really" rules to learn.
(Partly this is a product of folks coming to the hobby whose sole prior experience is with high-production-value podcasts, where the GM actually is an entertainer putting on a show for an audience, and often a professional actor to boot; partly it's a product of Hasbro attempting to market D&D as a zero-entry-barrier hobby by framing the GM not as a fellow player with special responsibilities, but as a volunteer service provider whose job is to facilitate other people playing D&D.)
The observation I'm gesturing toward here is that Paranoia is a game that actually, textually works this way – i.e., the GM is a performer putting on a show for the players, and the rules are fake and don't matter – but it does so within a narrative frame where the GM is both allowed and encouraged to demand that the players dance for their amusement, so at least the fuckery flows both ways. Contemporary D&D's culture of play doesn't even offer that (indeed, in many circles a GM who expresses any preferences at all regarding what kind of game they want to run would be regarded as an odious gatekeeper!), then has nerve to wonder why rapid GM burnout is such a massive problem.
I'm not familiar with Paranoia, so forgive me if I'm rehashing the main thrust of it or some other game, but this does actually make me think it'd be fun to have a game with the complexity of something like 3.5 or Pathfinder, and the DM and players establish a set of rulebooks in play, and then it becomes a bluffing game on par with that one episode of "Um, Actually" where both the DM and the players attempt to fudge the rules, and catching the other out means bonuses and/or penalties.
Why is this floor of the dungeon so hard? Because the DM has been using the old rules for tremorsense, and we established in session 0 that we're using the 7 Rings rules! Now those creatures are blind for a turn while reality reasserts itself, attack! How did that attack not hit the fighter? Ah, the player was ignoring that her weapon is two-handed and didn't reduce her armor to account for not holding her shield. Will the DM disarm her, or turn off armor bonuses for the round? And of course to keep things balanced and novel, players would be encouraged or even directed to change classes, multi class, and otherwise screw around with their characters.
It lets players that like crunch really get into nitty gritty, builds a natural system (perhaps even a diagetic one) for accounting for slip-ups on both sides, and encourages everyone to learn the rules as an active strategy to survive in a game where the God of Deceit and Duplicity has made it dangerous to trust reality itself too implicitly. I like the idea of adding a level of gamification to the act of learning your character.
