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.
I think this also hurts group dynamics as well.
When you have people that have actually done some reading on the rules vs. people that just coast and foist the majority of the game onto the GM, it makes it appear like the more knowledgeable players are sweaty power-gamers or rules-laywers.
Best example I've got with asking players to make informed decisions was when I ran the Wilderfeast Quick Start. The GM has the info about what ingredients can be gathered in any of the regions, but the party then has to cook it. They know what the ingredient does and just have to make the decision on how they want to combine their ingredients as a party.
#i just wanna play a silly game#i feel like. gatekept. while reading this#i don’t have the drive to read a several hundred pg game manual i just wanna play a game w my friends#like. it’s a game. play it how u want#jeeze
My point is not to say that people who don't want to learn the rules shouldn't play, only that people who don't actually know the rules aren't necessarily engaging with the game to its fullest, especially in the case of a relatively rules-heavy game like D&D, and that as the previous poster mentioned it can actually result in a bad rules dynamic where the DM needs to do more work due to player unwillingness to learn the rules as well as casting players who actually know the rules and can engage with them in unfavorable light. All of these are negative elements of the culture of play surrounding.
Like, there isn't anything meaningfully gatekeepy about saying "players who don't know the rules of the game aren't as good at playing the game as the people who know the rules of the game." Because playing games is a skill that can be cultivated and knowledge of the rules is an important part of that skill.
And respectfully, if the idea of learning the rules of D&D seems like an insurmountable task, you don't have to learn them, but you might actually gain something out of actually making an effort because it can make engaging with the game more rewarding for you. Or if the idea of learning the rules of a game that has hundreds of pages is an insurmountable obstacle, there are lots of games with much more modest page counts! D&D is actually relatively heavy as far as RPGs go but it's not the only RPG, and you can get rewarding mechanical engagement combined with cool stories for a much smaller time investment.
Pointing out that, if you're playing a game with a several-hundred-page rulebook and haven't even made the effort to read the parts of it relevant to your character, then you're pushing a lot of cognitive load onto your friends, isn't gatekeeping. Nobody's kicking you out of your group for it.
i also think that the OP is kind of more about the people who bite back against people going "hey, maybe try something other than D&D" with "but those games are too crunchy/hard to learn" when they don't even really know the actual rules of D&D. i mean, i've had people like this push back against learning PbtA games.
i really hope this was just an unusual case, but i've even had that exist response from one of the local DMs where i live, when i invited him to be a player in a game of Masks i was starting up.
Oh yeah, that was definitely the original context. And it's really funny to hear "learning another game is hard" as a reason for not engaging in game beyond D&D when clearly people are not learning D&D either if they consider the act of reading the rules beyond the pale.
The folks this post is about are the reason you get dudes on Reddit posting about prepping to DM games for 60+ hours a week and still feeling inadequate.
At this point, it’s a fun game for *almost* everyone at the table. And nobody wants to take on the role that has you showing up to game night with a wagon full of paper, an external hard drive, and a heart condition due to anxiety.
Be kind to your GM. Learn bits of the rules and help out :)
Quite so. If you just want to fool around and occasionally roll some shiny math rocks, that's a perfectly cromulent aspiration, and there are plenty of games that will give you exactly that – but if you just want to fool around and occasionally roll some shiny math rocks while simultaneously insisting upon using a rules-heavy system whose rules you refuse to learn, what you're doing in practice is making the GM do all the work of playing your character for you. It isn't gatekeeping to point this out; it's simply a fact. To be sure, there are a few GMs who are receptive to that sort of thing – it's often termed "black box" play in the hobby's jargon, likening the rules to a box the players can't see inside – but most GMs merely tolerate having all the work of making your character happen dumped on them for the sake of avoiding drama. It can be worthwhile to think carefully about whether this is something you're really okay with doing to someone you call a friend.
Like, there's this stereotype of the "play literally any other game" crowd as a bunch of arty snobs who want to force everybody to play semi-freeform Jungian psychodramas about giant telepathic bugs or what-have-you, but in my experience, the greater part of them are folks who've been GMing Dungeons & Dragons for years, and spent that time single-handedly doing all the work of making the game happen, and all they really want is for their group to pick a game whose baked-in expectations regarding mechanical engagement are compatible with the level of engagement they're actually willing to put forth!
This is all assuming the GM insists on following all the rules to their fullest extent and won't have any fun improvising or running a casual game. You are all going "if the players' play style and the GM's play style are at odds it will not be fun for either," which is true, but from that you are coming to the conclusion "therefore if you have a casual play style you are a bad player and being shitty to your GM" and, like...if the GM also has a casual play style it is not an issue for a player to have a casual play style!!!!! If you are a player with a casual play style you can find a GM with a casual play style! I am a GM with a casual play style & it's baffling that this post insists we don't exist and insists GMs all secretly resent the players that don't care about the minutiae of the rules. I also don't care about the minutiae of the rules, I don't structure my games so that they'll collapse if no one adheres to the minutiae of the rules. No, players, your GM does not necessarily secretly resent you if you don't know all the rules. If you ARE a GM and you secretly resent your players, you need to be a goddamn adult about it and TELL THEM your play styles are incompatible instead of being all boo-hoo woe-is-me about your players "not caring" about you. "It's not fun for people who care about rules to play with people who don't care about rules" and it's also not fun for people who don't care about rules to play with people who care about rules...no one is having fun incorrectly, y'all, you just need to find people you can have fun with.
Like, if this post is about "people that can't even do the basic character creation," fine, but "I just wanna go on a fun romp with my friends and roleplay and I don't care about minmaxing or doing The Most and gaining the The Most XP to level up" is a fine way to be a player. Some people I know don't even play with XP or levels. You can bend D&D to your will. You can take the bones of D&D and make it a different game. You're allowed to do that! You can play a non-rules-centric game and have a ton of fun. Even if it isn't ""technically D&D."" You don't NEED to learn another game, even if it IS be more suited to your play style, if you're already having fun and have found people that have fun playing D&D the same way you have fun playing D&D!
In discussions of D&D as a game I find it most meaningful to talk about D&D the game as it exists in the rules. I know that more casual playstyles where a large swathe of the rules are ignored exist, but for the sake of discussing D&D as it exists in the rulebooks and for the sake of players developing system mastery in the game of D&D I don't find it relevant. It's a valid playstyle and obviously won't cause friction, but your assumption that I think this playstyle is bad because I don't explicitly discuss it is implied nowhere in the post, it is simply an inference you chose to make.
So of course if your table is more casual and ignores most of the rules, then this doesn't apply to your table, because no one is giving you the GM too much rules-knowing burden. But at the same time in tables which ignore most of the rules neither players nor GM are necessarily developing system mastery in a way that translates to other tables.
And yeah this isn't "about" any specific type of player who doesn't know the rules, but the notes on this post are full of examples including players not knowing how their characters' abilities or spells work, which no matter how you slice it is offloading a burden to other players. Not knowing the rules is obviously a gradient and not a binary, but at tables that run the game assuming the rulebooks as a baseline I think knowing at least the rules relevant to your character, as well as the general player-facing rules, should be a minimum.
A couple of additional points:
Conflating "players who refuse to engage with the mechanics" with "casual players" isn't appropriate. Plenty of players in the former cohort do want to play Dungeons & Dragons with all the bells and whistles in – they just want someone else to do the actual work of understanding them and carrying them out. Basically, they're approaching tabletop roleplaying like a video game, and treating the GM as the computer. This isn't a weird edge case; it's a common problem, and the notes of this post are full of GMs sharing horror stories about it. "I feel like my players are treating me like a game console" is one of the most frequently cited complaints when discussing GM burnout.
Responding to that by going "well, if that does ever happen it's 100% the GM's fault for not clearly communicating with their players" is perverse; the GM being expected to do all the work of making the game happen is, itself, the problem.
