#37: Teach Me The Rules Please, I'm All Ears

I. Dear Reader,

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot of rulebooks and the fact that they are, you know, books.

I know a few people who really enjoy reading RPG books - but I’m not one of them. Especially if they’re 100s of pages long. I find that I can only really read them if I have to - i.e. I’m running a game soon and need to learn the game ASAP! (My technique is to make a new document and then start making a Reference Sheet from scratch. Only thing that has ever helped me focus.)

It’s widely accepted that people learn in different ways. Reading is a method that works for some people and really doesn’t for others. Some games have started shipping with audio-versions of the rulebooks. I know Artefact has one. And Anyone Can Wear The Mask is set to release one any time soon.

But an audio rulebook is just someone reading a written book out to me. And that’s nice - but just not enough. Zeynep Tufekci has an excellent essay about the differences between oral and print culture. RPGs, to me, feel like they’re fundamentally an oral culture. I don’t just mean that when we play, we’re talking out loud. I think most people learn rules by having it taught to them - or by watching other people play.

This is partly why Actual Play streams get people into the hobby - but also I know people who actively search for APs of games they’ve bought so they can learn by watching. (Party of One and One Shot are definitely both major resources in this regard.) And I think designers and publishers know this but it’s obviously hard to act on this information. What do you do with it?

I think, at the most basic level, my point is that publishing rulebooks isn’t the best way to teach people how to play your game. If that’s your goal, think about other avenues. Discern Realities was a podcast explicitly about teaching Dungeon World and it ran for ages (now ended). There’s a very popular video series on Youtube called Let’s Learn Blades in the Dark.

And I think this logic holds for all types of games. If you’ve got a rules-light game, that probably means there’s a lot of unwritten assumptions or best practices that you could share - the unwritten rulebooks. The Trophy podcast, The Sixth Ring, is an example of this. Trophy is a really short game but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to teach. (Jason Cordova, one of the hosts of the Trophy podcast, was behind Discern Realities as well. He gets this idea completely.)

On twitter, I (only half-jokingly) posted about how I should start a podcast where designers whose game is more than a 100 pages teach me (and the audience) how to play their game. The logic is that - unlike an audio rulebook, which is still better than nothing - this is something that is consciously a learning tool. Designers can drop page numbers so people can read along, and so on. I think it’s something that could easily exist and people would like and use.

Yours in print,

Thomas

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II. Listen of the Week

Haven’t had a lot of time recently so consider this section behind a steel mesh fence and “CONSTRUCTION IN PROGRESS” sign - but with strange green flashes coming from somewhere within.

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III. Links of the Week

• If you like your maps more like flowcharts, Trizbort.io could be exactly what you need.

• Luke Rejec, designer of UltraViolet Grasslands, writes about how the “roleplaying community” is an illusion: “In the broader wilds of the internet, on the vast social media savannahs, on the twitter tundras, in the facebook forests, in the yawning tubes of you, however, I find no community.”

• Philgamer seems to be done with Dune and is now doing a read-along series for the Fallout RPG.

• An interview with Tyler Crumrine about his kickstarter for an RPG subscription box - and one of the games is about a group of people who are doing a heist while performing a play on stage at the same time. Which is hilarious.

• Rules aren’t just restrictions. On the IGRC, a nice article on the many uses of rules.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.

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