Decide to get into tabletop RPGs

Your players are totally normal. It sucks, but it's true. Most people won't read and memorize a whole ton of rules straight out of a book. It's nice if they do, but don't expect that shit to happen, be ready to explain things as you go. I like to start the first session with just core mechanics and then introduce the subsystem shit in later sessions.

>Was it really any better back when physical rulebooks were the only option ?

A little, but not really. In D&D in the 80s it was expected that the DM knew all the rules and players didn't know them at all. It did mean there wasn't any rules lawyering.

Well, the 90s were a different time. At that point the industry had decided that it was a great idea to target their games at people who loved to read big rule books and memorize shit.
Unfortunately, those people are a small minority, which is why the RPG industry nearly died yet again in the 90s.

Would it be nice if all players learned the rules? Hell yeah, that'd be fantastic. But don't hold your breath, guys. Consider it the icing on the great player cake.

I have almost the opposite problem
>Friend decides to host Gurps
>I learn all of the rules because the game actually sounds really cool and exactly my kind of thing
>ST creates homebrew that completely breaks the combat, and doesn't actually understand very many of the game's rules so the game basically becomes freeform with little to no rolling involved

Yeah, this is what I do. I accepted that my players won't read a long time ago. It adds a step, but prepping for it makes the job that much easier.

And this is one of the reasons why players don't learn the rules.
Few things suck as much as having a player who knows the rules better than the DM. (For the player, at least.)

>In D&D in the 80s it was expected that the DM knew all the rules and players didn't know them at all
That's not so bad when the rulebook is 25 pages long and your character's vital mechanics fit on a 3X5 notecard.

It can be an enjoyable experience to have people just imagine what their character would do, and the rules arbitration happens mostly behind the screen.

A wizard PC had to know the spells, but if the player didn't do their homework, they'd have nobody to blame but themselves when they fucked up.

When was the rulebook ever 25 pages long?

Technically never, he's exaggerating, but Basic D&D does have very minimal rules.

A few years ago when my now forever DM wanted to run Rifts, half our players read the core book and had characters ready for the session the following morning. One, read the basics and made a character, and checks the rule book for the rest. And one of our players spent 16 hours in character creation, didn't look at the rest of the rule book, insisted on making a mage. And doesn't have any of his spells written down. And hasn't managed to memorize any of his sheet after 3 years.
Stupid people are everywhere, doesn't matter the age or how long ago it was.

Especially since the rules are compartmentalized. Up til 3e, you could probably fit the rules for playing a fighter on a single typed page.

I've been playing with the same group for nigh on six year now and only one of them can make a character without my hand holding, predictably, he's the only one who ever makes a character that is any more mechanically interesting than "i swing my sword/shoot my bow/throw a fireball".

Despite the pain that is getting any of them to follow along regarding any mechanics, they're actually great roleplayers and we have awesome sessions.

I'll take my players over rules lawyer powergamers any day.

Battle worn rulebooks are literally the best

Do they manage to play without knowing anything about the game though?

I play GURPS and I normally don't have my players read the rules, mostly cuz on the player side it's just roll 3d6 and then for basic combat it's just a few things like aiming, all out attacks and blocks, parrys and dodges which are pretty easy to explain when the time comes.

I recently started a shadowrun campaign. One player knows the rules extremely well as he's DMed Shadowrun before, one owns the rulebook but hasn't memorized the rules because there's a fuckton of them, and one is an experienced Pathfinder player who was more interested in making a character that fit the backstory he liked than minmaxing or understanding how the rules work.

I ended up running their decker for them because none of them wanted to do the work for that, which allows me to bend those rules significantly.

Had to walk both newbies through character creation, but they were engaged and interested the whole time, coming up with ideas for their characters. Honestly, as a DM that's all I really ask of my players; that they be interested and engaged. As long as they're interested (meaning that I'm doing my job), rules knowledge should follow naturally.

OD&D clocks in at around 80 pages, and about half of that is monster and spell listings. The core rules alone are just about 40 pages and are even shorter if you cut out the tables for quick reference.

AD&D clocks in at about 160 pages, but over 60 pages are spells, and around 20 pages of fluff could be removed. Also a lot of the stuff is pure optional advice on the GM's side. You could literally write out/print out a notecard of rules for each class to give to new players (and a notecard pile for spells so new players can pick which ones they memorized without dotting their character sheet twenty billion times).

>want to get into tabletop RPGs
>have some friends who I actively play board games with, are enthusiastic about them
>suggest we try picking up a true RPG and trying the whole thing out

>always fizzles out because none of them want to bother doing anything but games with structured pieces and rules

I'll never understand the mindset of people who say they want to play RPGs, but when the time comes they act in every way like they have no actual interest in playing RPGs.

If you don't want to play this game, don't waste the time of the people that do. It's ok if you don't like tabletop RPGs, no one says you HAVE to.

>But reading is BORING!
If they find reading the books boring then they probably wouldn't like the books anyways.

like the games anyway*

Are the rp-lite board games like the D&D ones or Flying Frog or most of the Cthulhu games something that you could try and bridge the gap with?

Your "friend" is human trash. I'd have made him buy me a new copy and given him the fuck up one.

lol, like you could "make" your friend do anything.

Yeah, it takes a few sessions of me showing them. But it is way better than getting upset that they don't read, that just prolongs the suffering.

Because in most groups it isn't the player's job to understand the game system, and in fact the system would just interfere with their enjoyment of the game, because the default at any table is that the GM will make up shit as he goes and just use the game system for inspiration.

I used to see it the way you do before I had any RPG experience, now having played with a variety of groups I would personally say that a fast-and-loose style where players don't need to understand the system (beyond character creation and the mechanics on their character sheet) is the default, and games where all of the players know the system cold and play it legalistically are the exception rather than the norm.

>that one guy that's a decent RPer but asks you to help him level/create his character EVERY TIME
>it's 5e for Christ's sake

It's almost as though RPGs represent a powerful and exciting new form of storytelling and attract people who don't actually give two shits about wargames.

Tried, the closest we ever came was a friend considering buying Talisman, but it never went anywhere.

I'm just extremely interested in the worldbuilding and storytelling aspects of a tabletop RPG; I feel like it isn't something that you can really accomplish with any kind of scripted board game.

I think this is also an argument for why many players don't read. Even if the rules are relatively short, if 50% of the text isn't immediately relevant to gameplay, then you're asking people to do a bunch of pointless reading. Worse, it's usually impossible for the uninitiated to figure out which sections are important and which ones aren't, because they've never experienced play before.

Usually the section you need to read is a chapter somewhere in the middle of the book that details how the system handles most situations and tests. Instead, most RPGs start with character creation, which seems intuitive until you realize that none of the traits available to characters make sense until you understand how tests are handled. What good is it to know how much XP you need to get +1 to a skill, when you don't even understand the significance of "+1 to a skill"? Worse, it's easy to get lost in this early section, because if you read something without fully getting it, a typically reasonable response is to read it again more carefully until it makes sense (assuming you don't just give up). That will never happen because the section you actually need to read doesn't come for several more chapters, which defies the intuition of "basics first".

By actually reading character creation your players put in more effort than many, but the arcane nature of RPG books doesn't make for rewarding reading.

Yes.

No, that's so wrong, how could you possibly think that. Have you ever met a human?

The tendency of RPG books to be laid out poorly with rules spread all over the place doesn't help. Its like the people that do the formatting and shit don't realize these are reference books.

Then there is the layout of the character creation section. Normally when I make a character, I start with the class/career I want then make the race/homeworld/background/etc choices.
But the books are typically arranged with the class choice last. A big example is DH2E. First you have homeworld choice, with recommended background. Then you have backgrounds with recommended roles. Then you finally reach the roles

But everyone I know who makes a character works through them in the reverse order. Making the recommendations rather useless.

They typically work very well as reference books. The catch is that reference books are for people who have some understanding of what is within them and just want to look up one specific things.

But they fail as books for people who are new to that system.

PHBs need to function as both a textbook and a straight reference.

They can't be both, thus organization suffers.

>>What, you mean there isn't a three hour tutorial to teach me how to play that blends seamlessly with the start of the actual game?
Yeah because quickstarts that give you a pregenned character with a basic adventure to run them through while explaining exactly what you're rolling at every moment do not exist, nosirree.

Those don't exist for Dark Heresy 2e

That kind of thing used to be common back in the 80s, it's a shame that they stopped making them.
I'd love to have one for something like Burning Wheel, but nope, I'm supposed to just wrap my head around the book enough to run it, as is.

>What, you mean there isn't a three hour tutorial to teach me how to play that blends seamlessly with the start of the actual game?
Creating a tutorial for a tabletop game is fucking easy, though.

I recently started some newbies with 5e, ran through character creation, ran an initial little shitty "quest" ("go track down some goblins for some money"), explained the basic mechanics of the game along the way, beat that in one session, then dumped them into the campaign proper.

And because I explained shit well and the tutorial was fun, they all went and read the book after and had a good grasp of mechanics in the sessions after.

Players are human beings and generally learn better when doing something, and RPGs can be arcane bullshit when you're coming in with no past experience. Cut new players some slack.

I've introduced probably a dozen people to tabletop games over the years, so I've gotten used creating adventures that introduce different concepts (usually for D&D so my examples will pertain to that). Things like an adventure where they encounter enemies that use stealth against them to force them to use perception rules, or an adventure with interaction with an npc that helps them understand when diplomacy and intimidate can and will be used. And of course easier battles against the first opponents that had auras (troglodytes), fast healing (an imp) and enemies with strange combat rules (giant crabs that can grab as a free action when they attack)

Basically just help them, introduce the concept, and then if they don't use it have enemies that use them to be more effective as a simple and non passive aggressive way to punish sub par play and encourage them to do similar actions in kind.

This desu. It's nice to have character creation at the front, since that's what you'll be referencing most of the time if you already know the rules - but it just makes it easier to finish character creation and assume you're done with the relevant parts of the book.

Your picrelated sounds like a fun thing to read.

And you still probably had no idea how the fucking rules worked, because it was the 90s and rules were so shittly written and untested that they would change from book to book or even from chapter to chapter.

Most RPG rulebooks ARE boring to read though.

This is my number 1 nightmare.

Oooh, dude. You are SO salty lol