What do you find is the easiest way to learn a new system aside from being taught?

What do you find is the easiest way to learn a new system aside from being taught?

I really want to expand my GMing skills beyond the purview of D&D/Pathfinder, but I find that I struggle with sitting down to just read a rulebook. Obviously the easiest way to learn is for someone who knows what their doing to teach you, but do you fa/tg/uys have any method you use that can ease the burden of reading a book dry? I'm particularly interested in L5R at the moment, but eventually I'd like to learn as many systems as I reasonably can.

Also, discuss your favorite underplayed system and why it's such a tragedy it's not played more.

>Wanting to learn how to broaden GM stuff

Ah well I suggest

>I'm interested in L5R

...ooof

Essentially just get familiar with the core dice system. People are going to have a good time so long as you are able to keep the game moving. It's better to dgaf and make up a roll than to keep on slowing the game down w/ research.

Save that for after, when you get an idea of what things come up a lot.

Bonus points for encouraging players to get the book themselves to read up on the super special stuff they want to do.

If you have a suggestion for something else lay it on me my man, L5R is just the one that most recently caught my eye.

Gurps is good.

Once you learn it you don't have to buy an rpg ever again.

It only uses d6's.

And is far simplier than the memes sugest

To be more specific I have an interest in the following

NWoD - VtR in particular
Anima - Because just fuck me up it looks cool
Rogue Trader - I'm out of my depth with WH40k lore but it seems like fun
Shadowrun - Fantasy in the future sounds like it has potential

I'm not disinterested in GURPS, it's just that it's reputation is going to make it difficult to convince my players to learn it.

>Rogue Trader - I'm out of my depth with WH40k lore but it seems like fun

WH40k doesn't have lore, it has vast pools of handwavium used to sell new army figurines. You get to paint them yourself!

>Gurps is good.
>It only uses d6's.

But user, those are opposite statements!

I understand that in concept, but when I look into threads with grown men citing names and events like it's an enormous historied setting they've spent their lives learning like crazed scholars I feel like it's beyond me.

NWoD and Rogue Trader are awesome ones to expand too since the systems are super duper simple.

I love Shadowrun but it's in the same boat as L5R. Lots of reading and a lot of lore.

I've never played Vampire outside of that one PC game that was really popular for some reason, but it seems like a decent enough game... if you can talk the PCs into sharing a clan.
No Ventrue is going to spend much time in the presence of a Nosferatu if they can help it.

Every system I've DMed thus far I gained a good part of my understanding about from just playing in them a lot.

I'm a forever DM, and even in the small windows I do have to play, it's always D&D/Pathfinder, so that is unfortunately not an option.

Where I live nWoD is pretty underplayed. I have tons of interesting ideas even for core nWoD, Just normal people against bad stuff, but none of my players want anything but DnD and it's variants. And now all my players are finishing college and going away without ever experiencing my "cientists looking into an abandoned Antarctic base and finding really bad stuff underneath" that I've wanted to do for years now.

Plenty of systems exclusively use d6's and aren't bad, including Shadowrun which you yourself brought up. There are plenty of other things that you can bring up to critique it, but that point is silly.

My advice is to just sit down with some people and run a premade one shot. It gives you structure and a some direction towards what systems you need to learn and how they're used.

That bites, man. I like playing at least as much as DMing. Being only DM for my usual group for like...six months sucked.

I'll keep that in mind!

That seems to be the issue with a lot of well loved systems, theres just so much to them and it's a difficult thing to jump into without someone to teach you.

I feel your pain my friend, D&D is the staple because it's what everyone is comfortable with. I'm hoping by learning something new independently then teaching it I can expand their horizons.

It's not a bad idea, I'll have to see which games have those options for learning purposes.

Make a few characters with the system. That clues you in to different mechanics. From there, just make sure you understand what each item on the character sheet does.

Eventually, you do need to sit down and do a close read of the rulebook, but that'll be much easier after you figure out what the mechanics are.

Dig into lighter games first, like Savage Worlds. Look into games that cover a genre you're interested in.

I'd suggest learning Call of Cthulhu. It's very popular, and it's sort of a mirror image of D&D as far as mechanics go
>mundanes instead of fantasy superheroes
>skills instead of class archetypes
>focused more on investigation than combat

I can't complain too much, I love to DM, and most of the reason behind my position is that I'm the best DM in any of my friend groups, so most people want me to run or get discouraged when they feel like they don't meet up to my experience, which makes a feedback loop of me being the only one experienced enough to do it well.

I've been running my current game for a year and a half.

Try giving yourself interesting short-term goals. "Read 300 pages of rules to better myself as a GM" is a noble but abstract goal. "Find out how close I can get to Batman pillow fighting a sentry turret from Portal" is an asinine but potentially interesting goal. Asinine but interesting is almost always easier to pull off than noble but abstract.

Put another way, learn by doing. If you have nothing to do, invent something you like.

There's an absolute ton of content, but most of it is incredibly stupid straight 80s-homage dumped into a giant pot. Knowing a bunch of detailed shit about specific battles and so on just gives you more insight into how little the setting makes sense or affects itself.

Though really, that's not that different from any other "large" series. I could probably quote you a lot about Star Wars history and battles and Force mechanics and philosophy and retcons and so on, but "wizardmonks with laser swords and smugglers in starfighters" gets you like 80% of the setting. Nobody cares who exactly invented what cool-looking ship or how its blasters fared against that particular other ship in that one book that sucked anyway.

Thats another system I want to learn and have a lot of ideas for, so I'll take your advice on that.

Hmmmmm that's a good way to put it. I'll see if I can toe dip into the lore to see if I can learn enough to run a competent campaign one day.

Think through a situation that might come up, and pick through the rules to figure out how it would resolve.

>shill your favorite system
I like One Roll Engine's "wild talents" variant so far. I'm not yet an expert in it enough to fully understand its flaws, but it has great speed while presenting wide ranges of possible outcomes for each activity, and has a good amount of strategic depth. You do need to have some system knowledge, restraint, and decent guidelines to keep it balanced however. Like you can't just hand players a single point buy and expect everything to be okay, you have to carefully think through diepool caps (i.e. does it make sense for a suburban 12 year old to have 6d+3wd with assault rifles?), power levels, separated point-buys for player stats, skills, and superpowers, decide how many wiggle dice players should be allowed slap onto their powers, and so on. But once you get past that it seems to have a lot of potential.

Anima is a very fun, flavorful game but one that suffers from some translation problems and a bit of poor balance. Still an interesting experience, their take on classes as glorified price-sheets in particular was something I hadn't seen before.

It's a good RPG.

It has lore reasons for various clans to get together and work on something.

Even if someone teaches you, reading the manuals it's a must, it's the best source of info any game can have

>Shadowrun
>Good

Please, you can't even convince Shadowrun players their system is good

I understand that, but it helps to understand the basics so that its not just dry reading and you don't need to read the fundamentals and can focus on the higher level rules.

All the lore you need for Rogue Trader is in the book. It is the most lite version of the core fluff you can get and it is removed from the 40k universe proper.

It is also a very simple read, with a "class" based progression system that i was able to get my 3.5 players to understand first game.

That makes it even easier, I was worried I'd have to spoon feed lore to anyone I was trying to get to play in the setting. Thanks user!

The latest edition was abysmally executed, but the core mechanic is actually pretty solid. The problems are worst when they stray too far from it, like making hacking into a big stupid minigame instead of just a few quick rolls like the other skills.