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"I just literally do not know how to play."
A friend of mine, who has never played any RPG and is not particularly knowledgeable about nerd culture, somehow got interested in D&D from some middle-school aged campers at a rock camp where she volunteers. So she went to a bookstore and picked up the D&D 4E player's handbook, then took to Facebook to talk about it.
Brian: You should to to [local mini-con]! I've run games there before, and I might be there this year.
Shauna: I would totally go! I've never played it, so I don't want to slow everyone down but would love to watch. Or play if that's not a bummer...
Brian: Um you can't WATCH, you have to PLAY.
Shauna: ok! I just literally do not know how to play. That was not in my giant book.
Game makers, take note!
Brian: You should to to [local mini-con]! I've run games there before, and I might be there this year.
Shauna: I would totally go! I've never played it, so I don't want to slow everyone down but would love to watch. Or play if that's not a bummer...
Brian: Um you can't WATCH, you have to PLAY.
Shauna: ok! I just literally do not know how to play. That was not in my giant book.
Game makers, take note!
Comments
Curious though - why not invite her to watch? Watching a game being played is a great way to learn. Many of the newbies I have played with "learned" the basics of how RPGs work from TV shows like Community and Freaks & Geeks. (Or is this a mini-con specific rule?)
But that doesn't change the point that not everyone has a community available to teach them the game the book was supposed to teach them. A rule book should teach you how to play, right?
You certainly should not walk away from reading a game thinking "I still have no idea how to do that."
I don't necessarily think that's D&D 4E's fault. Maybe RPGs are just way more opaque than we think they are to people with no context or guidance.
As for watching vs. playing, why watch when you can play, right? I offered to run a game for her. She's gonna round up some friends.
The only ones I'm aware of are the ones in Maid, Fiasco, and Golden Sky Stories.
Golden Sky Stories has the best one, because it has art and stuff: http://starlinepublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/GSS-TheBrokenWindow.pdf
BUT, it's a far different experience than D&D. BUT, I believe that it essentially shows you universally How To Play A Role-Playing Game (just doesn't then go into D&D Combat and the like, which I expect is easier to pick up and understand given that at least that aspect is explained well in the rules). What a session Looks Like.
-Andy
Actually I had friends in high school who showed up just to watch the game a few times and then decided they wanted to play. Basically they would hang out, do homework, quip and joke, but listen, and eventually they got it and wanted in. I also had a few that showed up to watch, seemed to enjoy themselves all right, and said they'd rather not play. I take that as "getting it" too.
Now that I think about this, this open-ness to other people's hobbies/ideas was actually a pretty significant strength of my school that I don't think everyone else had.
I'm actually curious to hear what the experience of reading an entire D&D book cover-to-cover is like, particularly for someone who has no idea how it will be applied. (How many people have actually done this? It sounds awe-inspiring, if not sanity loss-provoking.)
I'd guess this has a lot to do with one's experience (or lack thereof) in childhood games, especially in games of pretend like cops & robbers or house, maybe even video games and board games too, I'm not sure. But I do know it has nothing to do with so-called "intelligence".
Keeping that in mind, I wonder if the theory I wrote about in my previous post is not really valid. Maybe the problem is not that you needd to do roleplaying in order to understand it (after all, who doesn't roleplay at somepoint in their life?). Maybe the comes from D&D 4th Ed. apparently being about telling adventure stories together, while actually being a tactical war game with its focus on combat. The roleplaying aspect is there as something you can do if you already know how to do it, or if you can just draw on previous experiences from childhood, but the game's mechanics don't support it so much in themselves. That might be what confused the person in this example.
Maybe if she'd happened upon another game first, her experience would have been very different.
It was two thirds of the way through the DMG that I suddenly discovered a transcript of an imaginary session - an example of a dungeon adventure. Suddenly, it made sense - it was a game you played through talking about the shared situation the characters were in, with each player taking one character, and the DM looking after the rest. No where up until then had this been explained. I'd had this vague idea that it was like a super complicated board game, but I'd known that couldn't be right because it also emphasized complete creative freedom. Now that I understood, I had to go back and reread everything again, and it all made much more sense once I knew the fundamental thing they were driving at.
True story.
As to letting someone watch rather than play initially: I understand the principle behind 'No, I usually say they have to play' (after all, see above), but if they really would rather watch (which could actually be better than playing for this purpose, outsiders having a better view of the game etc,)- it seems a bit exclusory to not let them.
I learned about RPGs from watching RPGs, from other RPG players. D&D in particular is steeped in the "tradition handed down through the years" model, in my experience. We know what an RPG is because someone showed us. This isn't universally true, but I'd wager it's largely true.
I'm taking mental notes.
Sadly however, the RPG industry is obsessed with these big hardback books because that's how to maximise your profits from the existing fan base. An awful lot of Kickstarters for example are about getting existing fans to buy a $200 leatherbound hardback of something they already own. The sort of box sets that I grew up with in the 80s thanks to Games Workshop (before it went Warhammer mad) just don't get the sort of attention they once did.
I don't know what the answer is because those big companies have staff to keep in jobs and a willing audience. But the indie crowd has no such existing market and has every reason to grow their own audience (although I've read too many indie rule books with the words "experienced gamers only" in them as well - at least they're honest I suppose).
I've wondered how much abusive and juvenile behavior in RPGs comes from people doing what they saw others do, and then retroactively justifying it in the play advice. Sure some of it comes from simply immature social dynamics, but it seems possible that these sections often fall under the "do what I say, not what I do" - and this become apparent when you compare folks playing to the idealized descriptions often occurring in books.
- Mendel
You see, it's true, we have roleplayed at some point in our lives, that's easy and intuitive. But Techniques are a missing key piece that isn't intuitive at first, but becomes a second nature once you see them in action. That's why everything becomes clear ONLY when you read an actual play or see people play. You're probably still using the same ritual expressions to convey each step of the process, just think about it:
-"You are in the town of X doing Y when suddenly..." and then you learned about scene framing and how this is a cue for everyone to pay attention.
-"What do you do?" ...and then you learned that this was the cue for when the GM had finished framing the scene and it was time for your input.
-"I try to convince him of N, do I roll Diplomacy?" and that taught you about how to give your input as an intention and not as a fact, that in this kind of situations you might be asked to roll the dice and how you could back up your roll with skills to have a higher chance of success.
And so on. These ritual phrases aren't roleplaying, but they are so ingrained with it we often confuse both, think Techniques are also intuitive and end up writing books that doesn't explain them, except for the actual play examples, which could actually be better at this or at least could be given a lot more of importance.
So I'm wary of turning into a technical question of How Do You Communicate Rules, because there is so much else going on. You turn a very human question - of how can we make newcomers, especially women, feel welcome at conventions - into a technical one.
She was keen to watch. I think she should come and watch.
Even if we don't want to talk about gender, though, we might discuss why newcomers like our games but don't want to play them at conventions. That's more than a technical issue of communicating rules.
Heck, I haven't played D&D for 20 years or so, but my wife wanted to pick a Monster Manual just because she thought it would be a cool reference guide for all of the fantasy novels she was reading at the time. And looking over that tome, with the countless stats and terms...it just made my head hurt. It's complete data overload.
Really, the best way to learn to play an RPG like D&D is to sit down with someone who has played before...and be told "the only rule is, tell the GM what you want to do, he'll tell you what to do next." Or, watch people playing (and watching a TV show playing doesn't really count). Once you get over the hurdle of "it's a game with rules and charts and stuff" the lightbulb should turn on.
It's not a gender issue, it still isn't part of the rules (though it should be), and as I mentioned it's so ingrained with roleplaying that we think it's also intuitive when it's not.
It's the Techniques! I can't stop saying how important these are for playing any RPG at all! Once you learn how to use them it becomes a second nature to you to the point that you'll take them to any other RPG you play, and you may even have a hard time playing other way if you learned and used only a limited set of techniques. So, the sooner they get explained in the rule books, the easier is to understand how to play. The more of them you explain to the players, the better they adapt to different games.
There are some fairly classic things going on. She feels she doesn't understand, she feels she might slow people down. I'm not saying Gender Is The Reason Behind All Of This, but I'm saying it a factor we can't ignore.
And gender is important in this thread. It's a very man thing to say: let's reduce this whole situation down to rational rules and techniques! (WarriorMonk's post, above, is a classic. And I am very happy to explain the link between rationality and masculinity off-line. It is fairly convincing.)
Anyway, I won't go on about this. There is something highly strange about gender conversations that just involve men. I'm just saying that gender is a factor, that's all.
On top of that I feel you're implying women can't focus on nothing else than emotional situations, that men can't be sensitive enough to realize they are being rude by keeping things rational (oh, yes, I admit that saying "no, you HAVE to play!" to a lady was the worst move ever) and a large etc. Most possibly I'm wrong about thinking you are implying any of this, and I hope you understand that you may be wrong on your interpretation of my previous posts too. I'm thankful you realize how complex is prodding the Gender landmine in this or any issue and why it deserves a thread of it's own.
You see, that's why I was asking you not to take the thread there; it's not that I'm denying there' s a bazillion of problems there too, it's just that I had a point I feel it's important to solve the subject stated in the very first post: How to explain the game to anyone, regardless of gender issues.
And I won't get tired of saying it again until someone takes it seriously: Techniques. Properly explained, these could do a lot for the hobby. I mean, a lot.
I think the issue here is Impostor's Syndrome, which can affect anyone, but in general affects women at a much higher percentage than men. "I read the manual, but, I mean, I'm not a D&D nerd or anything, so I couldn't possibly start playing." "Wow, you guys all seem to really know what's going on! If I jumped in, I would just slow you down with my questions." "I'm not a 'geek', so I'll never totally understand this crunchy system."
Gaming in particular, I think, can make people feel like impostors because we have a strongly embedded idea of what makes a typical gamer. It's easy to compare yourself to this caricature of a gamer and see why you don't add up.
Imagine if you joined a soccer team but no one told you if it was going to be a recreational, amateur, or professional team... you were just supposed to find out when you showed up for your first game?
Plus, inviting someone to sit in and watch your group play is several orders of magnitude less fraught than telling them "Just show up at this convention full of people you have never met before and play something." Unless you know for a fact that you're talking to someone who is enough of an extrovert to absolutely love being crammed into a room with dozens of strangers, it would probably be nicer to give them a lower-stress environment for their introduction to gaming.
I don't think it is entirely fair to reduce this down to a gender/intruder syndrome situation here (and, sidenote, let's neither simplify the intersection between the two nor pretend there is no intersection, shall we?), because the specific case we're talking about here is a person who said she just didn't pick up the basics of playing from reading the book. Since none of us are privy to knowing the individual in question, let alone her inner monologue, I think it is safe to say that it could be both a presentational issue and an inclusivity issue, and that both are valid lines of inquiry, surely?
I fear there is a lot of self-serving oversimplification going on in this thread. There isn't just one problem to be solved; if only.
@CarpeGuitarrem
I didn't mean to suggest that a full bells and whistles "starter box" approach was viable for indie publishers, although I can see how I may have given that impression. All I was really suggesting was that taking the effort to provide clear explanations, examples of play and definitions of terms (for example) was something that writers should and can aspire to - and that I've read too many books over the past year which don't even aim for that.
GAME MECHANICS
1. Roll initiative.
2. Roll attack.
3. Roll damage.
TECHNIQUES
Typical for this genre is to attack someone by spinning, jumping or running.
STRUCTURES
Roll attack roll and, if it's a success, include one of the following in the description of the attack.
- Spinning.
- Jumping.
- Running.
One thing I've noticed in particular about nanogames is an authoritative voice, because it's necessary. Not things of "you can do this or that", but "in this situation, this is what you do".
Take for example this comic by David Berg for his game Delve, which features exactly what I'm talking about.
We've been discussing Techniques in this thread if you want to know even more about it. You will find there a list of these Techniques; as you will see they are everyday's bread for veteran roleplayers and mostly everything you actually need to learn how to play any RPG, besides the mechanics and specific procedures of the game you're playing.
Of course, not all apply to every game and group; some games will require other techniques... which you may probably bring with you to other games too. AW's Principles may be confused with Techniques too, but actually they are more like guidelines which make you remember or develop Techniques to handle the negotiation of the fiction.
Also, most people can either infere/learn this Techniques by reading APs, watch other people use them in play and the hard way, by trial and error while playing. So, you get my drift now?