Relentless Rules

I can't teach a game to a group cold. I have to play solo to get the cadence down and be able to anticipate the easily missed rules. It is the very epitome of dread for me to have a cold game start. This is likely why I don't necessarily mind being the primary game procurer/teacher in the group. I would much rather teach than be taught a game.

Gary Sax wrote: ^agree, that's my general position on this too.

It's very frustrating, though, as a rules explainer. That petulance/disappointment by the wrong rules player feels like a shitty accusation if it starts to come to "well I didn't know that! Why didn't you say something?" I have a good friend who would do this constantly (my nickname was "rules master"), it stopped being personally funny to me at some point and just felt shitty. Which, when you're doing the rules explaining, which is hard, is extra bad.

Far too often the person whining about the rules being explained wrong is the person who is too fucking lazy to read the rules ahead of time. And never takes their turn to be the explainer. If I know I'm gonna be playing a game ahead of time, I at least try to skim the rules so I get a sense of what is going on. I've played enough games over the years I can pick up 90% of the gist pretty quick. Put me in the camp of "just start playing" vs an hour long intro. If a game takes that long to teach , people should have prepared ahead of time .

Shellhead wrote: How do members of The Cult of the New deal with teaching rules? Are they unusually good at teaching rules? Or do they stick to simple games?

From what I've seen they stick to the simpler Euro/abstract type stuff. They're not skipping from TI4 to War of the Ring to Gloomhaven .

jason10mm wrote: Cult of the New is why we started getting "quickstart" rulebooks and "the real rules" rulebooks, i think. Or first play options that minimize game complexity in order to focus on learning the core concepts.

I actually think this is great and I'd love to see it become standard. With the caveat that the "learn to play" booklet should be a PDF download. You usually only learn a game once, but (for a complicated game) you refer back to the rules many times. Don't weigh down a useful reference book with stuff I use once.