Do you enjoy playing roleplaying games in which you have no clue about the rules?

[Tallifer]

Do you enjoy playing roleplaying games in which you have no clue about the rules?

I do. My first experience with roleplaying was AD&D and a variety of the groundbreaking games such as Runequest, Call of Cthulhu and Chivalry & Sorcery of the early 1980s (and plenty of now forgotten ones: Dragonquest, Powers & Perils, GURPS, Rolemaster and various homebrew fantasy heartbreakers). Only the Dungeon Master had any books. He would let us peruse them but such a limited look meant we relied on him for any mechanical information. We just made characters according to our vague ideas and he would walk us through the relevant character generation.

Magic was especially mysterious and confusing. Skills at least were intuitive to use, but inevitably byzantine in mechanical complexity.

Recently my friend Jef Fej started his own homebrew, but most of the other players want to know the rules instead of go with the flow of experimentation and exploration.

 

[Morrus]

That’s super old school, and I’ve done it and there is definitely a genre of play there that for the right people is really immersive. It’s not for everyone, but if you can embrace it, it can be really intense.

In a way, that’s part of why games are trending towards rules-lite these days.

I myself like rules.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I would be okay with beginning a game where I knew very few of the rules, learning as we played. But I don’t think I’d like to remain in the dark indefinitely.

 

[Nagol]

No. I've seen too many terrible rulesets.

What I find is my base expectation for how the world works often diverges quite strongly with what the game designers expect even when I try to compensate for genre expectations.

 

[Jhaelen]

I think you need to know a few basics, especially in order to create an enjoyable player character. But you definitely don't need to know every little detail.

As a DM I prefer to ask my players to narrate what their characters want to do. Then, I decide which (if any) rules to apply, whether a skill check is required or not, etc. It creates a much better and more immersive flow than talking about a game's mechanics.

But for this to work well, the players should have some idea what their odds to succeed at certain tasks are.

 

[pemerton]

As a DM I prefer to ask my players to narrate what their characters want to do. Then, I decide which (if any) rules to apply, whether a skill check is required or not, etc. It creates a much better and more immersive flow than talking about a game's mechanics.

But how does this work with player-side resources? Eg expending an action surge, or inspiration, or similar?

 

[Jhaelen]

But how does this work with player-side resources? Eg expending an action surge, or inspiration, or similar?

It depends. Sometimes I will suggest good opportunities to spend them, sometimes my players ask to use them.
When a system is still new, it's mostly the former since players don't have a good idea what they can use them for. Once they've seen a few examples, most players start to remember about them on their own. However, if nobody's made use of them for a while, they're also prone to forget about them again.

Imho, this is actually a good example of a mechanic where it can be an advantage if the players don't know the exact rules behind it, because they're free to come up with creative ideas for spending them. I almost never say no to such ideas (unless they're completely over the top) - no matter what the rules say. The 'rule of cool' usually beats 'rules as written' in my games.

 

[Blue]

I can enjoy playing without knowing the rules, but that's not my default.

Way back when I had a great experience with this, run by [MENTION=813]jmucchiello[/MENTION]. We knew nothing about anything, and all played young people from a backwater village, just coming of age and needing to go into the wider world. He ran a homebrew system, though part way through he (after talking to us) revamped the freeform magic system because we were getting the hang of it way too fast. I remember being thrilled at being able to make a rope harness and levitate it (since we knew the magic words for, I think rope and telekinesis plus some power booster words), but nothing that would allow us to fly ourselves.

I'd have a couple of caveats to playing not knowing the rules, on top of the foundation of trust in your DM to be both fair and consistent.

First, it must be that none of the players know the rules and we're all learning them just from interaction with the world. Some people knowing the rules and me not just makes me feel stupid.

Second, we know the genre (at least to a degree). For example, assuming everything is gritty and death is cheap when the DM is trying to run a heroic fantasy game leads to frustration and mismatch between what the DM is putting down and how we are interacting with it.

Third, the system & DM needs to be able to handle that the players are in no ways are constrained to what they try in the world by the rules, only by the how the world reacts in the narrative. For example, I might try to disarm someone, while there's no rules for it or the rules are limited to if you have a particular, power, feat, etc. Same for our characters - my character might try to understand that book of elven runes because she's fascinated by stories of the fae, while the DM intended it to be something for a character who is bookish towards becoming a caster. The character advancement system needs to handle it, and in a way that someone isn't shooting themselves in the foot and making a character who can't hold up their share of the action by accidentally making sub-optimal character.

Fourth, we start as neophyte characters. Simply because anything my character understands better than I do I will feel justified asking the DM about. "Do I think we can take those two ten foot humanoids with clubs?" "I described them as muscular" "Yes, but you also described my character as a successful monster hunter - my character should have a reasonable idea of what she can handle."

(These are for a campaign. For a one-shot, or something special and long term it's much more relaxed.)

 

[Caliban]

I think it depends a lot on how much you trust that particular DM. If you have a lot of trust their judgment and storytelling abilities, the rules don't matter much. If you lack that trust...then the rules can be a comforting "safety net", something you CAN trust to be consistent, even if the DM is not. For some people, anyway.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*