Wow. This is a very high bar! This would filter out any casual players, and I know many experienced gamers who don't know the rules subsystems for things they're not interested in (e.g., someone who loves playing martial characters and doesn't care to learn the spellcasting system). I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's nearly the opposite of my approach as a GM. But, then again, my approach is focused on beginners and people who don't identify as gamers.
It doesn't filter out casual players because, as I said, the point is all players are (or should be) entering the game
accepting the obvious fact that there are hundreds of pages of rules to the game. They can't just show up week after week after week with no clue how to actually play. They need to read the rules. They need to become
familiar with the rules. If they want it that way of not knowing more than a bare minimum of rules (and the GM actually doesn't care) then my perception is
that is an intolerably LOW bar.
All players should come to understand ALL of what's happening in the game outside of their PC's turn. Just because they only need to know the narrow set of rules for their martial character to take actions, doesn't mean they can then just turn off their brain, ignore what happens after that, and then pay attention again only when their name is called in the initiative order. Again, they don't have to
memorize the other rules but HELL YES they should, as time goes by, read those other rules too, understand them, and appreciate what the other PC's and foes are doing, how the game mechanics control what
others do and thus further understand what their own PC can do to help/hinder them, etc.
This is actually something I now specifically make clear to players, old and new. It came about because I had players who not only didn't learn anything of the game outside of simple melee, they didn't even bother to learn simple melee sufficiently to not have to have it repeatedly explained to them EVERY session: "This is what you roll to hit, roll that for damage, ADD this, subtract that, NO... saving throws are there, I told you your movement already and it's written RIGHT THERE," and so forth. They were not learning impaired either. They just couldn't be arsed to BOTHER. So, I let players know that if they are in for a penny they're in for a pound. That is not a filter to prevent casual players. It's a filter to weed out dead-weight players.
Particularly if the genre expectations are understood, then it's just a matter of imagining your character in the fictional circumstances and describing what you'd like them to do.
Nope. The 5E PH is 300 pages. That's daunting, but nobody is expected to memorize all of it, or even grok it ALL right away. Again - I'm not going to test anyone on its contents, ever, no matter how long they've been playing. But if after a couple sessions a player still doesn't understand how the mechanics of their character actually works such that they DO NOT need it explained to them, then either they have disabilities or they're dead weight: "Drag me and my PC to where the combat is and wake me when we get there because I'm not into the rest of it. I just wanna kill stuff." Nope. Not in my game you're not. What a player like that wants is a computer game which will throw mindless enemies at their avatar until they puke. In D&D your ACTIVE participation is required, both in and out of combat, for EVERY PC.
Even casual players, if they are actually interested in the game and not just killing time like it's another game on their phone, don't need and wouldn't want a permanent crutch like permission to never have to actually learn the rules. If a player plays for a year, even if they only ever play a martial character, they should at least be perfectly
familiar with how spells work, and even if they don't care to
play a spellcaster, they at least could do so in a pinch. Knowing how spells and casting works is part of the game, whether your martial PC ever uses a spell or not. If nothing else it means that a casual player of only martial characters will at least have a clue what the heck is going on when it's NOT their PC's turn in combat.
The rest of it gets picked up pretty quickly in play.
And I said as much. Players can at least pay attention to what's happening outside of their PC's turn in combat and look up stuff in their PH that they don't understand, whether they use it for their PC or not, and learn what doesn't DIRECTLY apply to their PC over time. And again, if they are truly interested in D&D, whether casual players or not, they'll WANT to know more than just one narrow slice of the games rules leaving the rest of it a total mystery.
So I'm not convinced that every person at the table needs to master the rules in order to keep them behind the scenes.
And I'm emphatically not saying "rules MASTERY", I'm saying "rules FAMILIARITY". And
nobody gets a pass on that. If I've had a player at my table for a year and they tell me, "I can't play a wizard because I don't know the first thing about spells in the game," then _I_ have failed as a GM, and the other players have also failed as friends to properly teach them the game, and that player has also willfully missed out on even basic understanding of MASSIVE portions of the game. I'm not sure such a player could even exist as they'd be too lost and confused, too bored outside of their characters turn in combat to have kept coming back.
As to the point of the thread, though, it is tough to play if neither the GM nor the players know the rules. I definitely see that with some of the children's groups that I supervise at school. Nobody wants to crack the books, so they just make it all up. (Even then, though, it's not a bad way to get into the hobby. Many of these kids come back the following year and ask to borrow the books so that they can learn the ropes better.)
And if the GM openly states to otherwise mature players that the rules don't really matter (and playing/teaching the game to actual children as opposed to at least adolescents is another matter), then a good time can still be had by all, but the point of the thread is then also moot.
The longer anyone plays the game, the less they should need to have things explained, not just about their PC, but about any of the other rules as well. The more they know about the game rules beyond just their PC the more they unquestionably
must be getting out of the game.
