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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9163400" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I found that in the groups that I played in, the amount of effort an individual player put into actually reading and digesting the totality of the rules in the books tended to be sharply limited.  Even DM's would be daunted by this task.I started DMing without a total understanding of the rules, in fact, and my players ran rings around me until I devoted time and effort to them.  AD&D rules are dense to a degree that most people don't really seem to grasp.  Once I did devote that time, I became known as "the rules guy" (much to my annoyance) as rather than look things up themselves, people were generally happy to use me as a resource rather than look things up themselves.And even then, there were rules I was mistaken about, and thought I "knew" for decades!  It took me awhile, but I eventually noticed a trend among most players- many players want to play the game, they don't want to read about how to play it.Some people learn by doing, which is fair, but many find that reading rules is a chore, and not fun.  This may be related to why video game companies stopped printing rulebooks at a certain point, I can't say.I used to, for example, be a prolific creator of house rules, creating long lists of alterations and hacks to games- but it was upon hitting upon the realization that most players aren't big on reading rules to begin with that I drastically scaled back on this- if they aren't keen on reading the actual rules, lol, how can I expect them to keep up with six pages of house rules?[SPOILER="As an anecdote to illustrate this"], I only started playing 5e in 2017, several years after the game came out, when I learned that my FLGS (the now sadly-defunct Grapple Games) was running Adventurer's League games on Wednesday and Sundays. (Having felt disappointed after taking an active part in the Next playtest and finding very little of the things I liked from that playtest in the new PHB, I had continued to play Pathfinder 1e).Anyways, a friend of mine was involved in the AL games and I was suffering from PF burnout, so I made a character and joined.  I quickly noted that despite having much more experience than myself at playing 5e, there were several rules not being obeyed.I asked if this was just common house rules, and was told "no, we play by the books here".  "Well, in that case, how is the Cleric casting spells with a weapon and a shield equipped?""A Cleric can use a shield as a spellcasting focus."  "Yeah, but that only helps if the spell has both Somatic and Material components, see?""...oh.  That's weird.""Also, how did the Cleric cast Spirit Guardians and Healing Word in the same turn?""Uh, because one is a bonus action cast?""Yeah, but right here, it says you can't cast a leveled spell as a bonus action and another leveled spell in the same turn.""....huh."And so on, lol.  This is nothing against these people; these are easily missed rules and it's sometimes difficult to understand why they exist in the first place (and I know a lot of games simply ignore them- in my current game, nobody asks the Cleric to put their hammer down to cast spells!).[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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