How hard is learning a new TTRPG system?
DrunkonDuty
he/him
For me it has as much, maybe more, to do with how the rule books are written and laid out. I bounced off PF2 trying to get through the explanation of how stat bumps are assigned in character creation. Oh, I got the concept immediately. But several pages of dense text left me no wiser as to what the actual bonuses for different backgrounds, etc. were.
Fast forward a couple of years, to last month or so. I tried again. The online SRD made it a bit easier. But it was only random chance that I discovered you also get some free stat bumps. And I get the feeling that characters get 2 hit dice at level 1: 1 class, 1 ancestry. But I'm not sure.
Layout, Paizo! Bloody layout!
Fast forward a couple of years, to last month or so. I tried again. The online SRD made it a bit easier. But it was only random chance that I discovered you also get some free stat bumps. And I get the feeling that characters get 2 hit dice at level 1: 1 class, 1 ancestry. But I'm not sure.
Layout, Paizo! Bloody layout!
payn
He'll flip ya...Flip ya for real...
Sadly, PF2 boils down to 2-3 different arrays despite all the hullabaloo about generating them via A,B,C. A nice sidebar that just says use them instead would be great.
jdrakeh
Front Range Warlock
The PF2 Core Rulebook is a great example of what I alluded to re: poor content editing. Specifically with regard to character creation. The first time my friends and I created characters for PF2, three of the four of us missed some vital mechanical bits due to poor organization (there was some stuff that was shuffled away under another heading, IIRC, rather than being presented inline with like content).
So my own experience is this. In the last year at the TTRPG club I’ve joined I’ve played maybe a dozen new games. Mainly rules light stuff — Blades in the Dark, Delta Green, Savage Worlds, etc — so picking up the rules was a few minutes intro by the GM and then we picked it up as we went, which was pretty easy. By the end of the first session, we had a full handle on those games.
I guess we were all lucky as the time sink ‘learning a new game’ part was like 5 minutes all those times. At no point did we have to learn a 300 page hardcover.
I guess D&D might take a little longer? But most games don’t. And Pathfinder is obviously comparable to D&D in complexity. But 99% of RPGs take a few minutes to learn.
I guess we were all lucky as the time sink ‘learning a new game’ part was like 5 minutes all those times. At no point did we have to learn a 300 page hardcover.
I guess D&D might take a little longer? But most games don’t. And Pathfinder is obviously comparable to D&D in complexity. But 99% of RPGs take a few minutes to learn.
Warpiglet-7
Cry havoc! And let slip the pigs of war!
Some find it hard. I find that gaming time is precious and I don’t want to invest in such learning. It’s a shame but true.
I have a nice collection of boardgames and wargames. I spend a week learning and play around with them. Then there is a delay in playing them for whatever reason and it’s back almost to square one.
With D&D we just get together and start rocking. We work and have kids/spouses; it hard to spend gaming time on learning new stuff.
Ymmv
I have a nice collection of boardgames and wargames. I spend a week learning and play around with them. Then there is a delay in playing them for whatever reason and it’s back almost to square one.
With D&D we just get together and start rocking. We work and have kids/spouses; it hard to spend gaming time on learning new stuff.
Ymmv
DrunkonDuty
he/him
Yes!
The (what 3 charts for stats?) could be easily placed on two facing pages. The explanation on how to use them, plus telling you you get 3 free stat bumps, could be one short paragraph.
darjr
I crit!
I've found when RPG gamers play other types of games they do pickup other RPGs, but it can be a time burden, and a bit of "stage fright", by that I mean many times they'll want someone who knows the game to run it for them.
When the RPG gamer isn't otherwise a general gamer it seems there is a resistance to put in the effort to learn a new RPG.
When the RPG gamer isn't otherwise a general gamer it seems there is a resistance to put in the effort to learn a new RPG.
darjr
I crit!
I think the key here is you joined a club of folks already interested in new games.
I do find it much easier to go out and find folks that want to play a game. I'm also lucky in that my wider gaming community is well connected and much larger than any single gaming group, much much larger. Often I can post on our local facebook or mention it at a local convention or game day and I'll have enough people to play most any game. Sometimes too many.
I think if anyone looking to play other games and find it hard to get the local game group to try then branching out to a larger community is a way to go. Especially if you are running.
Bagpuss
Legend
From experience, I've not come across a game I can't teach people enough to play a session with a pregenerated character in less than 30 minutes. The majority of complexity in most system comes from character design and the making the choice of what abilities they get. Some games you can even design characters from scratch in that time (a lot of PbtA games spring to mind).
Even with designing a character from scratch the vast majority of games are less complex than D&D. There are only few games I consider more complex, A Time of War, Shadowrun, Hero System for example.
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