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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 3914505" data-attributes="member: 31454">I'll confess that I absolutely don't understand the "ignorance of the rules makes it more fun" idea. I've been playing Shadowrun with my girlfriend's gaming group down in Baltimore when I go for a visit, and other than the very basic task resolution (roll a number of d6s determined by your abilities and your skills in the relevant area and count successes), I don't understand the rules at all. I don't have the rulebook, and even if I did, I wouldn't have the time to read it (except at their table). It's often frustrating to find out that I lost my turn because an action I wanted to take just didn't jive with the rules.For example, in the first session, we were fighting some enemies in a hotel stairwell. My troll, being a melee monster (pun intended) decided he wanted to jump down and dismember the guy with the rocket launcher down there and his mage buddies. So he handed off his shotgun to an orc and perched himself on the railing, readying an action to jump after the gun bunny's grenade went off.Unfortunately, I didn't know that grenades explode at the end of the turn, not immediately after being thrown (allowing for a sort of "hot potato" minigame). So what happened? I lost my action as after the grenade went off, it was a new round, and my initiative pass was lower than everyone else's. So in the entire fight, my troll took and missed one shot and tried to spot the bad guys twice. That was his entire contribution for the night, and a potentially cool moment was ruined because I didn't know the rules.However, I still had a good time. It wasn't because I was in an air of mystery and wonder thanks to not knowing the rules, but because my troll wound up being my girlfriend's character's sidekick (the gun bunny). He rode around in the side-car of her motorcycle and had dreams of one day buying a good-looking suit. He introduced himself as, "Ziggy, short for Zigian, short for Bob" and when people inevitably looked at him strangely, he replied, "It's a troll thing; you wouldn't get it." He later helped to unravel an evil plot surrounding a radical revolutionary group and some evil-er corporations because an effort to clamp down on the revolutionary broadcast interrupted television service, and he missed his soaps. It was the roleplaying in spite of the rules that I had such a good time with, not ignorance of the rules themselves. For me, being left ignorant of the rules and forced to grope blindly through an adventure isn't more fun: it's more frustrating.Luckily it also doesn't preclude me from playing a witty troll whose idea of disarming someone is to lop off the offending limb above the elbow with a monofilament sword...</blockquote>

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