Fraser McHarg: Do I Have Rule Apathy or Ruleophobia?

I played my first game of Roads and Boats last weekend.  Thanks to Gregor for running the rules explanation.  Melissa bought this for my birthday 18 months ago.  I punched it and looked at it—then waited for an opportunity to play it with somebody who already knew how to play.  Why did I wait so long?

Over the last few years I have found myself doing this quite a bit with board games.  I get the game and I don’t read the rules; some time later I will play with someone else teaching and then possibly read the rules afterwards.

It’s not that I am incapable of reading and understanding rules—well, with the notable exception of Mystery Rummy: Jack the Ripper that is—it is just some mental block about sitting down and reading the rules and working the game out.  I certainly don’t have issues with learning the rules when I am being taught in game.  Possibly I just prefer to learn game rules this way now.

After a session of Elric of Melnibone tonight we were tallking about this amongst the group and there is a similar thing with roleplaying game rules happening.  In our younger days we used to sit down and read and memorise the voluminous RPG rules.  I haven’t read the rules for Elric of Melnibone and nor am I likely to.  I played a Call of Cthulhu campaign for many years with barely a cursory glance at the rulebook.  Yet I can still tell you instantly that an AD&D Troll has 6+6 Hit Dice, is a large creature, and regenerates 3 HP per round; and that a fireball will expand to 33,000 cubic feet.

With the roleplaying game rules, one theory proposed was that we just weren’t interested enough in the particular system to invest the time and effort to read the rules thoroughly.  We can certainly get by with just one person having a bit of an overview and checking the rules if required.  This is probably assisted by the amount of rules to other systems we have digested in the past.

Game literacy is a concept in which you have played (and understood) many different types of games over time and picked up many different aspects of game play, rules and low-level building blocks of games.  Obviously an individual’s game literacy depends on his actual experience of games played.  For me things like action points, tile laying, multiple phases to a turn, roll and move, auctions, set collection, stack limits, area of control, card driven, role selection, victory points, resource production, counter mix limit, pickup and deliver, and even interlocking zone of control are all part and parcel of my game literacy.

Thus if I am taught a new game where many of the aspects of the game correlate to my existing game literacy, I find it easy to pick up how to play the game.  For example after a sample couple of turns I could play Roads and Boats quite confidently.  A couple of points needed finer further explanation, e.g. how the end of game can be triggered, but this is much more a game specific condition than general game literacy.

The same is true with roleplaying games; for example, Elric of Melnibone has experience rolls and combat rounds.  The way they work is slightly different than other games I have played, e.g. Call of Cthulhu, at the technical level, but the concept is fundamentally the same and thus absorbed relatively easily.

Of course none of this explains why I seem to be shying away from reading game rules, does it?

© 2008 Fraser McHarg

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I am the opposite. I prefer to read the rules myself. I can positively say that almost every single time I have been taught the rules to a game, I found an error in the explanation later on when reading the rulebook myself. I am not one of those idiots who sit at the table, barely paying attention while I read the rulebook, but I do read the rules when I get home. The constant teacher errors are why I tend to be the teacher more often than not. I have made a few errors in my time, but it is honestly a rare occurrence. I think the decade spent being a Magic the Gathering rules lawyer taught me to be meticulous with rulesets. Posted by Dan Corban on Feb 5, 2008 at 01:17 PM | #

I try and choose my teachers wisely and am mostly successful in this regard. Posted by Fraser McHarg on Feb 5, 2008 at 04:18 PM | #

I was the designated rules reader for my gaming group “back in the day” since I enjoyed reading the rules more than others and was willing to spend more of my free time on them. Now, I tend to be the game teacher since I am more likely to be the game owner.  Since I teach games so often I usually take the reins and explain things when someone is new to a game.  Oh, and I’m a “talker” so that means its hard for me to sit through an explanation without helping out.  (I tend to try to walk away for a minute or two so I’m not tempted...) Posted by Matt J. Carlson on Feb 6, 2008 at 10:28 AM | #

Nice post, thanks!  I’ve been finding myself in the same boat (same road and boat?!) lately.  It started when attending a couple of cons, where you don’t have time to read the rules before setting down to play; I figured I would go back and read the rules to see what I missed, but I never did.  I’m not sure what is with the sudden rules fatigue… Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Feb 9, 2008 at 11:33 AM | #

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