The games I know best are ones I learned through osmosis.
I learned Fiasco at a wedding. I played D&D with friends through high school. My first pbta game was at Camp Nerdly. Catan I learned in grad school, Carc from a great friend. Hell, Endless Sky was first shown to me.
And I just realized -- because I am not so smart -- that the learning through osmosis with pbta doesn't just apply to a single game like Monster Hearts or Apocalypse World, but gives a suite of skills that are applicable to all pbta games.
So, for ex, I know how to look to my principles and think about what moves follow. I know how to think about hard versus soft moves. Heck, I know how to quickly add the result of 2d6 + stat and determine the outcome. As MC, I often do this before my players and start thinking about the result.
I'm not sure I have ever learned and internalized rules through a book. Have you? Do you? Am I weird in this?
Or, is learning and mastering a game an inherently social phenomenon?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I do some learning through reading, but admittedly I don't tend to /learn learn/ it until I've actually sued it. Either through play, or at the very least, creating various characters to see how things flow. It's one of the reasons I have problems with new games to be honest, I need to play them to learn them, but it's hard to play them before you learn them so if its new for everyone there is a lot of stumbling and then a "let's just play what we know"....
ReplyDeletedefinitely reading games' rules (much like reading about anything) can be enlightening in and of itself, so surely this is a normal phenomenon. however, i think mastery requires practice and is unavoidable in that way. the other factor is natural ability, which i think you have, meaning you're just good at gaming anyway.
ReplyDeletee.g. i played in a go tournament once where my opponent had never actually played a game before. i scoffed, since i'd been playing for a couple years at the time, so surely i'd have the advantage. maybe so, but i lost. so it's def possible to learn just by reading. however, by this time in my "go career", i doubt anyone could simply read their way to my current level. it simply requires too much real world experience to get to mastery. i suspect that guy was just a "natch" at go too though. there's no way i could just have read a few books on go and played at 10-kyu as he did.
so learning definitely and basic mastery maybe, yes, from reading only. otherwise, real mastery, imo, only through practice. like anything.
I learn to play games by reading the rules all the time. Board games, RPGs, etc., it's great. But you're not weird, a lot of people do it the way you do. I don't really understand why, game designers generally try to engineer their rules so they are effective in teaching the reader to play (or they should if they don't) so using some other method is likely to produce less-optimal results. But people prefer the "personalized service" of other people teaching them, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteI taught myself how to play D&D entirely from the books (AD&D 2e, because it was '93) because I wanted to play and to get my friends into it, but didn't know anyone who was already playing. It was six years before I played D&D with someone who had not learned how to play from me. To be fair, video games had been teaching me the language of games for years at that point.
ReplyDeleteThe question of "real mastery" defies definition. I'm a better GM this year than I was last year, and so on back to my start in the hobby. At what point did I achieve real mastery, or does that continue to elude me? My doctoral thesis is still in front of the review board. ;)
Yes to all of this.
ReplyDeleteI think there's something ephemeral that's not in the rules of any game. The unwritten but always spoken rules that make a game sing. The ... culture, maybe .. of a particular game. The rules between the rules.
Go is a great example of this; I can know the rules in an hour, but I won't really know how the game flows.
This is perhaps strongest with roleplaying games, where there's so much that can be taught with a glance or a tilt of the head.
Whether that's a demand personalized service, or fallback to the ease of games we already know (I'm looking at you, Catan), learning and playing a new game takes juice. Learning and playing a game that we already know takes substantially less.
I suppose my position is that playing a new game with others who already know how to play it means it not only takes a lot less juice to get started, but also that I much more likely to play it correctly.
Or, at least as correctly as the people I'm playing it with. That's why I go to the designer as often as possible.
I think those ephemeral "unspoken rules" are something like reading between the lines or what we call "flavor". Perhaps it's the "spirit" of the game as portrayed by the fluff of the writing. AD&D is a great example. That game has a very distinct flavor, and it's definitely not a great game because of its lucid ruleset. AD&D is incredible, but maybe more for the rambling idiosyncratic style of the author, the odd little embedded comics, numerous product references, nods to literary works, and so on. (OK, and it filled a need at just the right time in an awfully good way.)
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think the skills of a good GM transcend gaming. Having a good [stage] presence, for example. Being good at making shit up on the fly. Being fair. Being decisive. These are natural talents a GM might have.
If you literally mean learn a game by osmosis, though, I might argue it can't be done. Learning pretty much always requires some real effort. Osmosis essentially implies learning without effort. I can attest that a guy in my Sunday game chooses not learn (by osmosis or otherwise). He's been playing 5E for a couple years now and pretty much sucks at the rules. He just enjoys role-playing and makes the minimal effort toward rules.
I think the games you like have a "viral" element to them. Once you do learn them( by reading or playing), you are compelled to share them with others, and it is this sharing (and proselytizing) that gets others learning and seeing the game without reading the ruleset themselves. Then the cycle continues.
ReplyDelete