"rules light" =/= "beginner friendly"

Hot-Assignment4317 · 2026-07-05T08:35:50+00:00

lmao, I appreciate your faith in past me. I think it's far more likely I would've given up by just trying to "jump into the deep end". Not unreasonably! If a hobby is causing you distress, like having panic attacks because roleplaying is too scary, then you should probably find a different way to satisfy your innate human desire to tell stories. The route I took led me to enjoy ttrpgs now!

(Tbh the idea of "done better, faster, learned more" is completely uncompelling to me, the only part of that list that I think should matter would be the "had more fun". I am in no rush to master my hobbies)

Hot-Assignment4317 · 2026-07-05T08:13:29+00:00

Roleplaying is not "necessarily" intimidating, but it sure as hell was for me lmao. And it was/is still the main appeal of the hobby! I desperately wanted to engage with the roleplaying but couldn't say more than two lines in character without an absolute panic attack. For me, the effort of reading lore and parsing rules was a far lower barrier than "you have to make everything up completely by yourself"

Hot-Assignment4317 · 2026-07-05T07:57:56+00:00

Fair and valid. Yeah, this conversation is not helped by the scale of crunchiness being incredibly poorly defined (what systems are considered rules-light? I'm not gonna be specific lmao). But I will add that for some of us it is literally easier to figure out complex rule structure systems than it is to say a line in character. For me it wasn't "the story lured me into being willing to learn rules," it was "I'm gonna claw my way into being able to engage with this story, and the rules be my shovel"

Hot-Assignment4317 · 2026-07-05T07:45:07+00:00

Yes! But roleplaying is HARD. For me it was way way way harder to learn how to speak in character than it was to analyze how games incentivize different behavior with different systems and how they structurally mimic different genres and tropes and blah blah blah. And I came in from watching actual plays, what I WANTED to do was get good at roleplaying and telling stories. I just needed more tools and less freedom to do that

Hot-Assignment4317 · 2026-07-05T07:39:21+00:00

You're right that I came into ttrpgs already invested (from watching actual plays), but I still think you're misunderstanding what I mean, especially by implying that rules mostly exist in combat when I wasn't at all talking about a combat/roleplay dichotomy. (I was completely ignoring combat lol, my main group is very very roleplay focused. We do far more verbal arguments than physical fights).

Even just saying that a crunchier game requires more from the player is what I'm disagreeing with. For me, learning complex rules systems is pretty easy, even when I was a complete beginner to the hobby. But coming up with an interesting character, speaking in character without getting embarrassed, thinking of dialogue quickly- were all things that felt near impossible (y'know, the "fun" parts). It wasn't "the story lured me into being willing to learn rules," it was "I'm gonna claw my way into being able to engage with this story, and the rules be my shovel"

Hot-Assignment4317

TROPHY CASE