There’s no Long, Rambling Introduction™ today. This is a Random Bulls$%& article; it’s Long enough and Rambling enough as it is. And this particular Random BullS$% is also Introduction enough as it is. Because I might just introduce a new thing today. A new series. Maybe. Depends on what kind of response this bulls%&$ gets and whether I really want to start a whole new series. Not that this is going to be a series, really. I mean, I have to call it a series. That’s what I call a bunch of inter-hyper-linked articles in some kind of sequence that get their own collective page on this crappy mess of a website. But it’ll probably be more like a collection of essays. In fact, that’s exactly what it’ll be.

Unless it bombs. Then, it’ll be one Long, Rambling, Bulls$&% article, a pair of essays combined into one failed article, and then nothing else ever. Another thing I’ll never finish that three or four people get obsessed enough with that they never f$&%ing leave me alone about it. No matter how many times I say, “look, I know the four of you really liked that thing, but the other tens of thousands of people who also read this website didn’t particularly give a s$&% and they don’t miss it. And I have to make those tens of thousands of people happy, not just you four. Sorry.”

But enough about why I’ll never write that “how to make Pathfinder monsters” thing. Or really anything about Pathfinder. No, not even for PF2. Especially not for PF2.

And also enough rambling introduction to an article that’s just a bunch of rambling introduction. So, let’s ramble on to the rambling meat.

Teaching D&D

Let’s talk about teaching people how to play Dungeons & Dragons. But not about…

Hold on. I know there’s a few of you that hate D&D out there and you’re actually still playing s$&% like Pathfinder and Blades in the Motherf$&%ing Dark. But tens of thousands of people show up because they like D&D and they play D&D and they want D&D advice. That’s why I’m always talking about D&D. Even when my advice works perfectly well for everything and even though I don’t exclusively play or run D&D and even though I’m not even playing the current edition of D&D myself. I use D&D and Dungeons & Dragons in my headings, titles, descriptions, and text mainly so search engines will shove my website in gamers’ faces. Blame WotC for making the most popular and successful RPG in the world. Blame fans for being too stupid to stop having fun long enough to recognize they’re having fun with the wrong game. Blame the evil internet corporations for their world-controlling algorithms. I don’t give a f$&%.

Anyway…

Let’s talk about teaching people how to play Dungeons & Dragons. But not about how to teach people how to play. About the idea of teaching people how to play. What it means to teach people how to play D&D. And why so many people don’t seem to know how to play D&D. Especially the people teaching other people how to play. Which is a f$&%ing problem because those people end up at my table and I think they know how to play D&D and they don’t and then they all fail and die and they blame me as some killer a$&hole GM.

Thing is, I wrote this book and this module that were designed to first teach newbies how to play and run D&D and to second give them the resources they’d need to teach other newbies how to play D&D with them. So I’d already given this “how to teach D&D” thing a f$&%-ton of thought. That’s why the module looked like it did. Literally the entire first third of the module was just a bunch of encounters that let the GM sequentially introduce and explain various game mechanics. In order of complexity. The rest of the module then — supposedly — let the players use their newfound abilities to play the game to, you know, play the game. Explore a dungeon, get treasure, fight monsters, complete a quest, all that crap.

Except that’s technically a lie. The entire module was actually designed to teach players and GMs alike how to play D&D from beginning to end. The tutorial didn’t stop at Encounter B8. It just got really subtle after that. But that’s a whole other story. Well, partly. Because partly, this story — today’s Bulls$&% — is about all the other stuff you need to know to play D&D that isn’t in the rules.

And it’s also about how I drastically underestimated the amount of other subtle stuff people don’t know about playing D&D. Even experienced players.

See, I’ve now run that module for something like 30 people in the last two months. I’ve run it for friends, strangers, newbies, oldbies, D&D players, D&D haters, people new to my table, people who’ve been at my table for years, people I like, people I hate, people I thought I liked until I saw what they were like as players, every kind of gamer imaginable. And now that those games are just about f$&%ing done — for now — the one thing that’s surprised me more than anything else is the sheer number of people who have zero f$&%ing clue how to play D&D. Even the experienced gamers and the GMs who’ve played at my table for years don’t know how to play D&D. No one does. Apparently.

I’ve even got this problem at my home game. My personal, for-fun game. I’ve got four experienced gamers there and three of them have been playing at my table for years. Despite all my brilliant designs and best efforts, those goobers still manage to break my brilliant Angry’s Open World Game! Okay, it wasn’t totally completely their fault. I admit that I made a few little mistakes and that the AOWG is missing a few little bits and pieces. But they were basically just peas under the mattress. The big problems were all to do with how to actually play D&D.

I had an epiphany a couple of months ago. It’s how that whole AOWG series started. It started with me saying. “okay, my players can’t figure out how to play the game I’m running so I’ve got to stop running the game and explain it to them, and maybe, if you’re having the same problem, you should do the same.” But all y’all got way more excited about the game I was running — my Angry’s Open-World Game — than about just talking to your f$&%ing players and making sure you all know how to play the same game.

Meanwhile, the problem of people not knowing how to play D&D ran way f$&%ing deeper than I realized. And it wasn’t just that I had a bad batch of goobers at my table who were loveable enough to be worth the effort of teaching. By which I mean, they manage to piss me off the least of any group of players I’ve run for in a long time. And that’s saying a lot. So they’re keepers. Even if they’re fixer-uppers.

But why? Why doesn’t anyone know how to play D&D?

And yes, I know I’m still being really f$&%ing vague here when I say “how to play D&D.” I mean, you can probably tell I’m not talking about “rolling ability checks” or “taking one action and a move on a turn.” I obviously mean something here. But what? Well, I’ll tell you after I tell you why no one can play D&D.

First, the books suck at teaching people how to play — and run — D&D. Now, lots of people say that. But they’re wrong when they say that because they’ve never f$&%ing read the books. They piss and moan about how the books don’t concisely explain what D&D is about and that they don’t start with basic concepts and build up to the more advanced stuff. They do though. If you read the introduction to the PHB, you’ll find all the s$&% that I say an RPG should start with is right f$&%ing there. And also that D&D is totally honest about the game experience it promises. So forget that crap.

The rules are bloated, a little unevenly edited and presented, and disorganized in places. But they don’t omit much, they’re totally honest, and if you actually read them very carefully, you’d see they say lots of the same s$&% I do. I’ve had this fight before. A lot. And I always win just by citing a page number or quoting a paragraph.

There. Right f$&%ing there on page f$%&ing seven. That’s where it tells you exactly what D&D is and is not about in no uncertain terms. It didn’t leave it out. It didn’t lie. You just didn’t read it. Here, I will read it out loud to you and I’ll punctuate the important parts by hitting you in the head with the book.

All of that said — mainly because people keep forcing me to defend D&D’s s$&%y books with ridiculous, false claims about what is or is not in there — all of that said, the rules don’t actually tell you what you need to know to play D&D. And no, I don’t mean the whole RPG conversation where the GM describes s$&% and then you decide what your character does and the GM resolves it. That’s right on PHB5. I mean other stuff. Which I’ll get to.

The problem’s also that everyone thinks they know how to play D&D. No one actually reads the rules because everyone knows the rules. Usually because they learned the rules from someone else. Or because they know the rules from some previous edition or other game and can fill in the gaps in their knowledge with a quick skim. And then they think they’re equipped to teach other people how to play and run D&D. But they’re not. They’re f$&%ing not.

I call this the Monopoly problem. No one knows how to play Monopoly, but everyone thinks they do because everyone learned from someone else who also didn’t know how to play it. So no one knows about property auctions and how nothing actually happens on Free Parking and s$&% like that. And then, worse, they complain that the game sucks. I mean, I’m not going to claim Monopoly’s a great game, but it plays a lot better when you use the actual rules. And it’s a lot shorter.

Moreover, everyone thinks they’re smarter than the game’s designers. So, when they say the game sucks and you say it’s because they’re not playing by the rules, they argue that they like their rules better because the game’s rules make for a sucky game. Oh yeah? How the f$&% would you know? GMs are a prideful, egomaniacal bunch. They won’t even finish reading a set of rules before they rewrite the f$&%ing thing. Let alone actually play it as intended. Not even once. Just to see if maybe it works perfectly fine as is.

So, instead of calling this the Monopoly problem, I should call it the Dumba$& Gamer problem. But that describes 75% of all the problems with D&D. Why yes, I am claiming that 75% of all the issues people say they have with D&D arise not from the game’s design, but from a nebulous space located somewhere between the GM’s screen and their chair. If you take my meaning.

Anyway…

Another Dumba$& Gamer problem that doesn’t help the issue at all is the idiotic insistence that D&D can — and should — be anything to anyone. The idea that “there’s no wrong way to play.” The idea that, outside the rules for rolling dice, D&D should have absolutely no say in how you play it or what you do with it. “There’s no rules for role-playing,” observe the mouth-breathers, “no rules for imagination.”

No one ever insists that Monopoly shouldn’t be about property and wealth acquisition and should instead be about corporations in the future trying to destroy another planet’s environment by turning it into a carbon-copy of Earth’s. But no one bats an eye when someone says, “well, D&D should be a supernatural teen romance game with mass combat rules, political intrigue, and no combat encounters.”

But that’s an aside. The point is because vast wodges of vital information I haven’t yet described are missing from the D&D rules and because nobody reads the D&D rules and because everyone keeps changing the D&D rules and because everyone thinks that D&D’s rules are just guidelines for imagination, no one knows how to play the f$&%ing game. This means every time I sit down with a new group of players, I get to spend hours fighting with everyone just to get them to play the same game as each other.

Not even the game I want to run, by the way. This isn’t even about my personal style. I can’t even get the players playing the same game as each other. Let alone just playing the game in the books. I sure as hell can’t start making changes.

Look, if you don’t want to play the D&D in the books, that’s fine. That’s your problem. It’s your game. You bought it. Make it your own. Just like if you want to use a microwave oven to get the fleas off your cat, I can’t stop you. But whatever happens to your cat is your own damned fault. And don’t make me complicit by asking me to write an article about what setting’s the best for flea removal.

But let’s put that aside. Let me drag my topic, kicking and screaming, back onto the exam table and shackle it down for some surgery.

What Does it Actually Mean to Know How to Play D&D

If I asked you to tell me how to play D&D, what would you say? Assuming you’re me, of course, and that you actually know how to teach people how to play games. Which most gamers don’t. I’ve had lots of friends and strangers teach me games over the years. And I can tell you that 90% of people suck at teaching games.

But imagine you’re me. And you’re good at teaching games. How would you explain how to play D&D?

You could just follow the example in that module I wrote, right? First, briefly introduce the world. Next, describe the players’ goals. Then, give the players each a character and explain how the character is their avatar in the world. That they interact with the world through their characters. Then, start running the game. Show them that the game’s a conversation wherein you — the GM — describe the situation and they — the players — declare actions and you — the GM — determine and describe the outcomes. Then start with the rules stuff. Simple first. Ability checks, saving throws, hit points, proficiencies, death saves, rest and recovery, the basic s$&%. Then character abilities and bigger s$%& like combat and investigation.

I mean, that’s basically how you teach any board game. First, present the premise. Then, explain the goal. Then, tell the players what they’ll be doing from one round to the next. Then present the important rules from simple to complex. Whenever possible, introduce the rules through gameplay.

In this game, you and I are dueling wizards. We’re each trying to reduce our opponent’s health to zero. We do so by spending mana to cast spells and summon monsters. On your turn, you’ll draw a card, put a source of mana into play, and then cast one or more blah blah blahdy f$&%ing blah…

But D&D — all RPGs — are unique amongst tabletop games in that they’re totally open-ended. And that makes a huge amount of difference.

If I’m teaching you how to play Wizard Card Duel and you say, “how do I get mana to cast spells,” I explain that you can draw it from land cards or use special abilities printed on some cards to generate mana. I can show you the land cards and the special abilities and the little symbols and make it clear. Because there’s only a few ways to generate mana in WCD.

Now, what if I’m teaching you how to play D&D and you say, “how do I get information about specific monsters so I know how to fight them?” I might answer that, when you encounter a monster, if you have the right skills, you can roll a check and I’ll give you the information. But that’s not the whole answer, is it? Because, outside of encountering a monster, isn’t it possible to do some research? I mean, the point of D&D is that you can attempt any conceivable action to solve your problem. You can go to a library and look up the specific monster. You can consult an expert. You can seek out a supernatural entity and ask for information. How do you find experts and supernatural entities? Well, there’s ways to do that too.

How about this question: “how do I get information out of an NPC that doesn’t want to give it when I don’t want to hurt them?” Is it really enough to just know you can roll a Charisma (Persuasion) check to convince someone to do something? How the hell can you run a good social interaction encounter if the whole thing’s just about rolling a single check to get or not get the information.

It’s easy enough to say, “well, you have to imagine a way to get the information and then do that.” It’s easy to say, “just think about what you’d say to get the information and then say that.” I mean, that is how D&D works, isn’t it. But is that fair? I mean, there’s a lot of esoteric stuff built into that, isn’t there? Details about the setting and the world. What’s possible. What’s not.

If you want information in the D&D world, you can definitely do research, right? Go to a library or academy? If one exists where you are. But you can also speak to an expert. But who’s an expert? How do you find one? Just ask around? Maybe. But where do you start? What about diviners and oracles? In the real world, most people think psychics are charlatans. Scam artists. But in the D&D world, they exist and they have good information. Who ever considers going to an oracle before the GM explicitly makes “going to the oracle” part of a quest?

And this ain’t just specific world lore crap either. Let me give you an example. You and your fellow players turned up evidence that the king’s adviser is corrupt. Evil. And you’re trying to decide what to do with that. The king trusts his adviser. And the king might be corrupt himself. He certainly doesn’t trust the armed mercenaries just passing through his kingdom. It could go bad if you approach the king and say, “hey, I know you’re not going to believe this, but Jafar over there with the snake staff and the evil goatee? He’s a bad guy. And we’ve got receipts.” Really bad. So, you and your allies are sitting there arguing about what to do.

Did you know that according to the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook — the current one — you can pay a fee of around 10 to 50 gp and the GM will tell you whether confronting the king is a good idea or a bad idea. I s$&% you not. It’s official core rules.

I’ll let you find it.

I usually see the whole “how to play a game” thing as a question with two answers. First, there’s the rules answer. How to roll checks, basic role-playing-conversation-turn-order, standard-action-and-move and initiative counts, all the crap in the rulebook. Second, there’s the strategic answer. How to pick the right action, which abilities to use when, how to manage resources, all the crap you learn and improve at over time. The player skill s$&%.

In Dueling Card Wizards, there’s the rules that tell you how to resolve combat. And then there’s the experience and player smarts that tell you which creature to block with and which attacker to banish with a spell before the attack resolves.

But D&D — being an open-world game of role-playing fantasy adventure — actually has a pile of middle-ground s$&%. It’s not quite the rules. It’s not quite strategy you learn over time. It’s a sense of how to function — on a basic level — in the world. Basic proficiency at adventuring s$&%. How to look at a map and plan a route to a destination. How to find a destination whose exact location you only have a rough idea about. How to basically play a social interaction encounter. How to get information and do research in a medieval fantasy world. Stuff we — as GMs — assume players will just sort of “imagine” or “figure out,” that they actually usually won’t. Because there’s just no frame of reference.

To enter the world of D&D, you need to know more than just the rules. And putting s$&% in the rules doesn’t even help. That thing I said about paying the GM for the answer? It’s split between two different places in the PHB. It’s two rules combined together to make something possible that most players never even read. And some players are even told there’s no reason for them to ever read one of those two things unless they’re playing a certain character. But it’s a possibility everyone would know about. Every person in the medieval fantasy world knows that when you’re really screwed for information, you go to a priest and have them ask the gods. That’s part of the fantasy world thing.

This stuff isn’t just strategy. It’s as essential to playing the game as things like turn order in Card Wizards: The Duelinging

The books give you a bunch of pieces of things. You’ve got all the rules for travel pace and travel tasks and foraging and resting and wilderness encounters. But hand your players a map and a vague description of a location they want to get to and they won’t know how the f$%& to put that s$&% together. I’ve got a whole world filled with quests and adventures and exciting locations to explore. All my players have to do is recognize them and then resolve — as a team — to do them or go to them or explore them and then figure out a strategy for doing, going, or exploring. And to gather whatever information they need to make that happen. All the resources are there. But they don’t know how to put them together.

I had players playing my module who knew full well that the best way to win the adventure was to resolve the ghost’s unfinished business. All they had to do was talk to the thing the right way. And hell, the ghost was telling them everything they needed to know. All they had to do was get it talking, listen to its concerns, address those concerns, and not roll f$%&ing ones on their Charisma checks. You know what they struggled with? It wasn’t the Charisma checks. Well, except for one party.

And, look, we all know this s$&% is a problem. All of us GMs. Because we’re always looking for more codification, right? We need rules for social interactions. Social f$&%ing combat. We need better travel and exploration rules. Why do we feel like that s$&%’s not there? Because it kinda is in the rules. But it’s all broken apart. It’s like we’ve got all the rules for how to compare card powers and bring cards into play and which cards cost what and what special abilities do what, but they forgot to include the f$&%ing turn order rules in the pamphlet. Like, we have all the tools to resolve a combat except for the rules for actually running a combat from beginning to end.

If that makes sense.

But the solution’s not more rules. Because we don’t want to turn our open-ended world of fantasy adventure into Wizard Monopoly. The solution’s just to actually teach players how to play the game. That is, how to function — with a basic level of proficiency — in the D&D world. Because there’s some s$&% that’s always going to come up in the D&D world. Like wilderness travel and social interaction and dealing with traps and locked things and potentially hidden things. Especially if you don’t have a rogue. I mean, lots of characters have lots of abilities to help deal with this s$&%. Rangers and bards and rogues. But they’re the exception. Every player should know how to deal with traps and locked doors and the rogue should just have the little extra whammy that makes that easier. Which, by the way, is how it is. That’s just not how it’s presented.

Dear Players…

So, I’ve found myself struggling a lot lately with players who have no f$&%ing clue how to actually play D&D. They know all the rules. But they don’t know how to play the game. It’s not even strategy they’re lacking. They don’t even know how to communicate with me or with each other. They don’t know how to talk to NPCs or plan a trek across the wilds or find information they don’t have in the fantastic world of D&D. They want to do these things. They try. But they don’t even know what direction to start in. They can’t imagine the possible solutions because they don’t have a frame of reference.

And so I found myself wondering if I shouldn’t be teaching people that s$&%. The basic skills. How to squeeze information out of an average NPC. How to interact with the GM and the players. How to agree on a course of action. How to look at a map and plan a travel route. How to get information in a village. A town. A city. What to do when you first arrive in a new town. How to strategize. Not what strategies to use. But how to work together as a team to come up with a strategy and then execute it.

Problem is that players aren’t attentive. They’re not going to read 5,000-word deep-dives into every aspect of the game. They don’t even read the rules. This is just a hobby for them. They don’t want an in-depth analysis of how to strategically interact with NPCs to get what you want. They want Five Simple Social Interaction Encounter Steps Your GM Doesn’t Want You to Know!

Maybe not that f$%&ing blatant. Maybe something like a short letter. A single page.

Dear players…

So, you want to get some information out of an NPC and you can’t just beat it out of them. What do you do?

Or…

Dear players…

So, you found out you’ve got to evict a nalfeshnee from the local puppy orphanage, but you’ve got no idea what the hell a nalfeshnee even is, let alone what it’s vulnerable to. How do you find out what you want to know about a monster if you’ve got the time to do the legwork?

Or…

Dear players…

So, you found an old journal that describes an ancient, treasure-filled ruin hidden somewhere in the Doomdark Hills but that doesn’t tell you exactly where it is. How do you find a thing in the wilderness if you don’t know exactly where you’re going?

Dear Players. A series of short essays GMs can print out and hand off to their players to teach their players how to function in the world of D&D. Introductory chunks of instruction that lets the players pull off some of this s$&% without hurting themselves. Simple, basic proficiency stuff they can build better strategies on top of.

Is that a crazy idea? Is there even a demand for it? Would anyone read it? I don’t know. Which is why I’m just bulls$&%ing around it instead of just saying, “here’s the first entry in my new Dear Players series.” But if I’m going to run more games for strangers without killing them, I’ve got to do something.

But MY Game Doesn’t Work That Way!

Of course, there’s two problems with this s$&%. One I don’t particularly care about. But the other is a pretty serious one.

The one I don’t care about is the pissing and moaning about setting-specific this-and-that. Yes, I know that some of this stuff — like the existence of divination magic — is setting specific. I mean, to some extent it isn’t. If it’s in the PHB, it’s fair game as far as I’m concerned. But, finding an oracle in Faerun is as easy as going down to the Watherdavian Board of Commerce. They’ve got brochures. Meanwhile, in Ravenloft, you’re probably going to have to pay your oracle with someone’s stolen baby because hags don’t take personal checks. And in Athas, well, you’re as likely to get a good answer as you are to get killed by a slithering horror and have your remains smeared across eleven-dimensional space.

There’s nothing I can do about that. And I don’t really care. Nor do I care how much you hate the existence of divination magic or religion or whatever and you just don’t use that s$&% in your world. That doesn’t invalidate my advice. You just refuse to play D&D. You’re playing something else.

But the more serious issue is that most GMs also don’t know how to put this s$&% together. Most GMs don’t teach their players how to plan a wilderness excursion because they don’t know how to do it themselves. They know all the rules and they’re waiting for their players to invoke the rules without realizing there’s a big gulf between the rules and actually making a plan and taking an action. So, if I start teaching players how to do this s$&%, I’m going to confuse the f$&% out of their GMs. Or, at least, I’m going to be giving players a bunch of crappy advice that won’t work.

This means every Dear Players… essay will need an accompanying Dear GMs… essay that explains how to run the game when the players do the things I teach them to do. Not to explain the same s$&%. I expect the GMs to read both essays. The GM essay just clarifies the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes the player essays work.

The problem is all of this s$&% sets me up for a lot of arguments. Because, to some extent, I will be putting the rules together in new ways. Frankly, the D&D rules don’t really cover social interaction encounters. You have to infer the way to run the encounter from what rules there are. Which means, to some extent, I’m telling GMs how to run their games. Style s$&%. And I’m claiming to be the authority on how to play and run the game right. How the world of D&D should work.

But then I remember that, basically, that’s what all my supporters are paying me to do anyway. People want me to tell them how the game should work. How to do it right.

So, I guess I’ll just throw this s$&% up here and then wait for everyone to tell me whether they actually want this crap or not. And then I’ll probably do it anyway. Because, frankly, I write what I want to write. And I’m sick of teaching players how to not suck one table at a time.

Telling everyone how to not suck all at once is just more efficient.