OOC: It’s Better to Understand the Game than to Memorize It
Nothing kills the flow of a session more than having to crack open the rulebook to make sure you got a rule right. When I first started GMing, I inevitably went flipping through pages, getting more and more flustered at the slightest thing going wrong while my players awkwardly waited around for me to come back to them. I would spend off-hours reading through the rulebook and familiarizing myself with D&D’s edge cases just so that I could tell a player whether or not they can try and grapple an ogre. The standard advice to my younger self would be to make a call and look up the specific rule later. While there’s nothing wrong with that (I still do it all the time) I would go farther to say that if you know the basic gist of the game you’re playing, you can make the call, and simply live with it. As long as what happens feels like it fits the game, fits the table you’re playing at, then you’re golden.
Since those early days, I have memorized a ton of rules for D&D 5e. I don’t have to open up the rulebook for a vast majority of situations that come up, simply because I’ve played long enough that I’ve internalized the rules. But that took literal years of immersion in the system and ideally isn’t required to run a game smoothly. The number of times I make a call for unexpected damage or an effect-based consequence, I can usually think of an appropriate damage die or condition to put in place, or using familiar spell effects or existing rules as templates. Fall damage rules can be applied to a chandelier falling on someone’s head, or the basic snare spell being used as the rules for a very real snare constructed in front of an ogre’s lair. Yes, even 5e can fall back on what makes sense in the narrative before going back to the mechanics. But there are many obstacles in the way to get there.
This is why PbtA games and other story-forward games are the go-to example for being easy to run, or are considered low prep. Because when the core mechanic of your game revolves around a series of moves that all are pointing in the same direction, then it’s easier to understand the direction you should go if you get a little lost. Story games also tend to have more unified mechanics that are easier to internalize. Having the guiding light of a specific genre or trope to keep you on track with a simple resolution system does a lot to ensure that a game keeps on moving.
That’s why I think that more games should be explicit with readers about what kinds of games the book is good at running. Even “universal” systems like GURPS, Fate, or Savage Worlds may be able run games in any setting, but the kind of game, the kind of story that emerges from those systems, will be wildly different. Each game of Fate is going to require at least a cursory overview of the kinds of media everyone at the table wants to emulate. I think it’s pretty hard to beat Blades in the Dark, where John Harper tells you on page one that you will play scoundrels who burn bright and burn out quick. Sure, one could glean that kind of playstyle from the rules around prison or death, but having it outright stated at the beginning skips over the growing pains of playing a new system and knowing if it’s running right.
If a book doesn’t offer that level of detail, then the next best thing is to trawl the web for other peoples experiences. This is where a game’s popularity can be a crutch, because the more people who have been able to stress test the system and then report on it, the less that the shortcomings of the rulebook will stand out. Dungeons & Dragons 5e has a decade of discussion with millions of people weighing in on what did and didn’t work at their table. But even smaller games like Lancer or Fate have had plenty of online discussion so glean insight from.
Finally, my advice as always is to play the game. Many GMs get it into their heads that they are responsible for everybody at the table having a perfect game with no hiccups, but that simply isn’t feasible. Mistakes happen, games have wonky rules, someone misses a session. Play the game. Find out what works for you, find out what doesn’t. Make mistakes and decide how to avoid them next time. If you feel like you need to review the book later, go ahead. But get a feel for the game that you and your friends are building together, and ask yourself if you want to be beholden to a book, or to each other.
