local ant wizard

People used to tut-tut at us for calling the occupation's treatment of Palestinians a genocide, for comparing the zionist occupiers to the Nazis, for talking about Western Jewish institutions' overwhelming participation and complicity in our oppression, for talking about how Holocaust education was primarily a zionist propaganda tool. We were called antisemites for describing the dynamics of power that enabled the escalation of the genocide of Palestine to happen. The one you witnessed livestreamed to you for years. The one with the images you cannot erase from your mind if you tried. The one that started making you wish Hell was real because justice was not going to be served on Earth.

Stop mincing words. Stop tone policing yourself and others. We have a genuine fucking problem on our hands and it's not saying the words "Jewish supremacy" to describe the system occupying Palestine and trying to erase every country in South West Asia off the map.

This acceleration of the genocide was enabled by our silencing because of the discomfort of Westerners.

You can choose where you want to sit in that dynamic.

Now I don't think the above actually counts as knowing the rules. D&D is a relatively crunchy game that actually rewards system mastery and actually learning how to play D&D well, as in to make mechanically informed tactical decisions and utilizing the mechanics to your advantage, is actually a skill that needs to be learned and cultivated. None of that is to say that you need to be a perfectly tuned CharOp machine to know how to play D&D. But to actually start to make the sorts of decisions D&D as a game rewards you kind of need to know the rules.

And like, a lot of people don't seem to know the rules. They know how to play D&D in the most abstract sense of knowing that they need to say things and sometimes the person scowling at them from behind the screen will ask them to roll a die. But that's hardly engaging with the mechanics of the game, like the actual game part.

When you have people that have actually done some reading on the rules vs. people that just coast and foist the majority of the game onto the GM, it makes it appear like the more knowledgeable players are sweaty power-gamers or rules-laywers.

My point is not to say that people who don't want to learn the rules shouldn't play, only that people who don't actually know the rules aren't necessarily engaging with the game to its fullest, especially in the case of a relatively rules-heavy game like D&D, and that as the previous poster mentioned it can actually result in a bad rules dynamic where the DM needs to do more work due to player unwillingness to learn the rules as well as casting players who actually know the rules and can engage with them in unfavorable light. All of these are negative elements of the culture of play surrounding.

Like, there isn't anything meaningfully gatekeepy about saying "players who don't know the rules of the game aren't as good at playing the game as the people who know the rules of the game." Because playing games is a skill that can be cultivated and knowledge of the rules is an important part of that skill.

I actually want to dial in on the phrasing here, which seems - insidious isn't quite the right word - but really weasely to me. There's this reflexive attempt to position the writer as the victim, from the way things are phrased to the actual sentiment. "I feel gatekept" (note that its not "I have been gatekept") is a pretty transparent attempt to claim victimhood, and gain the reader's sympathies. Likewise "I just wanna" and such. But then you have the sentiment of "I just want to play a silly game" and this carries this, like, baggage that game design is *not worth* taking seriously. Same with 'play it how u want', it's working to undermine the idea that you could *care* about this stuff, and it positions taking the artform seriously as an act of aggression against the poor victim who just wants to *not think about things.* Which is to say its classic anti-intillectualism. "It's just a [song/tv show/book/game] don't take it seriously" is like classic anti-intellectualism, and generally comes from a fairly regressive infantalised place.

They can set up the scenarios and build the maps and run the world. They already know the rest of the rules, so why not? They also know the stats for all the NPCs too, so might as well let them play everyone else

It's kinda their world and their game, too. So they can handle scheduling. My schedule is crazy, but they can figure it out.

The gits of it is - no one EVER knew how to play this fucking game, people had arguments before the official first edition, the white booklets era. Most people played based on their own interpretation, then arguet about it in zines. All the crunch in the AD&D onward was Gary Gygax's attempt to make the rule for everything because he grew greedy and wished to kill the competition that built careers on explaining his crappy rules better than he did (also, he made AD&D to screw Dave Arneson of his due money).

The first complete game - the Greyhawk supplement - is entirely straightforward and easy to pick up, and significantly simpler than modern D&D.

None of the early editions of D&D are hard to learn or obscure like you seem to think, so I assume you either have pudding for brains or are going entirely on hearsay rather than direct experience.

I'd wager nobody in the entire world has ever read the full comprehensive rules of MtG as they exist today.

And nobody expects you to! If you go to a Friday Night Magic with a random deck you bought in a toy store, no idea what the rules are like, I'm sure you'll find people willing to teach you, even explain how to properly play your deck in particular.

If, however, you keep coming to FNM for weeks, if not months, and you keep asking basic questions, like what "Flying" means, or what a "+1/+1 counter" does, or how any of the cards in the deck you've been playing for months does, if you call someone who tells you you can't block with that creature because it's already tapped that they're a "rules lawyer" who's "gatekeeping your fun", if it becomes apparent that you're not making any effort to actually learn the rules of the game... nobody will want to play with you anymore. You'll be labeled annoying at best, an asshole at worst.

And that's the case in any dedicated gaming space. As an avid board gamer, there's nothing more infuriating to me than having to re-explain basic rules because someone doesn't listen, or explaining what certain cards/characters/units/items/whatever do because someone is too lazy to simply read.

And yet, somehow, in D&D, behavior like this is apparently not just accepted, but expected, nay, encouraged(!) by the player base!

You may not like cooking dinner—I certainly don't—but I do know how to make cooking dinner easier for my partner. I can chop onions or grate cheese, I can grab things for them while their hands are busy, I can make a simple side salad, I can put away ingredients as they're used, I can set the table and pour the water, I can clean up the dishes after the meal is over. I'm aware enough of what's involved in making dinner happen that I know how to help even if I don't do the most difficult central activity.

Plus, if asked what I want for dinner, I don't respond 'ooh, let's have filet mignon! I want filet mignon!' when there's no steak in the house, because I maintain at least basic working knowledge of the ingredients we typically have on hand and I know filets are not among them.

I don't expect my partner to handle 100% of everything to do with dinner just because I don't like cooking. Why? Because having somebody make me hot dinners is better than the alternative, and I'm not an asshole who's going to take advantage of the fact that my partner would probably cook for us even if I didn't help. I can help, so even though I would rather have an extra 30-40 minutes of fanfic time, I get up and help.