This is intended to be a very nuts-and-bolts, foundational guide to analyzing and learning new game systems for the purpose of running them to share with others. This is my own process, and it is every bit a work-in-progress. I have no formal training in pedagogy, and it probably shows. This guide is very long, and will continue to grow as I work on it. I welcome and appreciate whatever feedback or questions people have to offer.
The majority of my RPG game time is playing Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a great game that empowers its players to do and imagine and create amazing, incredible things. The books are widely-available at Friendly Local Game Stores, book shops, thrift stores, and (best of all!) your public library. It’s also the first non-computer RPG that I’ve gotten to play properly and with any regularity. I wrote a whole thing about that; it’s not required reading for anything that follows, but apparently I had to get all of that out before I could work on this. What can I say? Brains are weird.
Much as I love D&D, there are loads of other games that I want to check out, people I’d love to introduce to this hobby, and stories to explore. Heroic sword and sorcery adventures are great, but I’m also drawn to science fictional morality tales, mysticism-laden coming-of-age struggles, survival horror gauntlets, and ever so many different varieties of mysterious, perilous investigation.
There are plenty of reasons to try some new games, not least of all is just that the creative space around games is incredibly active and healthy, with amazing, talented people making fun and interesting content that deserves your attention.
The problem, though, is that there are a lot of different game systems, each with their own rules, storytelling approaches, game-specific variants, and underlying philosophies. As much as these systems have broadly in common, the differences cohabitate with devils deep in the details.
All of that wonderful variety, creativity, and diversity of experience burdens players with managing the complexity of learning all these different game systems before you even get a chance to figure out if you like the damn thing.
That’s a high barrier to entry, made worse by the community nature of most games: every player at the table has to know something about what they’re doing.
Removing Barriers
Good news! We just made the first, most important step - we admitted we have a problem, and we defined the boundaries of the problem: there are many games we want to play, and every game expects us to learn how to play it, but time is limited, cognitive capacity is finite, and collective action is hard.
The next step is just to believe that effort is worth it. Taking the time to learn and play new games, to have new experiences and meet new people is all worthwhile. In preparing to write this, I asked for people’s input. One of the responses was a great blog post about the author’s experience playing nearly two dozen different games in a year. It’s a quick read and it makes the case justifying what I’m on about (that’s teamwork, baby!) - so go check it out!
Now we’ve identified our constraints and have a reason to persevere, so it’s time to get to work on solving our problem.
“Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It’s shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.”
– Frank Herbert, Dune
That Muad’Dib guy had a lot going for him, but I sincerely hope that no one reading this has that much personal baggage. The point is still valid, though: if you want to play more, different games you’re going to need to learn them and - more than just that - you probably need to step up as a champion for your cause.
Here’s what (I think) that looks like:
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title: The GM's Journey
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graph LR
A(I: Learn to Play It) --> B((II: Learn to Run It))
B --> D{III: Learn to Teach It}
Let’s get down to some actionable guidance. I’m going to rely on two different games for examples: Dungeons & Dragons and Star Trek Adventures. My goal here isn’t to teach how to play or run those games, and I intend to avoid needing a deep knowledge of either to follow along. The point is demonstrate a method. Throughout, keep a couple things in mind: I am not an expert on any game system - just an enthusiastic hobbyist; I am not a teacher, but my professional life requires me to learn new systems, processes, and concepts regularly.
I: Learn to Play It
There are two things for this section that I want to avoid:
- RTFM (No, GTFO)
- “It’s really simple, you just…”
That probably comes off a bit harsh, so let me explain. Game manuals are, more often than not, a total mess. This is fine, those books have to do a lot of heavy lifting and are usually written by teams of people in relative isolation from one another. Expecting a new player to read a game manual (like, say, the D&D Players Handbook, or STA’s Core Rulebook) front-to-back before playing the game is a non-starter. Expecting a GM to do that is torturous and unnecessary. Yes, the core books are an essential tool in learning the game and must be a part of the process, but let’s be sensible here and recognize that poring over inventory tables and memorizing spell components or spaceframes isn’t going to make your first session a success.
People love to tell you that whatever game they’re playing is “really simple” in an endearingly naive way of explaining that they’ve hit Malcolm Gladwell’s threshold for expertise in that system. If you have the 47 hours necessary to get through their inevitably-mangled, incoherent telling of every possible corner case of the rules and your self-esteem is impervious to feeling like a banana slug when you still don’t get it, be my guest.
If the game can’t fit - in human-readable handwriting - on a standard index card then it is not simple. The Star Trek Adventures 2nd Edition Core Rulebook clocks in at 377 pages; the Starter Set condensed version is 47 pages - it is not simple, but it is comprehensible.
So how do you learn how to play a game for the first time? To paraphrase Einstein, you have to make it as simple as possible, but no simpler. For the purpose of this post, all the guidance that follows assumes we’re in a Title-as-a-Second-Game (TSG) space. That is, I know how to play Dungeons & Dragons but I’m interested in learning how to play Star Trek Adventures, so my learning of STA is informed by my experiences with a similar game (every experience carries its lesson, eh?).
We’re not going to read 377 pages to learn STA. First things first, though, we’re going to read the Table of Contents and try to understand the structure of the book and the authors’ priorities.
I said it earlier, but this is an exercise in comparison - read the chapter and section headings looking for familiar notions. Put the new game’s ToC side-by-side with one you already know and scan down the two lists.
The D&D 5e (2024) PHB looks daunting: a full page of 10-point font spanning three columns of single-spaced chapters, sections, and sub-sections with page numbers blowing past 378. When we zoom in on and read those sections, it’s a lot more digestible: all of the core mechanics we need to know are detailed by page 32.
Then we look at the STA table of contents, with its much more relaxed, spacious layout:
Much less intimidating, very inviting, and - oh! - it looks like major content areas are color-coded to each other. All that pretty formatting masks a nasty surprise: the headings are all painfully twee (wtf is “New Lives and Civilizations” supposed to mean?! What moorings are we clearing?) and completely unhelpful. This is actually a really common problem, RPG books are usually a mess, but we’re going to have to slog through some sections in search of game rules and ludic descriptions. Let’s boldly go through the book’s introduction, up to the start of Chapter 1.
Lots of useful stuff usually gets buried in the Introductions of books. That’s because every RPG book that isn’t published by Wizards of the Coast or Games Workshop has to fight like hell for shelf space and thoroughly explain what makes it beautiful and precious and worthy of occupying your shelf space. We’re going to skim our way through the introduction, reading the section heading and finding - gasp! - a whole section titled “What You Need to Play”, very promising.
STA does a decent job of setting key terms apart from the bulk of the text by bolding them, other books capitalize, underline, or italicize them. Scan pages for emphasized text and make notes on what these mean. Fight the urge to define key terms in your own words, or based on how you’ve seen them used in other games, use the definitions provided by the authors of this game, not another one. One example of this is “initiative” - in D&D, Initiative is the term for the order players take their turns, but in Hundred Dungeons “the initiative” varies depending on the mode of play, and in Star Trek Adventures “the initiative” refers specifically to which side of a conflict has the ability to act. Just because a certain word is used doesn’t mean its meaning is universal.
Making Notes
Use paper and pencil - not pen, pencil. Physically write down the key terms. If you have some supremely sophisticated digital note-taking system that you’ve honed to perfection over decades of extended, tortured use then you can transcribe your handwritten notes into that once you’re done. Yes, it’s old-fashioned. Yes, your handwriting is every bit as terrible as your second grade teacher complained to your parents’ voicemail that it was. Do it anyway. And write down the page numbers where you find information (remember, these books are usually a mess).
There are three questions that it is absolutely critical you be able to answer before getting into any deeper details:
- What player roles are needed?
- What is the game loop?
- What is the core mechanic?
Player Roles
This has nothing to do with character gameplay - we’re not there yet! Many RPGs have a division of labor between a GM and the other players, with the GM being responsible for presenting aspects of a story and adjudicating the rules while players are tasked with playing characters interacting with the story elements. Some titles are GM-less (like the excellent For the Queen, or Fiasco), and put all players on a more-or-less equal footing.
The Game Loop
Every game has a general set of repeated behaviors that make up its loop. Star Trek Adventures and Dungeons & Dragons have identical game loops:
- the GM describes a situation
- players clarify their understanding and describe what their characters do
- the GM determines how to resolve character actions
While most RPGs have similar loops, it’s important to verify how each game is structured at the most general level.
The Core Mechanic
This is how a game progresses its action, determines outcomes, or resolves dramatic tension. For both D&D and STA, the core mechanic comes into play when the GM determines how to resolve character actions, and both involve rolling d20s and comparing the results to certain numbers. This is often where similar-seeming games diverge - sometimes wildly - from each other.
D&D has the GM set the difficulty of a task to a number, usually between 1 and 30, with higher numbers representing more difficult tasks. The player rolls 1d20 and succeeds at the task if the number they rolled is equal to or greater than the difficulty.
STA also sees the GM setting a number for the task difficulty, but the range is typically from 0 to 5. Players accomplish the task in-game by generating “successes” from rolling 2d20 and having each die result less than a target number. The target number is based on values from that character’s sheet.
Both systems have various methods of modifying the probability of the outcome, but the core mechanics of both involve comparing the results of rolled dice to a predetermined number, albeit in very different ways.
A Question of Character
Many RPGs have defined differences between character types, as well as some way of quantifying character’s ability to do things. We’re familiar with D&D’s classes and sub-classes (“types”), and we’re accustomed to its Abilities - fundamental capabilities - and Skills - trained, conditioned specialties. Let’s keep it as simple as possible (but no simpler), and call any scores or values that may influence the core mechanic “abilities” (in D&D terms, this includes both Skills and Abilities) and anything that defines types of characters “classes” (class and sub-class, in the language of D&D).
Conceptually, we need to start building our understanding outward from the core mechanic. Write down the name of each of those abilities and a description of what it means. It can be copied straight out of the text or, if the text is really wordy (STA sure is) note the most general definition that will still be useful later. If the game system has abilities in different categories (“Abilities” and “Skills” in D&D, “Attributes” and “Departments” in STA), be sure to group abilities in your notes the same way.
Now we’re in good shape to take the next step outward and we start to lose the definite, concrete quantities of numbers on dice and ability scores. Now we start to read about the different qualities of a character that make them a good fit for the different classes, jobs, or roles they’ll occupy. Again, be sure to write down what each of the class options means, as well as any guidance about what abilities may be important for them. For example, a D&D Bard is apt to be a highly-social performer that casts spells using their charisma; a ship Pilot in STA may have been drawn to the role because of their daring.
Characters of any given class may have a lot of variability in their abilities, but we needed to know what those abilities meant so that we could understand why our Fighter needs Strength and our Commander needs Presence. We may also have recognized that abilities tend to be qualities that every character has each of in some measure, but only one class (simple as possible - but no simpler).
Flavor to Taste
At this point, stop for a moment and consider how much more abstract our understanding of the game has become from the fixed nature of the core mechanic. From here on, we start to have character choices that are less about the core mechanic and interact more with our ability and class choices.
Our game manual starts to give us more stylistic, expressive choices about how a character is seen in the world of the game; how the items they have access to affect their performance; and new scores and values that are determined by their abilities, class, or combinations of the two. So we have to tease out the which elements matter for gameplay from those for immersion - prioritizing gameplay.
If the game manual includes a blank character sheet, that’s an excellent tool to start identifying functional, mechanical elements. We want to identify and note keywords appearing on the character sheet (remember, it’s the player’s primary reference during the game) that are based directly on character abilities and classes. Things like Hit Points, Hit Dice, Proficiency Bonus, and Armor Class (D&D) or Stress, Resistance, Values, and Talents (STA) are vital statistics for different modes of play and vary based on a character’s class and abilities.
Avoid diving deeply into “immersion” elements. D&D has options for species, background, alignment, flaws, ideals… these properties certainly enrich the game (and may even be required choices), but an elf hermit makes its attack roll the same as a dwarf sage. Likewise, STA has species, upbringing, and talent options that may modify class/ability options or influence task outcomes without being centrally important to the core mechanic. A key difference that we need to watch for, though, is that many games include player-definable or open-ended customization options that directly interact with the game mechanic. STA throws us a curve, though, because its player-defined Focuses, when invoked, actually change how Task successes are tallied. This isn’t unique to STA, Hundred Dungeons and many other titles include player-defined character properties that change how core dice rolls are calculated - judging between the two is an art, not a science; read carefully!
A Mode, not a Malady
We spent a lot of time thinking about characters. This is appropriate. Players’ characters are their point of entry to the game and their frame for the entire in-world experience.
Now that we know how to do things in the system and how to define who we are, we need to shift focus to what things we do in the game and when. We’re not going to worry about why to do something, that’s just too context-sensitive. Specifically, we need now to understand the game’s modes of play.
Examining our D&D terra cognita, we are quite familiar with the three little words that signal one mode of play: “Roll for Initiative” sees us transition into turn-based play, typically for the purposes of managing combat. Implicitly, the existence of a turn-based mode of play also suggests a real-time (or, at least, “turn-less”) mode.
D&D “in Initiative” is highly-structured, with defined options for character behaviors limited to up to one each of Action, Bonus Action, and Reaction, as well as a per-turn amount of Movement. In design terms (if not in actual game terms), this is known as the “action economy” and it constrains behavior during the Initiative mode of play. Additionally, players take their turns one at a time, in an order defined by the result of their Dexterity (Initiative) ability check. It’s important to note the time scale: 6 seconds per round; as well as the degrees of parallelism: all activities happen (more or less) simultaneously.
There is a lot of detail here, but it’s important to understand the gameplay elements at work overall. Generalizing D&D’s Initiative mode of play, we find that it has the following characteristics:
- Each player gets a turn on which they exclusively act
- A single round of play is composed of all the players’ turns, ending once all players have taken a turn
- Turns are taken in a fixed order, as determined by a core mechanic operation
- Turn actions are constrained by the action economy
- All turn actions for a given round happen within the time scale of the round
- A round’s time scale is 6 seconds
Games vary considerably not just in their modes of play, but how they are structured and timed. Pathfinder uses the same overall structure as D&D with a different, point-based action economy; Hundred Dungeons defines itself around four distinct modes of play, each with its own time scale, turn progression, and action economy; Star Trek Adventures has a turn-less mode and three different flavors of conflict modes, each with its own considerations: social, personal, and starship.
We cannot simply assume that any two games implement modes of play identically, even games that share a common history or based on the same source may have incredibly different underpinnings. We need a process for analyzing and understanding the modes so that we can “find the fun” in a minimally-disrupted play flow.
The result of our process should be similar to what we see from D&D’s Initiative mode, repeated for each of our game’s modes, and we should record the output of our analyses in our written notes. It is not our intention to duplicate or replace the game manual, but to create “signposts and guardrails” to remind and guide us as we play.
Identify the Game’s Modes
The manual’s table of contents should (sadly, may not always) be helpful with this task. STA’s manual does a poor job of indicating to us what its modes of play are because the ToC entries are more stylistic than operational. It does offer us a major clue, however: there are three sections all titled with some form of “conflict.” Conflict isn’t necessarily a keyword to look for, but the pattern of having three similar-sounding sections suggests a starting point.
While you may find descriptions for most modes of play, be sure to also consider “what are we doing when we’re not in one of these modes?” - STA describes its three conflict modes, and D&D tells us about Initiative, but neither explicitly mentions any mode of play outside of these. We’re still playing an awful lot of game besides, so be sure to capture that!
What Makes This Different?
For each mode of play, catalog what makes it different from the others. STA’s Social Conflict mode is specific to non-combative adversarial interactions, while its Starship Conflict mode sees the crew holding their stations as their ship maneuvers, attacks, and deals with incoming threats.
Note any relevant conditions and special rules. If there are special activities that can only be taken during this mode, make a note of when and how those apply.
It’s the Economy, Stupid!
First, apologies for that. Next, pay attention to the action economy. D&D has its Action/Bonus Action/Reaction, STA has Major and Minor Actions. How many of each type is a player allowed? Are there conditions to taking an action? Can one grade of action replace another (e.g. a Bonus Action cannot be taken in place of an Action)?
Who’s Turn is it Anyway?
How is a player’s right to act determined? “Initiative” doesn’t mean the same thing in every game: is it a ranked order of who goes when, or is it “getting the jump on” opponents? STA conflicts hand control back and forth between the players and their adversaries, with one member of each group acting per turn. Players decide who acts this turn, with players not getting another chance to act until all of their party has acted. Perhaps most importantly: how do we know who goes first?
II: Learn to Run It
We’ve just done a lot of work, cataloging and analyzing how to play a game. All of that effort and understanding is the foundation for all of our efforts going forward and should inform the concepts and experiences that will onboard other new players. Unless you’re dedicated to the solo-RPG experience, you’re going to need to enlist other people to play and it’s at least a few shades of unreasonable to expect someone else to learn, run, and teach you how to play a game. Also we’ve just done a lot of work to earn the right to flex a bit.
By my reckoning, there are upwards of a gajillion-and-twelve resources designed to teach you how to GM a game - you have to love it. For all of that, not every game is particularly well-represented (especially new or niche-interest titles), and not all instruction is created equally.
To Build or to Buy?
My Top 10 recommendations for GMing a new-to-you game: get a good published adventure. That’s it. Items 1 through 10: use a published module.
Look, no one writes a novel because they want to start reading more, so don’t construct an elaborate world for a game you haven’t proven out yet. Even if you’re the chillest, most giving person in the world, working with a thoroughly vouched-for and beloved game, it’s going to sting more than a little to find yourself authoring content for a disappointing game system. I don’t even want to think about your feelings toward friends (or strangers) that bail on your newfound passion project. Use published content, for your own sake.
There are plenty of benefits to using existing content: challenges have been vetted against a variety of play styles, narrative branches are (probably) already interconnected, your time is freed up, and - this one matters more than you think - the general experience is repeatable. Repeatability means that you and your players have common ground to discuss the game with other people who played it, its weaknesses are known (and probably patched by someone), and so are the strengths that you can bring to bear.
This is the last time I’ll say it: use published content. Once you love it, contribute your creative genius back to its player community.
Slow Your Roll
Assume that you’ll only have a single session to play, and that you have a strict time limit. Asking players to commit to multiple hours-long sessions of play is hard enough (scheduling is the real BBEG, amiright?) with a game they know and love, don’t ever make someone else ask you to be reasonable.
Even at the peak of your knowledge and skills, expect the game session to take longer than its author’s time estimates. New players will have questions about systems, they’ll get confused, they’ll roll the wrong type of dice, they’ll rethink their character choices - budget yourself an extra 25-50% time to account for all of this. If you have a 3-hour budget, don’t try to cover more than 140 minutes (2 hours 20 minutes) of content. You’ll either all leave wanting more or you’ll be glad it finally had the decency to end.
You don’t have to finish the entire module. The other players don’t know how this story unfolds, so they’ll never know if parts of it litter the cutting room floor. Alternatively, a compelling, “we must keep going” level of engagement gives you room to end early, on a cliffhanger compelling enough to draw the party back for the thrilling conclusion. No one ever went broke on an audience wanting more.
Hey, You Started This
You’re the GM, and you’re also the host of this game - act the part. Have and provide everything players will need, don’t make them bring their own supplies. Prepare pre-generated character sheets, have enough dice (and of the correct type) for each player to have their own, provide “move sheets” and quick-reference guides. Most importantly, expect that the other players are coming to this game without any prior knowledge of it.
Use the work you did learning how to play the game to streamline this process. You already have notes on the different abilities and classes, have presentable versions of that information at hand.
Aim for one pre-gen character of each class, or at least one of each major type. D&D, for example, has several different flavors of “arcane spellcaster” that don’t necessarily all need to be represented - it’s OK to leave out warlocks (and druids, for that matter). The goal is to give a representative variety of options to players, but that offering shouldn’t be so broad that it creates “analysis paralysis” - bring enough character options that two or three are left over once everyone has selected, not more than that.