Teaching the Rules

Play

Tal: Okay, now the rules?

Ref: So this is a bit more complex than Into the Odd, but the core is the same. Wait, were you both here when we played that?

Tal: Yeah I think I remember all the rules.

Moss: No, I missed that week.

Ref: Okay I’ll start from scratch then. When you do something risky I’ll ask you to roll a Save, so you’ll roll a d20 and try to get equal or less than your relevant Virtue. So, Moss, if you made a Vigour Save then you’d need to roll 6 or less on a d20.

Moss: Got it. I guess I’ll be avoiding those.

Ref: Combat is… you know what, we’ll deal with combat when it happens. For now you just need to know that the die type next to your weapon is the die you roll when you Attack with it. So Moss your cudgel does d8 Damage. Oh, and you have a shield which gives you Armour 1, meaning you’ll take 1 less Damage from attacks against you. You can bash with it too for extra Damage.

Moss: Right. Does my bad Vigour score make my attacks weaker too?

Ref: No actually. There are times when it will matter, but it won’t affect your Damage.

Moss: Oh right, that’s good then.

Ref scans over some of the other pages of rules and prepared notes.

Ref: Yeah the rest we’ll just deal with as we get to it. I’ll give you plenty of warning so I won’t just drop a horrible rule on you!

Tal: What about this Ability on my sheet?

Ref: Right, right. Your Ability is a special thing that only you can do. There are also Feats linked to combat but… you know what let’s just get started and we’ll do a little combat brief when it happens.

Moss: Sounds good, let’s go.

Thoughts

Here I show my bias toward getting the game started as soon as you can, backloading as much of the rules explanation as possible.

The game is designed in such a way that players don’t need to know all of the rules to begin with, but there are some important considerations with this approach.

Players may be relieved that they don’t need to learn rules immediately, but some may worry that they’re going to make a critical mistake without knowing all of the details of how the game works.

Here Ref starts with the bare minimum, explaining how Saves work. This is a nice rule to start with as it’s simple and gives further context for the information on the players’ character sheets. They get a little bogged down talking about weapons and armour, and frankly I think Ref could have skipped this whole section, sticking to the line that combat will be explained when it happens.

It’s natural for players to ask about other parts of their character sheet that they don’t yet understand, here their Ability. Ref could have just said “we’ll deal with that later” but I like that they at least gave the context for them, if not the actual rules in detail. Now Tal understands generally what Feats are, but hasn’t needed to learn exactly how they work in game terms.

Something that Ref missed here is explaining the objective of the characters. In this game the Oath gives Knights a clear purpose, so I would encourage Ref to at least explain the Oath and maybe touch on how they’ll be gaining Glory.