The Culture: The Publishers' Abuse Of Hobbyists Is The Cause Of This

The Angry DM has an opinion.

Yes. If you’re a game designer and you know (a) that players are averse to reading rules and (b) that enjoyment of your game hinges on reading the rules, you’re an absolute frigging moron if you publish your game as a series of two-hundred word textbooks.

— The Angry GM (@AngryGamesInc) January 23, 2025

He's someone that's been burned by decades of Games That Disappoint.

When you are abused that badly for that long, habits like "Don't read the rulebooks" form and stick- and, when you are no longer in that dysfunctional cesspit, become maladaptive. It doesn't help that other gaming media don't cultivate active player exercise of agency either, as AGM notes in that thread ("yellow paint" and so on), and this is a known issue generally.

Talk to anyone that pays their bills by doing Advertising and Marketing. You have to get into peoples' faces and smear what you got into them to get and keep their attention because they tend to go about their lives like horses wearing blinders while also being severely near-sighted.

It is necessary, but not sufficient, to require every player to have their own copies of the rules. It is necessary to also walk them through the rules and procedures of the game, especially if the rules manuals themselves have substandard technical writing. (Looking at you, Gary.)

The flipside is not being nice and squishy to someone that was told what was expected of them, but to hold firm: "You fucked up, so now your man is dead. Reroll, go again, and read the fucking manual this time."

A healthy, functional, and competent hobby scene has hobbyists Read The Fucking Manual and work through how to play the game--how the rules and procedures work--specifically due to the fact that player skill and acumen is a necessary element to succeeding in playing the game. This is how and why cardgames, boardgames, and videogames successfully engage and retain their audiences- and Tabletop has failed to do so for 50 years.

This has to stop, or there no future, but as things are there are serious commercial disincentives to do so; these have to be exposed, isolated, and mercilessly hammered until they stop or (far, far, far more likely) the commercial end collapses and only non-commercial hobbyist publication remains.

There is no more tolerance for piss-poor technical writing or manual presentation. There is no more tolerance for making product to be displayed and status-signaled, maybe read, but never played. (All of you know exactly what I am talking about.)

There is room only for Real Games. That's not a lot; at this time, less than a US Army fireteam in number. Everyone else can, and should, just fucking die for everyone's good.