How Times Change: Reading the Rules
One of the items in a funny post, 27 Surefire Ways to Get Kicked Out of a Game, over at Evil Machinations was “Refuse to read the rules of the system you’re playing.”
While is is clearly intended to be a humor piece, it did make me think of how different things are today. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, most of the players in my campaigns had never read the entire rules to the games I ran. Most read little more than the character creation rules and any material directly related to the type of character they were playing. Some did not even read that much. Many did not own copies of the rules. No one in my campaigns would have thought, even in jest, that refusing to read the rules was a way to get booted from a campaign. Worse, many players didn’t bother to buy dice (another surefire way to get kicked out of a game according to this list). Hell, most games did not even come with dice — or if they did they were generally cheap and low quality. (TSR, I’m talking about you.)