GM Cognitive Load: Teaching Yourself, Then Others a New Game

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Learning a new TTRPG is freaking hard work and we don’t always talk about it enough. Sometimes there are gripes that Dungeons & Dragons is the main entry point to the hobby, but this fact is also reinforced by the ability to find now a vast library of actual play examples, video tutorials, books, and perhaps most helpful, mentoring veteran players and GMs who can teach those who aspire to play and run our games. I certainly wouldn’t have had as positive a personal experience teaching myself to play without the first group I played, then ran an adventure for.

I took a course on teaching several years back which touched on the concept of the gap in minds or cognitive distance. This concept is the difference in perception and understanding that we have with other humans. We are generally empathetic and cooperative to exist and organize in our societies, and often assume great shared understanding or experience with others when attempting to teach them. This is the slipped steps from the maths instructor that has run a proof a thousand times that utterly baffle a student learning algebra for the first time. Related to this idea is the so-called “curse of knowledge.” We actually forget, as we gain expertise, the degree to which our knowledge separates us from those who have not learned certain information or skills. It’s for this reason that we grow impatient with a new player when they ask a fifth time for an explanation of what this “sneak attack” does, when they’re still getting used to the concept that they need to roll a d20, add a modifier, and sometimes add that proficiency bonus thing—“what is a proficiency bonus again?”

TTRPGs, even rules-lite games, are complex systems that need a degree of memorization and study to understand. And much of this cognitive load when learning a new game is on the GM. They must read and digest the rules, often in their entirety. Of course, books will say “it’s alright if you get something wrong, just look it up later,” but they rarely clearly signpost something like “ALRIGHT, YOU’VE READ ENOUGH TO BE ABLE TO PLAY NOW. GOOD LUCK!” Couple that will how some games offer robust reference sheets and GM screen information. Others the information needs to be collected and painstakingly recorded by the GM to construct their own reference aids and perhaps player cheat sheets. Homework on top of homework. Then you need to do the actual fun stuff of design, then running an adventure and/or tilting at the beautiful windmill of setting design. Oh, and you have to have a sufficient mastery of this new rules material that you can teach players the core rules in an informal fashion. And be able to teach character creation or pass out pregens that you took a while figuring out how to make (every publisher should provide a QuickStart Guide with pregen characters if they can afford it—thank you to those that do! It’s the fastest way to start playing!) 

I have several games that I want to play. I recognize this process is growing easier, but we shouldn’t minimize the heavy task that learning, then teaching a new TTRPG is for GMs on top of all the work they already do. There’s some great advice on other aspects GMing, but certainly a gap on how to approach this problem (I mean specific strategies for notetaking or reading RPG rules—even ones culled from academia). 

So to my readers who have made it this far, what do you do to approach this problem? Have you played different TTRPGs? What is your experience? If it’s easy for you, what are specific habits or approaches you have to learning a game? How can you learn a new game quickly—like if you got something for Christmas and want to play it by the weekend after? Please share your thoughts in the comments.