Como posso ajudar meus jogadores a enfrentar Risus?

A brief preface: if you've been trying for years to teach a topic to multiple different people, it's likely the problem não é with your students. Teaching is actually rather difficult and it's worth learning some pedagogical techniques.

At the end of the day, there are a number of pedagogical traditions you can draw upon. Here, we will touch on three of them: mimesis, granularity, and system mastery. Before we begin, however, it's worth noting that you should confirm that they actually want to learn these topics. While classrooms have a number of positive and negative reinforcement techniques built in (loss of social status for not complying with norms, validation from grades, social expectations of learning, goal-fulfillment, etc..) hobby games do not have that same structure. Therefore, the only basis for engagement is voluntary pre-commitment. Try to differentiate "saying yes because polite" from "saying yes from general interest." Different social groups consider declining an invitation to be some level of taboo, and will therefore not decline, despite not being in the least interested.

Consider figure one by Boyd and McConville: without a common mutuality of concern and shared social experiences, there is no comprehensible explanation of the activity.

Rule-complexity is actually the least worry about teaching RPGs. Much of what forms a role-playing game is a tradition of play stretching back to the originators of the game. There are cultural expectations and touchstones that are so deeply embedded in our social tradition that they do not bear comment. Simple RPGs, by their very nature, assume more of those traditions. As a gedankenexperiment, try imagining explaining why playing "golf" is fun. "You hit the ball, then you chase the ball." There are a whole bunch of social expectations and experiences bound up in the game of Golf that are actually quite difficult to explain.

Pedagogical technique 1: Mimesis

Humans are creatures that are actually remarkably good at mimicry. We learn our first language by mimicking the sounds of our parents [citation needed] (I'm so not getting into neural-encoding of languages or anything like that here.). Therefore, review the recorded let's plays in esta resposta, find ones in gêneros that interest your group, and spend an evening listening to them and discussing.

É crítico to choose genres that your players already have experience in. It is too much to teach the common genre conventions of a given domain of fiction e other things. The point of mimesis is to expose, as novel, only the things that are the topic under discussion. Therefore, try to get favourite books of your group, and find a system that exposes the conventions of the modal genre, Avoid universal systems for now, as they load more of the cognitive work onto the players. This topic is worthy of a well specified game-recommendation question in its own right.

Once you've found the system, and found the favourite books of your group, your objective will be to game in those books. You will, effectively, be engaging in collaborative fan-fiction. This shortcut is useful: originality is great for people who understand the domain. Until then, stick close to your source material.

Again, here, the objective should be to find recorded games that match your desired system and genre. You can recommend listening to these individually, or listen communally as a group. Be prepared for very low compliance for individual assignments: very few people "like" doing homework on things that they're being socially pressured into doing [citation needed].

By listening to these games, and then by discutir these games as a group after the listen, you're not asking your putative players to agir. What you're doing is building their background knowledge of the actions expected in an RPG in a zero-risk environment. In these discussions, beware viés de confirmação. Ask them to explain what's happening in games to you. Figure out what they're getting and what they're not getting. Make sure to provide positive e negative feedback here: it's important to validate learned concepts as well as correcting mis-learned ideas.

Pedagogical technique 2: Granularity.

Consider the idea of Granularity Hierarchies. Consider the idea of driving. When driving a car, the first time, there are so many things to keep track of: the state of cars on the road, inputs via the front window, the side windows, the rear side windows, the rear-view mirror, the side-mirrors, road noise, the dashboard, people screaming at you to stop!, etc...

After driving for a while, all of those different "tasks" are grouped up into the task called "driving" and become mostly automatic, reducing the cognitive load of driving and allowing for new, more difficult tasks like "where am I now?" and "where am I going?"

There is a rough hierarchy of task difficulty. Mastery of basic tasks is required before advancing into moderately advanced tasks. Die-rolling has a huge number of assumptions bound up into the task, and isn't actually a very good place to start. Get a "RPG board game" to get the idea of characters working on tasks with a chance of failure. Once they have the idea of "hey, this is a 20 sided die, and I should add this number and compare against this other number." then move into simple vignettes in the chosen game system. If they all read Harry Potter, for example, maybe start with "you're trying to avoid Finch's cat while sneaking through the halls" and use that as the basis for teaching action success and failure. While I don't believe this level of granularity is normalmente necessary, the main reason it's not necessary is because there tend to be few new role-players in any given group, given the level of difficulty you've been reporting, it's likely worthwhile to go back to basics.

Again, make sure to verbalise your own mental procceses when running your side of the screen. "I'm doing this because of this, that, and the other thing. I'm offering you Y, because you did X." By chunking the rules into small chunks, you can test mastery of those chunks before "zooming out" and playing the game.

Pedagogical technique 3: System mastery

At the end of the day, your players will have to learn the rules. Give them the books for the system you've identified, one that matches their genre expectations and one that doesn't presume on too much implicit knowledge. Then ask them to commit to reading goals before the next meeting. At the next meeting discuss what they have read and the implications on the game of that chapter.

So long as it's not pure homework, and you're using the other techniques actively at the same time, expecting them to read the books and remember the rough rules of the game is not too much to ask. It's not your job to be the book: that's the book's job. If they aren't willing to read a long book, find a shorter (but well articulated game) that does what they want. (Again, that's likely in our game-recommendation section already.)

Conclusão:

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. Assuming your players are actually wanting to learn, the common theme is to have multiple distinct learning elements that your players can engage in. It's not your job to teach the entire social tradition of RPing. Set up a venue where they can be guided to recorded games, can practice task activities, and can get help in understanding the readings. If they don't engage, just enjoy playing board games and don't force the issue.

A little searching turned up a couple helpful articles about introducing new players to role-playing games. They aren't specific to Risus, but you may find some good advice in them:

• Teaching Role Playing Games to New Players
• How to introduce players to a new RPG system, the Super Mario Bros way

The most helpful advice I saw in those articles and elsewhere is to start out simple. Risus is already simple, but this can also be achieved by running a short adventure to start with, perhaps a small mini-dungeon or a couple minor encounters. Maybe run a short solo game with each player separately before starting the group game. Then you can build up to more complex things.

If character creation stumps them because they just can't decide what they want to play, give them a handful of pre-generated characters to pick from instead. This has worked for me when I've had players paralyzed by the wide open possibilities a game like Risus offers for character generation.

Focus on the story or the fiction, as that may make more sense to them than the mechanics. Don't start out by dumping the entire ruleset on them. Just tell them the rules as they need them. Just introduce the game by saying you're going to tell an interesting, exciting story together. Then describe a situation that requires action, starting out na mídia res. Then ask them "What do you do?" Briefly discuss which cliche best applies and ask them to roll that many dice, then tell them if they succeeded and move the story forward. They don't necessarily need to know what the Target Number was, and after several times of doing this, hopefully they will get the picture that when their character tries to do something that has a chance of failure, they have to roll dice and add them up. Right at first, they don't need to know about Teaming Up or any of the Advanced Options.

Finally, be supportive of the players. Offer suggestions when they appear stumped, whether when picking cliches at character creation, or trying to decide on a course of action in the game. Applaud them when their characters succeed.

Before I write my answer, I just want to state that I have no experience whatsoever with Risus. I haven't even heard of it till now. As such, my answer comes from a far more general place.

As was stated earlier and I can only second that, starting simple is the key. The simpler you start the faster the learning carve will be. Rolepying games are already complicated and also entirely new for them, they haven't encountered anything like that. This means that we need not only to choose the simple system but to present it as simply as we can.

Risus is a generic rule-system so from this point we need to run. "What do you wanna play? Do you like Harry Potter? Great, so we're going to play a Harry Potter kind of game. You're all first year students." When I usually GM for first-time players I usually let them choose the style of the game. I GMed a "French-Revolution" style of game for History Majors and an "Avatar: the Last Airbender" style for younger ones. The trick is to come from a place that is common to all of the participants, most importantly them.

Start in Media Res

They're first timers, they are getting an idea/impression from anything that you'll do. I f you start too slowly it can be too late for the big action. They are entering the crypt of the Lich King; Loki closes on the White House... The adrenaline should pump in all of you. Then ask them what they're going to do.

Explain the Rules as the game unfolds

Don't start with any rules. Then, when one of them decides to attack Loki give her a dice and explain as simply as you can. "This is a dice, it lets us decide if you succeeded or not. If you roll [insert a number here] you succeed, below it and you failed." We present each concept of the rules separately, one after the other, as the game unfolds. Presenting the rules mid-game, as they become relevant, makes them be remembered much better (by using a tool we learn how to use it better than by hearing an explanation about it). The goal is to let them usar most of the basic rules by mid-session.

Let them invent and add things to the game

One of the biggest strengths of the RPG medium is the main fact that they're limited only by their imaginations. Build on that, this is your main strength and selling point. As long as it isn't explicitly off-limits, go with them. You can always bring the cops later, if you'll ever need.

About characters

This is entirely up to you and them, but I go usually for one of 2 options: Handing them characters or letting them invent their characters. For me, it usually depends on the goal of my game. If I'm trying to showcase not only RPGs but also a specific rules-system I'll go for handing characters, otherwise I'll usually go for the invention method.

Letting them inventing the characters is far simpler than it sounds. "OK, we're playing a LoTR game, what do you want to be?" "I wanna be a wizard, like Gandalf or something." He wants to be a Gandalf type of Character? Great, so he can create light and control fire and create a magic shield and the like. That's all there is to it, actually. The important part is to make the player enthusiastic about the character. We don't care right now if the character is uber or not, this is a one-shot aimed at showcasing a medium of games, not to create emotional engagement or a new way to look at a problem (if so, it's a different thing and I'll try my best helping that also if you'll need/want my suggestions...). If the player is enthusiastic, s/he'll be eager to use the character more.

Handing them characters is a bit more complicated. 2 things to keep in mind: 1) Always leave them space to fill with their ideas. The character should feel theirs. 2) Presentation should be nice to the eye. This means that D&D style character sheets with 4 pages of tables and the like with scribbles in a very tiny font are off limits. If they can't grasp the basics of the characters with one look, it's too complicated.