I am not sure who told me this, but I remember is was early into high school.
At the time I was learning to game it was more important for us to have fun than it was was to play by the rules. Then I went through a period where I only played by the letter of the rules. I used weapon speeds and every little encumbrance rule I knew of. If it was not in the books, or our specially sanctioned set of house rules, then we didn't do it.
I was talking with a friend (or maybe it was the older brother of another friend) and I was told this.
Don't memorize rules. You can't memorize them all anyway. Focus on the basics and having fun. Everything else can be looked up.
Turned out to be good advice. It's also the same advice I give.
I tend to make the rules an abstraction. Like in most newer editions of D&D it's "roll a d20 vs. a specified number. If the number is not specified use 10, 15 or 20." In Unisystem it's "roll a d10, add skills and abilities and see how much higher than 9 it is." Everything else will flow from that.
We are here to have fun, not defend a dissertation that someone else wrote.
http://www.brigadecon.org/rpgaday2016/
Nice. I think the corollary is something along the lines of, "If you just look up the rules as you need them, you'll realize how unimportant most of them are anyway..."
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