ACKS, Teaching the Game, and Structure

ACKS II has amazingly high production values, not only in art and appearance, but also in design. The game lays out the play step-by-step, and then informs you that you don't have to follow the checklists, but they are provided for those who are unfamiliar with the game and need a framework.

Many of today's games were never taught correctly in the first place, and then the game's design was altered by this lack of knowledge to appease players who were not playing it correctly. Role-playing became this sort of 'extreme rule zero' hobby, where the rules were 'anything you wanted them to be' and the entire hobby slipped into storytelling, personal identity reflection, and wish fulfillment.

But even then, teaching the game is moved so far to the back burner that people stumble their way through it. They mostly learned D&D by watching live-play shows on YouTube, which caused that part of the hobby to fork and diverge with Daggerheart. That is a good thing, since it gives the story-gamers a place of their own, and a game specifically tailored for that playstyle. It leaves D&D in a worse place as a game that does everything, but nothing specific that well.

Learning Daggerheart will be 'watching the show,' and the game is designed for that.

Even Shadowdark rolls this notion of 'what is the game' and 'how do we teach it' way back, forcing everyone to play the game in a structured turn order, on a map, with movement critically important, and a torch time in real time ticking down. Shadowdark is 5E with defined play procedures, and people eat this game up. It is tense, fun, edge-of-your-seat, and incredibly immersive. The real-time play prioritizes teamwork and table efficiency. The play structure and procedure define the Shadowdark experience and have become its brand and popularity.

I like it when publishers can teach the game. There have been games I had on the shelf for months, and I couldn't figure them out. There are still games I have that are far beyond me, just because of the way they are written, left for players to figure out, or they are a jumbled mess of ideas and concepts. I had Cypher System a year before I figured out what was going on with it, but now it's one of my favorite games. Pathfinder 2 remains a game that eludes me as a mess of tags, class-specific terms, and particular actions, even with an excellent Beginner Box. At times, there feels like too much for one person to remember.

But I can handle GURPS well, and that game is notorious for layers of depth and complexity.

Additionally, if the game does not teach how to play it, it will be left to YouTube to do so, and I cringe at the amount of horrible play and GM advice that pollutes that platform. If I were to take the general D&D content creator's advice on YouTube, the first thing I need to play D&D is an S-tier, highly optimized build, multiclass mix of paladin and warlock, pre-planned from levels 1 to 20, and with maximized DPT.

For GMs, the advice is even worse, with it being anywhere from no-prep to ultimate prep, to give up and spend a week reading a module to have your players instantly go off the rails on the first encounter. Some will suggest the GM use oracle dice, others will fall back on GM prep books they want to sell you, and others will just say 'make it all up' and give up, while still presenting the topic in a viewer-friendly and conversational way. Others are just eye-candy or a reflection of personal validation.

YouTube is a terrible place to learn anything from. You will be on the platform for months, listening to bad advice from everyone, and eventually find something you already knew that validates something that may have worked for you once, most likely by random chance.

Somewhere, I bet there is a 'learn to draw' channel out there with the advice, "The first step in learning to draw is to close your eyes before you move the pen." It sounds cool and interesting, like some secret technique was just discovered, but what the heck are you doing? Then, the creator goes on to sell a few million dollars of books titled "Drawing With Your Eyes Closed" to people who are fans of the channel, but are learning nothing of any actual value. When pressed by actual art instructors, they will come up with some nonsense like, "I am talking about the inner eye."

I swear I should go sell nonsense books on YouTube and be a millionaire instead of writing blogs.

Tales of the Valiant puts a little more effort into teaching and laying out procedures, but the 5E market has moved on to 'doing it my way' so hard that it falls on deaf ears. ToV does an excellent job streamlining character creation, and their GM's Guide is a 10/10 book, with many examples and suggestions on how to handle the situations that come up in real games. There is 'actual stuff you can use' in that book, instead of the 2024 DMG for D&D infamously spending pages of text to ultimately tell you to, 'just make it up yourself.'

The amount of bad advice that ultimately drives players away from the hobby, sitting out on YouTube, is shocking. The core books of D&D (2014 or 2024) do little to address the problem.

ACKS II teaches, often starting a chapter with a checklist or numbered sequence of play, outlining the steps and what to do in each one. There is even a play procedure laid out for dungeon exploration! If you do it all your way and it works, fine, keep doing that. If you are a new player with no clue, it is here for you to read through, understand, and use as a framework to develop your style. However, you are always starting from the best place —the one the designer intended, which is proven to work and deliver fun.

And the ACKS II Judges Journal is up there with the ToV GM's Guide in usability, helpfulness to running a real game, and stuff you can use. In fact, the ACKS II book far surpasses the ToV book in helpfulness to the actual play of the game. Checklists, teaching people to play, and the amount of helpful information put ACKS II over so many OSR and modern games.