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A while back I came to the conclusion that "games for experienced players only" shouldn't be a thing that exists.
Roleplaying games are, at their heart, about sharing in a story together. At least, thats the version of them that I enjoy. And I've found time and again that people who know nothing about roleplaying games enjoy that too.
Enjoying stories isn't something we need experience to do. We learn it as children. The storytelling part, that takes a little bit of learning, but if you do things right, if you run the game in the right way, and manage your players in the right way, you'll find that learning process is very, very quick.
Roleplaying games should have a learning curve that's measured in hours, not years. They should be for everyone, and if you do it right they are.
Games of experienced Players should exist. DMs/GMs invest tons of hours/years into the game and have equally much world building in which someone can immerse themselves. Now you have a newbie at a table you never had experienced that said world, concept that are second nature to the experienced players and DM/GM are foreign to them and need to be explained... In much detail. So while the experienced players immerse themselves in the deep pool the newbie stands in the kiddie pool. Sure both types of players at the same table roleplay, but it's just not on the same level.
So on the other hand. Games for newbies should exist as well. Games with a patient and understanding DM/GM.
Maybe a bit of a hot take, but if your world needs to be explained in great detail and can't be experienced with minimal background information, the world building might not be that great.
I think people have radically different ideas about what "minimal background information" is.
Some people think the Silmarillion is a suitable primer for their setting.
Some people have like one paragraph for the big picture, and one paragraph for each major faction.
There are players that would say both is too much.
I think a couple short paragraphs should be enough for a quick start for a custom setting, but I've had players that just refuse to read anything at all. As someone else said, it's makes it really hard to do some sort of stories if all the players are utter neophytes/amnesiacs/from-another-world/etc
I tried to do a game of Vampire once, but the players refused to read anything about the setting. All the political intrigue fell completely flat because they didn't understand what the different factions were looking for, nor did they understand how vampires worked.
That group might have just been kind of bad players, but I feel like bad players are more common than good. By "bad" I mean "doesn't think about the game very much, doesn't retain anything about the story or rules". They couldn't really do anything more complex than a simple dungeon crawl.
If that's true, then nobody should ever set a game in a version of the real world. No urban fantasy, no historical fiction, no call of cthulhu. The real world is too complicated. Games shouldn't be set in complicated worlds like the real one.
That's not what I'm saying.
Im saying that a world should be explorable from within, by interacting with it. You don't learn about urban fantasy, historical fiction, call of cthullu by downloading the knowledge about it before you are born. You learned about them while you engaged with the world.
A newbie can be like a child, exploring a world that is new to them (and it is easy to have a role that comes up with a reason for this: Amnesia, Migrant from far away county, lived a very privileged live in a golden cage that limited expose to the outside, etc.).
Sure, there might be some explaining, as you brought up before, but that can happen from within the game, in character, giving the new player a chance go engage with a world that is as foraign to them as to the character they are playing. They should be able to learn about a complicated world as they go.
Well that restricts the kinds of characters a person can play. What if you want to play an experienced politician? An old veteran of the dragon war? The former librarian of the wizard's university? A middle aged woman who spent her youth tending bars and serving drinks to adventurers and got sick of it and decided to go pick up a sword and explore a dungeon herself?
Not everyone wants to do the amnesia story. Some people want to play as experts.
Sure, and in that case a different approach might be sensible. But honestly, I don't see how a newbie would want to play a complex character right from the get go. If they do, I'd propaly recommend a more Newby friendly world / round. I still stand by my point: A complex world doesn't by default speak against new players.
Some games are designed for you to play complex characters. Like Blades in the Dark. You're supposed to play a hardened criminal. Everyone's going to be new to the game at some point and need the ghostfence and the spirit lightning explained to them, and it's much more fun to play a character in that game who knows the world well.
I think you can play complex characters that are tied in to the world just fine with newbies. I have no idea how to manage my footing when I swing a sword, but many of my characters do! Similarly, my quick-fingered thief likely knows a great deal about the ghost field that I've yet to learn (I think this is what you meant? The only ghost fence I'm seeing is from Morrowind).
The way I've handled this is to give a quick, concise rundown about a topic right when it becomes relevant, or looks about to become relevant. I keep it limited to just what they need to know for what's happening now, and only expand on it if asked. Being relevant to what they're doing right now makes it easy to focus on, and being able to experiment with it right then helps it stick for them.
If it's something just one or two people should know (like how their automatons function, or the political situation of their distant cousin's family that they're walking into), I'll try to give the information just to that player . And if they improvise or expand on what I said, I do whatever I can to make what they said true - that kind of player buy-in is absolute gold, no matter how it might diverge from what I had in mind!
The idea is to teach complex game elements in play as much as possible, rather than explain them. They'll remember the intricacies of court a lot better if they discover them while being cats-paws, or running a heist! (This is also how I introduce GURPS to people - start with the simple rules, and if they want to try something different, we'll walk through how that part works. If they didn't like how that worked, we try a different way next time - either different rules for it, or a different approach).
So now we are talking about game systems that need you to know the lore? I thought this is about GMs putting work into their world building and newbies not beeing able to grasp it.
If you are new you build your character with the GM and accept limits he puts in it, because you don't know better anyway. You can always play a character that has more knowledge of the world, once you have a bit of a feeling for what it's like. I have never had the problem of a new player not accepting some limitations to the characters or backstorys made avaible to them.
I'm not one of them, but I empathize with all the GMs that are just sick of dealing with those particular kinds of misconduct that crop up with new players.
It’s okay to do one shots for experienced players if you’re play testing something. But otherwise I agree with you.