If you’re playing a new-to-you game and you can afford it, buy your own copy of the book. Extra copies at the table (or even better, a PDF) make it much easier for everyone to reference the rules.
This is also part of being enthusiastic–nothing signals buy-in better than having some skin in the game. When I’m running a new game, it’s always a good feeling to see players who are enjoying it enough to pick up their own copy.
And if you buy the book, make an effort to read character creation and skim basic rules. You don’t have to be an expert, but if you’re depending on the GM to explain the entire game from scratch, that’s a lot of extra pressure for them. (Conversely, being able to answer other player’s questions takes extra pressure off of the GM!)
Write quick references and cheat sheets
TTRPG books are often daunting reads. There’s a lot of detail, and sometimes it isn’t always well-organized or accessibly written (even when the game itself is great!)
If you have the patience and the know-how, try writing quick reference sheets for the group–either for the game overall, or for a pieces of the game that need clarification.
I love doing this because it has a ton of great side-effects:
- Helps new players make choices. It’s hard to know what your character should do in the story if you don’t know what they can do mechanically. Creating lists of common actions (especially in games that are very specialized) helps clarify.
- Reminds everyone of how less-used rules work. There’s always some rule I forget because it only comes up once every few sessions, and it’s nice to be able to jog everyone’s memory.
- Serves as an index for the book. You don’t have to include everything in the quick reference–for more complicated rules, you can simply point to the page number in the book where the answer can be found.
- Cements the concepts in your own head. I find that the act of writing a quick reference–taking notes from the book, deciding what needs to be included, rewording rules for clarity and conciseness, and organizing them into sections–helps me better understand the rules in a way that simply reading the book wouldn’t.
For example, a friend of mine started running Orbital Blues recently. The first session culminated in ship-to-ship combat, and it just seemed like a slog. There was one cockpit and two guns; what was the fourth crew member supposed to do? None of us really knew, because only the GM had read the book, and he was still learning.
The week after that session, I read the rules and found the answer–there are Sensors, Comms, and Repair actions you can take, not just “flying” and “shooting.” The next time we did space combat, it went smoothly and everyone felt involved because they had a list of meaningful actions they could take in hand.