> I never fully understood the rules

I played from the early 80s through early 90s. Mostly AD&D 1e but earlier on the red/blue boxes and later on 2e.

Recently I've taken to reading r/adnd for nostalgia reasons. One thing become abundantly clear real fast, no one I ever played with ever truly understood the rules. Even the "rules lawyers" among us. And I played with a large variety of people from different friend groups, to different game shops, and even some smaller cons.

We understood the key details for the parts we actually used, but we weren't intentionally avoiding the rest, we just didn't understand that they existed. There's just so much minutia in those rule books.

This also makes me chuckle when I see newer players come into r/adnd as part of the OSR movement. Because they *do* seem to assume that all of these rules were commonly applied. But my anecdata would say otherwise. I originally assumed that these newcomers to the old rules would be playing a game I found alien as they'd be bringing in newer sensibilities, but instead I suspect I'd find it alien as they're more likely to be sticklers for the full ruleset!

When you look at the DM's guide guide to the game, one of the very first rules it teaches is that the fun trumps being a stickler for the rules and the DM is free to bend and break rules for a better plot, and even encouraged to do so.

D&D has a strong narrative aspect when you look at the published adventure modules. There are usually plenty of characters to interact with in some way or another and some quests can be solved entirely by following the breadcrumbs offered up through them. But the DM needs to role-play all of these characters and do a lot of improv to make this work. This isn't so easy.

Also, combat in D&D is a slog. Whereas turn taking outside combat is rather fast and loose, the game turns into this enormous ceremony once the words "roll initiative" are spoken. The effect is that combat can take up a lot of playtime relative to the non-combat role playing, while often also leading to less overall quest progress per time.

That's the plan! D&D combat can be a slog sometimes, and when it is, that kills a lot of fun for me as a story-first approach adept. I'd really just ask about that or that rule from a chatbot, or have a list of weighted actions presented to me at my turn. That's where I'm moving towards - a good spec is hopefully what should enable that direction. Hopefully...

There's a community and play-style called OSR or "old school renaissance," that recreates versions of the earliest editions of D&D, and encourage a style of play that's heavily oriented around few rules and the DM making quick decisions/rulings on the spot, rather than lots of rules and lots of time spent mining the rulebooks. In fact, the expression is "rulings over rules." This might appeal to you.

This is one of the biggest issues with DnD in general. It's also one of the reasons behind the simplicity of the Shadowdark[1] RPG.

Shadowdark does not only have much simpler (and fewer) rules, there's also a lot less world building. This encourages the DM and the players to create their own fantasies, rather than adhering to the races described in the (MASSIVE) DnD manual.

[1]: https://www.thearcanelibrary.com/pages/shadowdark

Baldurs Gate 3 the video game taught me DnD, videogames where you can go at your own pace are a nice option.

There are other RPGs with light rules that are WAY more fun than D&D. I've been playing "Blades in the Dark" recently, where the players run heists in a victorian ghost industrial city. It's an absolute delight.

D&D is better as a video game. Try Baldur's gate. It has the side benefit of teaching you the rules if you ever want to jump in to a local game

Agreed. I'm onboarding a couple of new players and see the issues again and again. I'm dropping the overall proficiency score as it just confuses things. skills and abilities just take awhile to become secondhand though.

D&D is a bit like Monopoly in that very few people play by the rules as written and instead most tables play by a semi-unique/regional subset of the rules and with a mixture of house rules and DM preferences. Especially people who have been playing for years, not only have they had more time to house rule and build DM opinions, but they also may have seen multiple versions of the rules over that time and interacted with a wider variety of other tables.

To some extent, this is weirdly a good thing: if you want strictly enforced rules, you may just want to play a videogame instead. D&D succeeds best as a social lubricant enabling a framework in which social gaming (roleplaying) can happen to be "fun". Rarely is strictly following rules "fun", especially socially with friends; the rules in D&D are meant to be guideposts and tools for enough structure that people that want structure find comfort and enough flexibility that "fun" isn't lost in the process.

Which is a long way to say that you probably aren't going to learn the right lessons from a well fuzzed computer spec of the rules, you probably are going to learn more lessons asking the people you play with what rules they find important, to explain things you feel you don't understand, and to suggest which chapters in which books to try to read to best improve your understanding for that group. At the end of the day, if the table seems too hard to play at you might also just be playing with the wrong group, especially if you aren't having fun.

Watch a few different popular gaming sessions on YouTube. Tons to choose from.

It's probably way different than you expect (and will be different between DMs).