I've worn both the hat of an educator and that of a game designer. Let's talk about accessibility WRT learning new tabletop games, why what you might perceive as easy is still challenging for someone else, and what we can do to improve the situation.

Part of being a good educator is seeing your own privilege and making the conscious choice to acknowledge the privileges (or lack thereof) of one's students. Many teachers complain that students don't get "easy stuff" without recognizing their OWN privileges that make it "easy."

Think for a minute: did your parents read to you as a kid? Did you have lots of toys/art supplies/books? How many (if any) computers/tablets/phones were in your house? How many adults? How many of them went to college?

All of these build what's called social or cultural capital.

Studies show that kids who are read to at young ages develop language skills faster than kids who aren't. This requires parents who have both time to read and language skills themselves, plus access to books. Having the time/resources to read to your kids is a form of privilege.

And let's unlearn something about privilege: you can have it and feel like you don't, but it's still benefiting you. If you're poor, queer, and white, you'll always dodge (literal and metaphorical) bullets that poor, queer BIMPOC can't. Privilege comes in many different flavors.

When you have a lot of cultural capital, from various privileges by birth to being given access to resources, things seem easier to you because you have more "spending power." You can navigate society better than those without your privileges, even if you can't see that yourself.

Let's apply cultural capital directly to tabletop gaming: I want to play an RPG! If I've only heard of D&D, I'm less likely to play a new game because I don't know what else exists. Telling me about game mechanics doesn't mean anything because I don't have a frame of reference.

Stop me if this scenario looks familiar:

ME: I want to get into RPGs! I like how in Dragon's Dungeons I can be a goblin thembo wizard.
YOU: You should play QuestHacker; it's based on the Pandemonium Engine but it tries to fix the problems in 2nd Ed. by swapping d20s for d100s."

The average person knows of at least one Triple-A RPG because they have money and celebrities pushing them. But getting frustrated with them when they don't understand that Pathfinder and D&D are different is a bad look, because they don't have the level of experience you do.

When you're learning a new RPG, there's more to the game than text on the page. Mothership's rulebook is a small but dense zine no longer than a comic book and I still had to both play it and run to see how it works. Imagine a new player learning any game w/ a 100+ page rulebook.

If you say it's "easy" to learn new games, you're probably not accounting for:
- Reader's language skills
- Reader's learning differences
- Reader's learning style
- Reader's finances
- Reader's free time
- Rulebook's editing/proofreading
- Rulebook's ease of use

These add up!

I own two bookshelves of RPGs in different systems and a ton of board games. I STILL struggle to understand new rules sometimes because of ADHD and executive dysfunction. Reading, playing, and running all those games makes it EASIER to learn and teach new ones; it's never EASY.