Lawful Pedantic
I’ll admit it. I too have felt the call of the rules lawyer. It was years ago, and we were just setting out into the depths of a megadungeon. That saucy, crunch-filled temptress known as Pathfinder beckoned us onwards and downwards, offering near-infinite character customization for the low, low price of a little learning curve.
It will go slowly at first, thought I to myself. But surely, as we learn the game, becoming familiar with its many intricacies by dint of experience, the rules lookups and confusions will eventually cease. We will swim in the ocean of a balanced system, happy little fish all unaware of the dense rules-fluids lapping at our gamer gills.
So we played. A year passed, and that hoped-for system mastery never quite materialized. I began writing modules for publication (Only $6.99 on Adventureaweek.com? What a steal!) and still I didn’t quite hit that sweet spot. Certainly my less obsessed buddies weren’t mastering the countless little details. And so after a year of playing by the book we finally said OK, it’s time to start applying some handwavium. We’ll do a little more of what feels right, and a little less of what is absolutely 100% correct.
But as a recovering rules lawyer, I can tell you that it is tough making the transition. For example, the situation in today’s comic popped up pretty much verbatim at my last home game. For the first time in her career the party sorcerer attempted to cast from a divine scroll via Use Magic Device. We reverted back to form, double-checking the rules, calculating the two requisite DCs for the one simple action, and then watching as the action failed.
“Well,” said the sorcerer, “I’m never doing that again.”
I can’t blame her for that reaction. There’s nothing like pausing the game for a rules lookup only to realize that your “pretty good” abilities are “completely ineffective.” But at the same time I’m sitting there with a clear-cut, this is how the book says it works rule in front of me. Do I make the player happy? Do I follow the system? Does Cleric get shanked in the back by an evil tiefling for trying to do the right thing?
How about you guys? How do you handle the tightrope walk of rules vs. expediency?
EARN BONUS LOOT! Check out the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. We’ve got a sketch feed full of Laurel’s original concept art. We’ve got early access to comics. There’s physical schwag, personalized art, and a monthly vote to see which class gets featured in the comic next. And perhaps my personal favorite, we’ve been hard at work bringing a bimonthly NSFW Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic to the world! So come one come all. Hurry while supplies of hot elf chicks lasts!
It depends a lot on which side of the screen I’m on.
As a GM I do what the rules say for the most part, but often have specific houserules for various things that allow for more choices/less arbitrarily constrained choices for my players or for things that just make sense. Sometimes when something isn’t spelled out/we don’t know where on earth to find where it’s specified, I’ll just ask my players how we want to handle said thing, being clear that it will work for or against them equally.
An example of this came up recently. My players in my 5e game wound up in a situation where something was telekinetically slammed into a flaming sphere. Said spell says absolutely nothing about things slamming into it, just it into them. I gave them the choice of us ruling it would either apply to damage from the flaming sphere spell or just treat it like any other object. They opted for treating it like any other object, except the damage type changes to fire.
On the player side of things, I’ll argue for whatever sounds most fun or most logical but expect to get absolutely nothing more or less than what the rules actually say, even when they have nothing to say on a subject.
I like your method of giving players limited choices but letting them make the final call. That way they still feel like they’ve got some agency in the whole “the rules don’t cover this” situation.
5e Flaming Sphere (and similar spells) do all of their damage during the caster’s turn, regardless of who hits who; what the game expected there was probably that you would register the collision, put it off until the caster’s turn, and calculate its damage then because the object is still in contact with the sphere. (With the implication that anything that collides with the spell but isn’t still in contact at the start of the caster’s turn only brushed against it, and didn’t stay in contact with it long enough to actually get burned. Works like burning coals, where you can walk across them without harm, but can’t stand still or you’ll burn your feet.)
That said, it is kinda silly, yeah, so checking with the party to see how they want to handle it absolutely makes sense. xD
I’ve always looked at the rules as more of a guideline. I’m going to the process of learning fifth edition right now, i keep to the rules as much as possible. But a lot of times, especially right now because I’m learning. If I don’t know a rule, I’ll make something up on the spot. And then look it up later. Ultimately, at the end of the night so long as everybody had fun it was a good night. And if we didn’t stick to the rules perfectly. No big deal.
Protip: You never stop doing that. Players will ALWAYS come up with a situation where the rules don’t apply. In such moments, you 100% have to make something up. Play on say I, and rest easy in the knowledge that you’re doing it right.
I say everything in moderation. I like when things follow the rules as written, but I also really dislike when a game comes to a screeching halt for 20 minutes so someone can do research, or worse, sit and argue over it.
Rule of thumb: If the argument is still going after you’ve ordered the pizza, waited for delivery, eaten the pizza, and sat back down to game, the day’s session is officially over.
Going WAY back to Basic D&D and 1st Edition AD&D, it was stated the rules are more guidelines than immutable laws. I ran a homebrew world, with a huge backstory, political system(s), all that and a bag of chips. The basic game mechanics remained the same, but the players/characters learned fairly quickly not to argue with my smug, “You don’t know, do you?” After the game, I might explain the mechanics and generally my group was pretty good about not allowing player knowledge to come character knowledge (though there’s always That One Guy…) Lets face it, your lvl one peasant got turfed out on the road by his former Lord, he spent some time as a bouncer at the brothel in the nearest town outside his former-Lord’s demesnes. He fell in with a thief and an expelled wizard who stole a few books from the Library and thought she’d make her fortune. Now, what are the odds you know what the current exchange rate for Imperial sovereigns to silver coins from the Third Age that you found in that ancient crypt you fell into while being chased by a bear? A barbarian is any vaguely humanoid creature who doesn’t speak your language or dress like you do. You got to 5th level and never met a full Elf because humans have no concept of Time; all YOU know is they have pointy ears and their lady parts got no decent hair. And they have sorority water fights totally naked in forest pools and that’s just an invitation right there…and crap, why is there an arrow sticking out of my codpiece..? And the party thief spent a hour real time rolling really badly trying to Find Traps on a fallen rock because it was poised on the edge of the ravine the party was about to travel down…he eventually gave up and convinced everyone it’d be safer to go *all* the way around, adding three days (and random encounters) to the trip. Why? Because his character didn’t know and neither did he. That’s the best phrase a DM can throw out there: “You don’t know, do you?” Just, yanno…as long as the DM *does* know and isn’t just making stuff up because the party was more creative than he expected.
Interesting that you bring up basic D&D as the “these rules are just guidelines” touchstone. I was just reading this morning in “Designers and Dragons” how Advamced D&D was Gygax’s attempt to codify the system for tournament play. Apparently he didn’t like the idea that there were people out there playing in a bunch of different ways, and so tried to make the rules more concrete than abstract. Basic and Advanced then wind up representing two very different design philosophies: one D&D brand name, but two very different D&D experiences.
As a rules lawyer and optimizer myself, I blame the system(s) and not the player(s). Honestly? Nobody wants to comb thru shapechange, polymorph, alter self, the polymorph subschool, a bonus monster manual, at least 2 other splat books, and all the errata just to figure out how to get my cleric to permanently shape change into a Zodar to get a 1/round Wish as a SLA that dosent require XP or material or focus components. Nobody in their right mind expects a game to allow them to do that on the third or 300th read thru. But worse than finding the secret to plashifting infinite planes into other planes for infinite damage, is when the game gives you a cool concept class like the 3.x Monk and with a straight face tells you that is a viable character that can contribute to defeating encounters and overcoming adventure challenges. And it just isn’t, and no matter how cool you think it is 99 times out of a hundred you’re just being propped up by an artifact that turn you into a tiger that has nothing to do with the abilities you wrote on your character sheet. And once again it isn’t because you’re bad for selecting monks, or anything that sounds cool, it is because the designers are bad and lied to you.
The rules presented by DnD and pathfinder isn’t actually medieval mud farmers and murder hobos, it’s some kind of stargate-tippyverse fractally repeated an infinite number of times across infinite planes, but nobody really has the time or inclination to link all that together than the rules lawyers.
~There’s nothing like pausing the game for a rules lookup only to realize that your “pretty good” abilities are “completely ineffective.” But at the same time I’m sitting there with a clear-cut, this is how the book says it works rule in front of me. ~
And that’s the thing. If we want to be able to make informed decisions in a shared world that only really exists in the minds of 6 separate people, then we conform to rules. And if we don’t conform to those shared rules, then there really isn’t any reason to pay $6.99 or $39.99 or $9,000.99 or $0.02, because we can just make it up as we go for free.
Dude I’m reading at the moment suggests that pop culture is the basis of shared world expectations:
https://www.amazon.com/Fantasy-Role-Playing-Game-New-Performing/dp/0786408154
Not a bad read if you’re into performance studies.
I love Pathfinder, but damn does it make things harder than they need to be.
#mood
“That saucy, crunch-filled temptress known as Pathfinder beckoned us onwards and downwards, offering near-infinite character customization for the low, low price of a little learning curve.”
Now there’s a different take on it. I’ve always referred to Pathfinder (well, since the first 3 months of trying it) as “That abominable con-artist, stealing away innocent Role-Players to a system that trades imagination for numbers and rules, and has infinite avenues for powergaming.”
To each their own of course! I don’t seriously judge. I’m no fan of the very rules-lite systems (White Wolf anyone) either. But as a DM, I like to start with DnD as a basis for the campaign and then shave off the build options to create a plausible, minimalist world, and let my players work out how to build a character they want to play within the options available.
It does require a rather select sort of player, I’ll admit, but those I do run with seem to really enjoy the immersive worlds I can build for the price of a few race/class options.
In my view, this debate is about choosing a place on a continuum. You’ve got true improv games like Fiasco or Once Upon a Time on the one end. You make up what you want to happen, and there’s almost nothing in the way of character customization.
On the other end you’ve got stuff like GURPS, with it’s infinite sub-systems and add-ons. You can make almost anything you can imagine, and there will be hard mechanical rules to reflect those differences.
5e D&D and Pathfinder 1e are both middle grounds on that continuum, trading away character customization on the one end or ease of play on the other. They can both be eloquent systems for describing a game world, but their place on the continuum is a matter of preference.
It took me about a year of play to get into 3.5 enough to read the rules and begin building my first character as a well-informed player. Once that happened, it was the same pleasure as building a deck in Magic or an army in 40K. I could finally read the character enough to understand how the mechanics translated into fiction, and to describe them in that way. It’s a much lower barrier to entry with 5e. But as a longtime 3.X player I find that one 5e wizard tends to feel very much like the next mechanically, with only spell selection providing a difference. That’s not much of an issue for the first year or so of 5e play, but after a while it began to grate on me.
Since many players come to the hobby through 5e, I think it’s an ideal system to expand the market. For those that take up the hobby long-term however, I think that greater depth and increased character options begin to seem more appealing over time. Either that or you go the other way and want to try out more systems rather than one particularly in-depth one, bouncing from Fate to PbtA to Dogs in the Vineyard in small, 6-12 session mini-campaigns, never pausing long enough for a single system to begin feeling stale.