In 3rd edition D&D, at least, they explicitly had Rule Zero, which basically said that the DM could modify any rule in any way at any time. So if anyone tries to rules-lawyer you, you’re perfectly justified in rules-lawyering back that you’re following the rules exactly and to the letter, and that he shouldn’t complain.
That said, it makes for a bad game to over-apply that. You can ignore the dice occasionally, but do it too much, and your players will realize that you’re railroading them. Ideally, if you prepared the adventure well, you’d never need to roll the dice “just for noise”. Now, obviously, perfect game design never happens, and you will occasionally need to fudge the dice to patch something. But you should still strive to minimize it.
Similar to a player I had that walked into a lair full of kobolds confident that his AC was unhittable since it exceeded even the natural 20 (1st ed AD&D).
Player: I’m just going to walk straight to their treasure room, they can’t touch me.
DM: The kobolds swarm you…
Player: ok. Still walking.
DM: They climb over you, screaming and pounding on you. You soon have over a dozen hanging off of you…
Player: ok. I’m strong enough to carry them. Still walking…
DM: A kobold on your neck raises his dagger…
Player: Ha. Still walking…
DM: And slides it slowly through the eyeslits of your plate mail visor…
Player:…um, what?
DM:…and stabs and stabs. So this will be on the critical hit table makes ominous dice rolls behind screen…
Player: Hey! But they can’t…
DM:…You stumble, blinded and bleeding, frantically trying to throw off the kobold…
Right. It’s important to remember that the dice in an RPG are an abstraction of a (more or less) realistic situation, and baked into that abstraction is the assumption that the character is actively trying to avoid being harmed. If a high level fighter sticks his head into a lit cannon, he’s going to die. I don’t care how many hit points the character has, or how many damage dice the cannon deals. The cannon’s damage was calculated under the assumption that the target is going to try to dodge, or find cover, or do something to avoid taking a direct hit from a fifteen pound ball of iron moving hundreds of miles an hour. If the character isn’t taking those precautions, then the damage dice are irrelevant. There’s no way any human being can survive that situation, regardless of how many times he’s killed something by sticking it with a bit of sharpened steel.
And that’s about as good a summary of ‘How Not to Run a Game’ as I’ve ever seen. Kudos. But hey, as long as you keep finding players willing to be treated like barely-tolerated nuisances necessary for you to get your ‘story’ out, more power to you.
Alternately, that’s a great way to run a game, if everyone is collectively trying to tell an awesome story regardless of whether the dice technically had them dying ignobly in chapter two twenty sessions back.
With certain gamers, “perceived risk” that never actualizes generates as much interest as “actual risk”. It’s all about knowing your troupe.
And sometimes, you have to fight a rules-lawyering nitwit. Because your gaming group is heavily infected with Geek Social Fallacy #1, for example, and you can’t just get rid of him.
It’s hard to work on something collectively if your GM thinks you should purposefully be kept ignorant of the rules of the road. In other words, your theory would be fine if it ended up being “Our Story”, but in every case I’ve ever seen where the GM runs this way, it’s HIS Story that he’s interested in. Railroading, GMPCs, and other badness ensue. Because anything goes so long as it makes HIS story better.
The point you’re missing, in your haste to be condescending, is that it’s not about my story, but *our *story. My players are not barely tolerated nuisances, they’re partners in story telling. They act their story, I weave something around it, we produce something that alternatively kicks ass, makes us laugh, is just silly enough or is Serious Business (haha, only not really, only Serious).
And my point was not that they should shut up and soldier to my petty diktats and act like I want them to, but that ultimately, and for most intensive porpoises, rules get in the way of getting good time and/or story done.
Stats, character sheets and Byzantine grappling rules are a useful tool to get a framework and/or a more precise idea of who the character is if the player doesn’t have a very specific thing in mind (or is not so good at wirting/explaining who the person they have in their mind is, since not all players are professional writers) ; or of what’s happening if neither side has a good idea of it ; or generating a result/situation when it doesn’t really matter either way. But that’s all it is: a tool.
Their character isn’t just a stat block, and it’s limiting to hold that stat block, or the falling damage chart, or the busted waist size equatio (aaaah, Rolemaster…) as a limiting factor that denies the game going this or that way that would be interesting. Or a enabling factor to go somewhere stupid, as the case may be (see: “I don’t care about 100 kobolds ganging me because they can’t hit me, I keep walking”).
When everyone has a decent idea of who their character is, what they can or cannot do, what they want to accomplish, what weaknesses they’ve arbitrarily given themselves to make shit interesting and so forth, then page 128 §4 sub-clause 6 is wholly unnecessary. Either let them do it, let them do it with some reserves, or say no because X. Simple.
Why *want *to be at the mercy of a dice roll, an unbalanced power or a badly thought-out rule going either way ? Feeling forced to say yes when you don’t want to, or no when you want to say yes, is an exercise in frustration no matter which side of the GM screen you are.
The 53 story illustrates this perfectly: it’s amusing to tell, but it’s also retarded. In fact, it’s amusing *because *it’s retarded. The NPC had no reason to say yes whatsoever. I evidently did not intend her to say yes. The player didn’t *expect *her to say yes, he was just having a laugh during an otherwise low-adrenaline part of the game. Her saying yes broke much of the dramatic tension of the scenario, because you can’t really take a minor villain seriously who sucked your cock on a lark half an hour ago.
But I had officially set a difficulty, high and unreachable as it seemed, and the dice said “haha, fuck you” so I had no choice but to go with them. Which while not positively ruining the story really took something from it in the end. I try to avoid making that mistake again.
Bottomline: it’s about creative control - the GM and the players should have it. Not the dice, not the rule book, not whoever wrote the scenario.
ETA: Hmm. Would have had more punch if written 2 posts ago. Work on conciseness required
I’ve had GMs akin to what you’ve described. They’re much less common in my experience than “the one guy who you can’t uninvite who has every sourcebook memorized and is trying to use one of those infinite power builds like you see on the Dragon online forums every other day”. The only way to fight these guys is to not show them the target they’re aiming for, if it’s socially unacceptable to just throw them out or educate them about what an RPG actually is (which is obviously the best response).
The vast majority of GMs I’ve experienced are firmly committed to the ideal of “Our Story”, and the ones that aren’t are generally so bad at it that everyone quits after two sessions anyway.
You make it sound like you are assuming that this dictatorial style was something occuring on a daily basis. It doesn’t, not at least with the players I have gamed with. We all just want to have fun.
But there’s a difference between coming up with a clever solution to a problem, and a player using a loophole within the rules to achieve a unreasonable result.
One example would be jumping from a cliff. It used to be that falling damage was 1d6 per 10 feet of height fallen, maxed out somewhere [due to terminal velocity, I guess]. A player calculates that now that he has 125hp (more than 20d6 maxed), he can jump from any height and live, and precedes to do so, bypassing “in game” content, and acting out of character in an unreasonable way.
How would the character know what his “hit points” was? What max falling damage was? Why would he avoid falling or jumping off the castle wall all his life, only to start now?
Another example of using player knowledge that the character wouldn’t have, for example: The 2nd edition had a lot of odd critters in the “Fiend Folio”, some of whom needed special methods to kill. The player owns a copy of the “Fiend Folio”, and based on his own knowledge of the data within the book, uses that in game. For example, let’s say that a critter can only be killed (permanently) by severing the head with a silver weapon blessed by a [good aligned] priest. The player does this on the first encounter. A DM who feels that the character would not know this is free to prevent this from taking place in that encounter.
The DM needs to keep the game interesting for all players, and must balance “risk” (making the stories “challenging”), “reward”, and “fun”.
My problem was always the “reward” department. The characters ended up being veritable walking magic item shops. “Reward” is hard to balance, and make the next challenges even tougher to plan out.
None of that is fixed by “the dice exist to make noise behind the screen”, though. And as for situations like that “impossible” roll of 53, well, ridiculously unlikely things do happen in life. If you shun the dice and just decide on your own whether things work, then you’re inevitably going to fall into one of two traps: Either the longshots never work, which is going to feel unrealistic to your players, or on the rare occasions where you do let the longshots work, it’s going to feel like you’re railroading the game.
I was sorta on the flip side of something like this once. My 1st Edition Ranger Lord wanted to interrogate a goblin sentry, so I snuck up on him and tackled him. Unfortunately for me, 1Ed Rangers get +1 damage per level to all giant class creatures, which includes goblins. DM made me roll to hit. Natural 20. Roll a d6 to see if it was critical (house rule)–yup, critical tackle on the goblin. 10th level Ranger Lord with percentile strength (18/74% I think). Less than 1 hit die goblin. Damage was 1d6 + 4 (strength bonus) + 10 (ranger bonus) X 2 (for critical hit). Squished Goblin. Oops.
The solution to Rules Lawyers is knowing the rules better than they do. If they bring up an obscure loophole that produces results against common sense, you say ‘no’, and rule consistently on that point. if they think of something clever in the rules that gives them a reasonable advantage and that doesn’t cross over the OOC/IC knowledge line, let’em have it.
You’re describing metagaming, and that’s a little different from (but related to) rules lawyering. The solution to that metagaming is “Your character doesn’t know that. He is pretty sure he’d die if he tried it, in fact.” Then if the Rules Lawyer wants to dig in his heels and jump, let him - and dock him all his experience points for poor roleplaying. Preferably right before he lands, so he has many fewer hitpoints to survive the fall with.
While I wouldn’t condemn you, you ought to make clear how thigns work in your game. There’s no particular reason a character with oodles of hit points wouldn’t consider some normally-lethal menace a pitiful, pale shadow of a threat. I generally say that if I’m going to accept hit points, the players may cosider them, too. If I want a critical wounds or location-based damage system, then things become different.
Edit: What I mean to say is, if I intend to run a world where people can be astoundingly tough, then I would use hit poitns or something like it. If not, I find a different system.
Meh, or I could just wing it to produce sensible results and have fun with a lot less time and money spent on obscure sourcebooks.
My troupe has been coming back every week for over a decade at this point, that’s all the proof I personally need to justify my methods.
I generally try to give a speech to new players that basically points out that I consider “hit points” to be an abstraction that combines toughness, luck, and combat expertise–right before I point out the house rules that make non-combat lethal damage proportional to HP rather than a fixed die roll.
No, of course not. But that has nothing to do with fudging dice rolls, and if you’ve got players pulling things like that, then fudging dice rolls won’t fix the problem.
I never mentioned fudging dice rolls, or making noises behind the GM screen. That was someone else. That’s why I’m not sure if your comments were directed at me, specifically.
Yes and no. It’s a matter of judging the consequences of the longshot working, as well. Sometimes (hell, oftentimes), the longshot takes a steaming dump over what would have been fun.
Like when the cleric hits with his DC 10 Mace of Disruption and your big bad evil recurring Vampire villain guy is *supposed *to pop instantly because you happened to roll a 1 and the long epic confrontation you’d planned turns into “Weell… he’s dead, guys, I guess. So, umm… you loot him ?” then not only are you, as the DM, shortchanged the opportunity to show off your cool prepared fight scene (you know, the one with the 4 different stages, each with its own soundtrack, its resonance with the overarching themes of the campaign and the internal turmoils of each character in turn ?), but so are the players who came to your place on a Saturday night to find out and live out the big climactic payoff of all the villain-plans-ruining they’d been doing for the last two months and…just… pop goes the bad guy.
Well, there’s always the Xbox, guys ? Yeah, no. Like, screw your Mace of Disruption, dude. Totally rolled nat’ 20 behind the screen.
And sometimes, the longshot is all kinds of badass and believable and you just roll with it. Sometimes you even engineer the longshot to happen because fuck it, they came up with a plan so ridiculous it just *has *to work and you’re not going to let the stupid dice tell you it failed because it only had 0.05% chances of actually working.
But now that we’ve established that it’s OK to fudge the rules occasionally, why not fudge them all the time ? Why have rules at all, except as a vestigial limb of that time, way back when, when D&D (no A yet) was supposed to be a tabletop wargame ? Once again, when it doesn’t really matter either way, sure, roll if you want to, whatever. But when it does matter, screw the dice up their sneering little statistically improbable arses.
Now, I admit that there is also a beauty to be found, and fun to be had, in running “old skool”, tactical RPGing sessions with 5-foot square mats, 40x60 rooms with limestone walls and three Minotaurs in the middle, count all the pluses but don’t forget the Power Attack, gain 250 XP from the orc encounter etc…
But it’s not the same game and, in my experience, the two kinds don’t mesh all that well. It’s nigh-impossible to maintain dramatic tension and mood when the descriptions and banter come to a screeching halt courtesy of the 3 hour rolling-then-sitting-on-your-hands extravaganza that is every skirmish in every combat system ever, or when one guy has a long verbal joust with an NPC and the next guy just goes “I roll Diplomacy, what info does he give me ?”. It’s also not possible to describe a turn-based combat and keep it fresh and interesting before it quickly devolving into “you hit it with your sword. It looks roll a bit hurt. NEXT !”. Least I’ve never seen it happen, nevermind managing it myself.
Finally, it’s also a rare thing to have players who enjoy both types of gameplay equally at the same time ; which is to say that plenty of players like both but good luck matching the moods and expectations of all of them at once *this Saturday. *The solution there is to clearly run one or the other from day 1 and if they don’t feel like it, well, It’s OK, they don’t have to come this time.
Which in my mind is leagues better than them coming only to get bored or annoyed and derailing the game for everyone else, be it by rules-lawyering what’s supposed to be a storytelling oeuvre majeure, or insisting on twenty minutes of flowery roleplay when everyone else is rolling initiative, bitch.
