Episode 131: Rule of Cool

I've generally considered myself a rules lawyer-lite while playing in my friends' games. This was more along the lines of a "Oh, this is happening? Let me look up the rule on that for you so we can keep the action moving" sort of thing. I knew the way I GMed and it sometimes clashed with the way my friends GMed. Lately, I've learned that this is an OK thing.

For example, in Palladium roleplaying games, a "Round" of combat is 15 seconds and called a Melee Round, and everyone has a number of attacks per round as per a number of factors, so you could have people in combat with 2 attacks per round and people with 7 or higher. The rounds would then go through initiative in order, and if you ran out of attacks then it would keep cycling through the list until everyone was out of attacks. That meant if everyone had 2 attacks but Joe Awesome had 7, then everyone would get 2 attacks alternating, then Joe Awesome would get 5 uncontested attacks to close out the round. This is how the rules state combat goes, which is perfectly fine, but unrealistic and not so cool. So, I came up with a custom initiative sheet that split up everyone's attacks per melee into a chunk of time each attack took up, then it organized everyone based on whose attack begins next in the timeline. Ties would go to those who have a higher initiative. This made combat flow so much more interestingly, in my opinion, but it was somewhat complicated on the back end and not for every GM. So, when I went back to being a player, my other friends would generally use the rules as written just because it is less complex.

Ironically, the rules lawyer in me was wanting to go to the cool house rule we came up with and I ended up implementing, but then I realized one thing during combat one time. Things were still fun for us, and sometimes GMs have their own way about doing things that work just fine. Also, in terms of any roleplaying system, a GM has final say on the rules, regardless if it contradicts a previous rule. Especially if the previous rule was broken.

So, back to the rule of cool, in the moment where a player wants to do something cool, the DM could consider to allow it simply because it would help the story and the player would be happy, as long as it didn't break the game. Say the situation comes up again and the player said "Oh, I did this last time and it got us out of the mess easily, so I'm just going to do that again." At that point, it'd be perfectly acceptable for the DM to deny the request for the "cool" action, with the excuse that it could break the game if that "house rule" was kept in play. We just, as both players and DMs, have to keep in mind that the books explicitly state that if a rule isn't liked, throw it out. If a rule is made up and not in the books, feel free to use that, too. And if something worked fine in one situation and not fine in another, then don't worry too much about rule consistency. The point is to have fun and to tell a story. If a rule only allows one person to have fun and the rest not to have fun, then it may need to be tweaked or put down completely.

I guess my ramblings can be summed up quickly: Rules can be a fluid thing, and that's ok. But having someone at the table who knows all of the base rules and can recite them isn't necessarily a detriment. Instead, allow them to be the one to record and memorize all the house rules that are made up and rules lawyer those as well.