Strangest Rule Lawyering

[Balgus]

That is a dirty DM. At our gaming table, one of the most fun moments is to see the dwarf charge into melee, and the rest of us scream CLEEEAAVVVVEEE!!!

He is the only front line fighter. wee have a rog, archer, wiz, clr, monk (which does the fun innefctive stuff)

So by being so picky, he is taking the fun from the game...

 

[A'koss]

Well, some of you old timers should get a good laugh outta this...

When 1st edition AD&D first hit the scene our group read the rules far too quickly and made mistakes that we didn't catch for... literally months and months of playing.

For example, one small mistake I made was in reading the amount of XP the party gained from defeating monsters. Instead of reading "500 + 3/HP" for example, I'd read it as 500 XP + 3 HP... or in other words - every PC gained 3 HPs from killing the monster. Let's just say there were a few slack jaws amongst the group when we learned the truth (especially from the 10th level fighters pushing several hundred HPs)...


Cheers,

A'koss.

 

[kreynolds]

Re: Cleave

Can I still Cleave?

You can cleave off a mirror image, so why not?

 

[Silver Moon]

When 1st edition AD&D first hit the scene our group read the rules far too quickly and made mistakes that we didn't catch for... literally months and months of playing.

We had a similar "reading too quick" mistake, namely with the bonus spells for high wisdom. We missed where it said they got the ones for each spell level only when they got other spells of that same level - so we had 1st level clerics with up to 4th level clerical spells! Of course, that did have more players wanting to play clerics....

 

[A'koss]

Originally posted by Silver Moon:

We had a similar "reading too quick" mistake, namely with the bonus spells for high wisdom. We missed where it said they got the ones for each spell level only when they got other spells of that same level - so we had 1st level clerics with up to 4th level clerical spells!

We made the same mistake too... for about 2 or 3 years.

 

[Anubis the Doomseer]

Eh, not the worst possible House Rule. It just means that everyone hits 5% less of the time (and possibly that a natural 20 isn't an automatic hit). It's like starting AC at 11, which the 3.0 designers allegedly considered ('cause it means that a character with a +0 to hit has a 50% chance of hitting this base AC) but didn't implement because, in a nutshell, 10 is a nicer number.

'course, doing it this way because of a lack of rules knowledge is just sad...

It's also a common rule in other role-playing games where there are a number of possible 'ties' in opposed situations.

My personal house rule is "PCs win ties". just makes things a bit easier and my players are good enough to accept that in truly climatic situations this rule may be waived - on balance they get more good out of it. I mostly use it for initiative only in D&D (it comes into [;ay a lot more often in other games).

 

[Goddess FallenAngel]

I once read a post on r.g.f.dnd by a DM who used initiative to handle... NEGOTIATIONS.

<snip>

So, basically, anytime this party dealt with almost anyone, they would switch to "initiative mode"; everyone rolled initiative and then each PC/NPC spoke on their initiative count. This way, nobody was ever flat-footed in the event that the person they were talking to decided to attack.

buzz - While I do see this as an extreme, at the same time my current gaming group does something simular.

Basically, our DM got tired of certain players *naming no names, you know who you are * would immediately attack anything in sight when the DM called for initiative rolls. This caused some problems when he called for initative while we were in the middle of negotiations, and we got sneak-attacked by a third party to the negotiations. Example, some details changed to protect PCs: We were in the middle of talking, the DM called for init, and one of us got to go first - and immediately took out the person we were negotiating with... who turned out to be the NG cleric son of a paladin. We had some trouble explaining why we had killed him, later.

So, from then on, the DM would randomally call for init for regular role-playing encounters... to keep the players on our feet.

 

[LightPhoenix]

Basically, our DM got tired of certain players *naming no names, you know who you are * would immediately attack anything in sight when the DM called for initiative rolls. This caused some problems when he called for initative while we were in the middle of negotiations, and we got sneak-attacked by a third party to the negotiations. Example, some details changed to protect PCs: We were in the middle of talking, the DM called for init, and one of us got to go first - and immediately took out the person we were negotiating with... who turned out to be the NG cleric son of a paladin. We had some trouble explaining why we had killed him, later.

Yeah, we had a game like that, it had just started. We ran into an elf, and there was an ambush and we were supposed to work together. Someone killed the elf in the first round, who turned out to be another PC. It was an amusing game, but not one destined to live long.

 

[enworldatemylogin]

My strangest rules lawyering session was probably anthema to most.

I was at Dundracon with the rest of my gaming group and we had agreed to meet up in one of the rooms to patch together a d20 game on the fly. In this group there are at least 4 of us who have DM'ed, so I figured it would be fine.

Unfortunately, everybody wanted to play a game I had quit in disgust a few months previous. The DM of the game is a good gamer, but a whole bunch of little things finally collided to make it something I didn't want to continue.

Needless to say it was like past midnight, no registration going on and I didn't want to dig through the open gaming area for something, so I figured I'd try to have fun and play a new PC. Everyone else conviently had their old character sheets with them.

Instead I am forced to play an NPC. That was fine. Now, this game takes off RIGHT AT THE POINT I LEFT THE GAME, and suddenly all the bad juju starts flowing again. My best buddy excused himself and never returned, he decided he wanted to sleep instead and I envied him.

I made the decision then and there to play his NPC with the intent to get him killed. Now, I didn't want to be obvious about it. So, I rules lawyered in favor of the DM all night. I made sure to inform him when spells expired, when I was provoking attacks of opportunity, when others did the same.

I was being a little bastard. The game ends, nobody is dead and we retrieve the treasure and then at the end what does the DM say?

"I'm giving you extra xp for being so honest. Never have I seen somebody care so much about following the rules and I think it helped the game."

Somehow I was able to control my expression. Needless to say, they wanted to play again after that and I had better things to do.

 

[Marimmar]

As far as stupid DM rulings go, I have seen some in my time...

- When we entered a dungeon someone cast a <i>Continual Light </i> spell. The obvious benefit was that those underneath the light orb were blinded by the light and those in the front rows who needed to see in the dark couldn't make out a thing because their own shadows prevented them from making out anything.

- When I played a paladin with a holy sword, suddenly all monsters tended to be lawful neutral in alignment because noone is inherently evil you see?

- The same paladin got his mount stolen and instead of the mount crying for help via the empathic link, it just went with the horse thieves. When my paladin eventually got to his horse again it was sold and the DM (who's a lawyer in RL) argued that according to our (german) law anything that is bought in good faith is considered to be in the rightful possession of the buyer, even stolen goods and so there wasn't any way for the paladin to get his horse back legally.

- Back in 2e days all monsters literally always succeeded at every saving throw or magic resistance check thus making wizards a very useless class. The worst comment on this was when the DM told me when I tried to polymorph a monster into a toad, 'he saved, erm no, this is so nice and fitting that it works, he's a toad.' You can imagine my anger.

Enough of these demons from the past, different players and a new system solved those problems.

~Marimmar