Strangest Rule Lawyering

[Iced Tea]

I think the best example of Cleave that I've seen given is what Sauron does to the poor warriors in the Prologue of Fellowship of the Ring...though that's more Great Cleave.

or whirlwind, anyway, if anyone on this has seen the anime berserk (which i highly recomend), then they will understand the true nature of cleave. its when their blow basically kills one person and has enough momentum left to hit another (like his swings with his oversized sword).

 

[Iced Tea]

I remember back in high school I had a player who played a rogue with a penchant for caltrops. He had a bag with several hundred caltrops. Once when being persued down a corridor, he anounced he spilled the entire bag in a 5' square. When the persuers failed their saving throw I announced that they took 1d4 damage (or something like that, I don't remember the 2e rule). He was miffed. He said that they should have taken at least 10d4 damage (enough to kill them), because "the rules state that you take 1d4 damage for an area with 10 caltrops, I had over 100 in this small area, so it should do 10 times the damage!" Needless to say the ensuing argument lasted quite some time.

actually, i think/would rulethat there were enough caltrops to lessen the blow and more evenly spread out the force, much like a bed of nails, one nail would hurt, but with a hundred or so, you can sleep on it. (or how you can step onto a carton of eggs and not break them because the force is distributed or something like that)

 

[Iced Tea]

OutWay

Hey BagPuss what is your name on Outwar?

 

[Spatula]

or whirlwind, anyway, if anyone on this has seen the anime berserk (which i highly recomend), then they will understand the true nature of cleave. its when their blow basically kills one person and has enough momentum left to hit another (like his swings with his oversized sword).

That sort of thinking leads to DMs ruling that Cleave doesn't work with piercing (and possibly bludgeoning) weapons...

 

[Dragonblade]

I had a player try to argue with me that the Hide in Plain Sight ability let him stand right in front of a bad guy, attack with impunity and not be seen. And since he wasn't technically "invisible", he claimed See Invisibility couldn't work on him either.

I said "Nope, you can 'hide in plain sight', not 'attack and hide in plain sight'." We had a big argument about it.

 

[Silver Moon]

Fortunately, even though you do run into situations like this at conventions like Gen Con, they are relatively rare. Most GMs, of any game system, at a con will know largely what they are doing.

I'll agree with that statement. Kriskrafts and I were the RPGA Coordinators for several years for two different New England gaming conventions, and we always did our best to recruit the best GM's that we could find. However, as an earlier poster pointed out, there are usually more players and games than available GM's, so you sometimes have to take some unknown ones. The key is to check the scoring packages, and not invite the bad ones back.

For truly egregious errors you should report the GM to the con, but probably not for just a different interpretation of a spell. I've actually only done so once, with a GM who would not stop the game at the end of the allotted time - and the players who needed to leave were then denied their share of the experience and treasure.

 

[Starman]

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...

Yeah, I forgot to mention that he liked to brag about knowing all the rules and how well he did on whatever test he took to become an RPGA DM. Besides, the attack roll is so basic, you'd think he could get that right!

Starman

 

[Numion]

Looks like he was scared of letting PCs play with the power they have in 3.0/3.5.

Me, I don't mind PCs having fun with their powers; I just throw more and tougher monsters at them if they have it too easy.

Same here. I've noticed that a good rule when deciding if a player can use one of their abilities is, and you're not sure: let it work.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

I've done some research on flash floods, and this isn't entirely ridiculous - assuming that the carriage was caught by the water broadside, and it dragged the horses along with it.

Depends on the speed of the water, of course.

The thing detected as secure for us, so to say. He said that we found a place where we could cross. I played a ranger at the time, so he should have a little knowledge about such things. End even if not, the caravan crew should.

Plus, it can well be that the broadside wasn't that much of a problem, as it didn't reach the wagon, only the wheels (though I'm not an expert about wagon design).



About cleave: A nice description is in the Rokugan Clan War Novels, in The Crab. It's about an old Crane Samurai who fights witha No-Dachi (Greatsword). Usually a weapon for younger samurai, this Hida was dangerous with it because he fought smart: With every blow, he killed one goblin and hurt 4 others.

Anyway, piercing weapons are a little hard to beleave if you think Cleave as in cleave (slashing and bludgeoning work just fine with that image), but you could think of it as impale.

 

[cptg1481]

I have a sad, sad tale of a guy with a character who ran around carrying a heavy lance in one hand. Not only did this guy claim that his character could use it effectively in combat, he claimed that his character would deal double damage on a charge.

Note that the character was not on a horse.

z

DUDE, confession time...

Back in 1978 when my friend ED slipped me some D&D stuff in a study hall I admit that I was hooked from the moment I read the first paragraph. I was so there...I could finally play all the fantasy novels we read. Anyway, being 12 and not knowing a great deal about weaponry I was sold on the lance myself...I mean 3d6 damage and double when charging, who could argue the logic of that choice. We played a few sessions fumbling throught he rules until we figured out what a lance actually was. After that it was the battel axe for me and my dwarven fighter.

I still chuckle every once in a while in my game when someone trys a particularly power gaming sort of thing as I envision my 4' fighter running around in the 10' corridors of some dungeon charging the orcs with his lance?

Confession over, now I am much cooler of course and older - 37!