Why Rules Lawyering Is a Negative Term

*Deleted by user*

As a complete aside, it's getting harder and harder to defend the current laws of soccer. They seem OK until you have to justify them, and as VAR has shown, there are cases where the soccer RAW makes no sense in practice and purely subjective standards in a game as low scoring as soccer mean a majority of games are actually turning on the referees entirely subjective 'discretion'.

But as for rules lawyers, I'm with you. There is nothing wrong with a player reminding the DM (me) of something in the rules or the fictional positioning I've forgotten. However, players that do that tend to often as not have an unhappy face when they do it, because often as not it's too their disadvantage to not remind me.

But, as you note, that's not how rules lawyers behave. Rules lawyers act as if playing the metagame rather than the game was the game that they enjoy and expect to excel in. They act as if the whole point of being at the table was not to make propositions about what their character does, but to argue about how a proposition should be resolved. They are never consistent idealists about applying the rules. They'll happily contradict themselves in principles or application if in this situation doing so will gain them some advantage. And they'll be perfectly content to argue for an hour over some minor aspect of the rules while everyone else does nothing.

They are also in my experience inverterate cheaters. Every rules lawyer I have ever met misreports their dice rolls, and will roll or say that they have rolled 20 15's or higher in a row.

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lowkey13 said:

The RL is the individual who ...(snip)... looks solely to better their own position

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This!

Celebrim said:

They'll happily contradict themselves in principles or application if in this situation doing so will gain them some advantage.

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And This!

It is less about an innocent rule discussion/clarification and more about the personal advantage that they will gain. At least that is my experience. They also tend to give min/maxers a bad name, since every RL of this type is inevitably a min/maxer.

In my group I was given the joking title of "Rules Lawyer of Justice". This is because while I have rules lawyered on my behalf and others, just as often it was on the DM's behalf (including times that it went seriously against my own interests).

However, I recognize that in the end the DM's word is law. Admittedly, in my younger days somewhat less so.

My point is that, in my opinion, healthy rules lawyering is about fairness. It's about playing a game where we can have realistic expectations of what the rules are. And in fairness, there are some DMs who sometimes forget that their goal isn't to "win the game", and the RL exists in these cases as a buffer between them and the other players, helping to nudge the DM back in the direction of arbitor rather than adversary. (If the DM wants to win, then their victory is a foregone conclusion.)

Like anything, it can certainly be taken too far or misused. However, when used with tact, intelligence, and maturity, I don't think there's anything wrong with a bit of rules lawyering.

lowkey13 said:

Instant replay (VAR) is the death of sport. And once it gets its toe in .... it just gets worse and worse.

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The thing is, VAR is there as soon as a sport is televised and recorded, because every fan of the sport will review every play of the sport on there own whether the sporting officials have to our not. So a sport has to acknowledge that video review is taking place whether it accepts VAR or not.

When a sport becomes televised, then every one of the viewers can see that Maradona tipped the ball over the keeper with his hand. The video review happened. Even the viewers that didn't see it the first time, could see it easily on the replay. That is something modern sport has to accept, and typically the problem that VAR reveals is a problem with VAR itself, but a problem with the rules having no uniform application and being treated as if they are unambiguous and produce unambiguous results when in fact they clearly don't. That's the thing VAR forces a sport to acknowledge, even if VAR isn't a refereeing tool. The very act of televising a sport means that the guardians of that sport no long can act as if they are unaccountable to the public. Televising a sport democratizes it.

I'm a fan of two spectator sports: soccer and sumo, and both are embroiled in different stages of this controversy. Sumo recognized very early on after matches became televised that the very act of televising the sport would change it and was an early adopter of VAR and has some of the most elegant video review in sport. But what sumo has thus far failed to recognize is that its rules are ambiguous and that in ambiguous situations you ought to tend to prefer a non-ambiguous outcome if you can. They don't seem to understand that if you can see what is going on clearly but you still don't know what to review, or if you can't see what is going on clearly even if it is in slow motion in front of you, then this indicates that there is something wrong with the rules.

The history of this in US soccer is huge. What many people are unaware of in this country or the world is that in the 1920's and 1930's soccer was a pretty big thing in the United States and we were pretty good at it. The reason soccer died in the US was in part that the American leagues told FIFA that the game was too ambiguous and too arbitrary and too dependent on the referee for the taste of American fans - they wanted to make a bunch of rules adjustments including hockey style 'penalty box' for play (remember at this time 'yellow cards' weren't even an official rule), and they wanted to allow 3 in game substitutions per match (something that wouldn't be official for another 30 years in FIFA play), and so forth - and that if they didn't make these adjustments, the American fan wouldn't put up with it because they expected sports officials to be accountable to the viewers as if the game was played for their benefit. Soccer to this day treats the referee as a little unaccountable autocrat, and that's only slowly changing. And FIFA and the USA leagues ended up in a fight that undermined our professional leagues, and when the great depression hit, between the fact that soccer was already losing out to baseball as the more widespread American sport and the one that worked better as a radio sport and the infighting in the US leagues, soccer went bankrupt in the US and was basically gone for 50 years thereafter and is still very much an 'also exists' sort of fifth wheel at least with respect to male athletics (its been readily embraced and even promoted as a women's sport).

Fanaelialae said:

My point is that, in my opinion, healthy rules lawyering is about fairness. It's about playing a game where we can have realistic expectations of what the rules are.

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Well, just when I thought this was going to be an unambigious hate bash of rules lawyers, you've managed to find the ambiguity.

The problem I foresee even though I've never observed this first hand, is that there are GMs that do not believe that the game should be about fairness or that the players should know what the rules or are what to expect of them. There is a theory of GMing out there that the best game is always constructed by the arbitrary whim of the GM, and that the expectation that the game will be fair ruins the game.

lowkey13 said:

...
"Oh, and a side note to this: Yes, and people hate real lawyers, until they're on their side. Funny how that works, isn't it? ...

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IMX people hate their own lawyers as much as any other lawyer.

Fanaelialae said:

In my group I was given the joking title of "Rules Lawyer of Justice". This is because while I have rules lawyered on my behalf and others, just as often it was on the DM's behalf (including times that it went seriously against my own interests).

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I would not call that a rules lawyer, but someone who knows the rules well. Rules lawyer, IMO, are the kind of people who come up with, and push for things like going prone in melee for disadvantage and then claiming using luck to get super-advantage.

I have no problem with a player pointing out the correct rule, so long as they are willing to accept my ruling. The counter to this is that I have to be up front and consistent with the players about any house rules I use.

*Deleted by user*

I didn't know this was a question that needed answering.

It's called "Rules Lawyering."

How could this not be a negative term?

EDIT:

So one day in kindergarten, the teacher went around the room asking every child what his/her mommy and daddy do for work. When she got to little Johnny, he proudly announced, "My daddy plays piano in a whorehouse!" The teacher blanched, but the other kids seemed confused by this, so she rushed the conversation along.

That afternoon, though, she requested a meeting with Johnny's parents. When they came in, she told them the story, and both parents shifted in their seats and looked very uncomfortable. "Where would Johnny learn to say something like this?" the teacher asked.

Johnny's father coughed, and said, looking abashed, "That's what we tell him."

The teacher was aghast. "Why on earth would you tell him that?"

"Well, you see, really I'm a lawyer. But how do you explain that to a 5 year old?"