D&D General Alternate thought - rule of cool is bad for gaming

[EzekielRaiden]

This seems contrary to the Rules as Physics style that @Micah Sweet and others are in preference of.

Yes. It is.

Because the goal of "rules as physics" is not possible. It isn't even remotely practicable as a loose approximation. The desire is for an unachievable ideal, and chasing after it has extreme, deleterious effects on any game that tries.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I had a "Rule of Cool" situation last year in a Pathfinder game I was playing in. The set-up:

The party was in a dilapitated mansion that held hundreds of mirrors hanging within it, each of which was more like a "window" that looked through into a room and one could see an individual moving and walking around inside that image (a la the paintings at Hogwarts). Now there's no rules in the game specifically designed for this effect, the DM just had to make some up. One of the rules he invented for the narrative of this adventure location was that if you touched the "glass" of the mirror, the image of the person changed, they turned into some sort of weird undead creature, and "climbed out" through the mirror to attack us (a la The Ring). Again, there's no rules in the game that explain these effects, the DM just made them up to use for the encounters.

I was playing a Paladin and while we were in a particular part of the mansion in some other fight, one of the PCs accidentally fell backwards (probably via a Push effect) and collided with a mirror, which then triggered one of these "mansion image ghosts" to turn evil and crawl out of the mirror to attack us.

Now I as a Paladin had no abilities that would allow me to interact with the actual game rule of "incorporeal" and thus be able to interact with this ghost physically as per the "game rules". However, on my turn I asked the DM if I was to use one of my Lay On Hands uses (that would allow me to damage undead per the rules) as well as a use of Smite Evil (that allows me a greater effect versus undead, fiends and the like) and combine them together to let the "energy of the divine magic create a solid force with which to shove the incorporeal ghost back into the mirror?"

Again... the rules do not allow for this. There's nothing that says using Lay On Hand and Smite Evil combined gives you the ability to affect incorporeal creatures. But the DM thought that this sounded like a cool thing to do, especially as I was willing giving up two uses of my paladin abilities to try it. So he said "let's try it!" and had me make a Strength check against the ghost to see if I could shove it back 5 feet and back into the mirror. I succeeded in doing so, and once the ghost was back on the "other side" of the glass... it turned back into it's normal image form of a person inside their bedroom, and thus there was one less opponent to deal with in this fight we were in.

None of this stuff could be considered Rules As Written, nor Rules As Intended. It was really just this DM using his "DM Fiat" to decide that what I was trying to do (and more importantly what I was giving up in paladin use abilities) was "cool" enough to let me try. And it ended up working out and created a whole new narrative direction that this adventure allowed us to go.

That's what the "Rule of Cool" can get us... whether or not you wish to call it the "Rule of Cool" or "DM Fiat" or "DM adjudication" or whatever term you are or are not comfortable with. Merely the opportunity to do things that aren't written down in the books as a hand-and-fast rule.

 

[Oofta]

I had a "Rule of Cool" situation last year in a Pathfinder game I was playing in. The set-up:

The party was in a dilapitated mansion that held hundreds of mirrors hanging within it, each of which was more like a "window" that looked through into a room and one could see an individual moving and walking around inside that image (a la the paintings at Hogwarts". Now there's no rules in the game specifically designed for this effect, the DM just had to make some up. One of the rules he invented for the narrative of this adventure location was that if you touched the "glass" of the mirror, the image of the person changed, they turned into some sort of weird undead creature, and "climbed out" through the mirror to attack us (a la The Ring). Again, there's no rules in the game that explain these effects, the DM just made them up to use for the encounters.

I was playing a Paladin and while we were in a particular part of the mansion in some other fight, one of the PCs accidentally fell backwards (probably via a Push effect) and collided with a mirror, which then triggered one of these "mansion image ghosts" to turn evil and crawl out of the mirror to attack us.

Now I as a Paladin had no abilities that would allow me to interact with the actual game rule of "incorporeal" and thus be able to interact with this ghost physically as per the "game rules". However, on my turn I asked the DM if I was to use one of my Lay On Hands uses (that would allow me to damage undead per the rules) as well as a use of Smite Evil (that allows me a greater effect versus undead, fiends and the like) and combine them together to let the "energy of the divine magic create a solid force with which to shove the incorporeal ghost back into the mirror?"

Again... the rules do not allow for this. There's nothing that says using Lay On Hand and Smite Evil combined gives you the ability to affect incorporeal creatures. But the DM thought that this sounded like a cool thing to do, especially as I was willing giving up two uses of my paladin abilities to try it. So he said "let's try it!" and had me make a Strength check against the ghost to see if I could it back 5 feet and back into the mirror. I succeeded in doing so, and once the ghost was back on the "other side" of the glass... it turned back into it's normal image form of a person inside their bedroom.

None of this stuff could be considered Rules As Written, nor Rules As Intended. It was really just this DM using his "DM Fiat" to decide that what I was trying to do (and more importantly what I was giving up in paladin use abilities) was "cool" enough to let me try. And it ended up working out and created a whole new narrative direction that this adventure allowed us to go.

That's what the "Rule of Cool" can get us... whether or not you wish to call it the "Rule of Cool" or "DM Fiat" or "DM adjudication" or whatever term you are or are not comfortable with. Merely the opportunity to do things that aren't written down in the books as a hand-and-fast rule.

That was a significant use of resources though and the DM made a ruling. It's different from just declaring you can leap 30 feet in the air from a standing start because you have a stick.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yes. It is.

Because the goal of "rules as physics" is not possible. It isn't even remotely practicable as a loose approximation. The desire is for an unachievable ideal, and chasing after it has extreme, deleterious effects on any game that tries.

Well, tell us what you really think!

Again, it is a spectrum. You're right that you're not going to reach pure rules as physics, but making your goal to lean that way whenever possible and practical is a perfectly viable playstyle, so the idea that doing so will necessarily lead to deleterious effects in your game (essentially saying the philosophy itself is hopelessly flawed) is ridiculous and borderline insulting to anyone who prefers it. These sort of opinions, while perfectly fine to express, IMO need to be very clear about their lack of objectivity.

 

[TiQuinn]

The DM in the OP allowed a vertical jump from a standing start. It more than doubles what the rules allow even with the most optimized PC. To me, that's what the rule of cool means - ignore the rules completely because it looks cool.

That’s not what rule of cool means to me, and I’m not interested debating over the OP’s strawman.

The problem is that I played in a game a while back at a convention where the DM stated they followed the rule of cool and did similar things for one player who happened to be more outspoken/convincing than the rest of us.

So if rule of cool is just "the rules don't cover it, but the DM will make a call that still follows the spirit of the rules and do not completely ignore the rules of the game" then we need another term what these DMs do. Extreme rule of cool? Loony Tunes rule of cool? Do whatever the f*** you want as long as you can make it sound fun and are enthusiastic about it?

It's a spectrum of course. But I've seen rule of cool allow whatever the player wants to do, rules that already cover what they're trying do be damned. It is not the same as improvised actions that may not succeed. It's shooting an arrow and hitting the moon because the player is convincing enough.

So you’ve determined that you have a negative reaction by the phrase “rule of cool” which can mean different things depending on the table. It’s just a DM and group that you should simply not play with again. We don’t need new terminology because the problem isn’t the term or even the concept but how it is individually applied and rather than take one’s bad experience and blow it up to define the term, we should just say the DM made a bad call. Bad calls happen. Maybe the real answer is, tell the DM why that bothered you.

 

[DEFCON 1]

That was a significant use of resources though and the DM made a ruling. It's different from just declaring you can leap 30 feet in the air from a standing start because you have a stick.

Yes. Your view is not regarding the concept of "Rule of Cool" or "DM Ruling" on the whole, but merely the specific use that the OP's DM used. Which is fine! You don't like that specific use of "Rule of Cool". No problems with that! That's your feeling on that specific matter.

But the question then becomes why continue to argue past that point? What further expectation do you have? What further is there to say than that you thought the DM made a bad call in that particular 30-foot jump instance?

 

[tetrasodium]

I've been following this for a while now & there is something noteworthy that doesn't seem to have been raised. Back when rule of cool/rule zero was written about it was written for a much crunchier system. At the time it provided justification for the GM to bypass those rules when it made sense without it getting dubbed with the often negative term "fiat". Both sides of the GM screen got something cool going on at the table & neither had to take any heat so the term itself carried a lot of positive good will to the point that even using it in negative ways got completely unrelated terms like favoritism & such.

That crunch is no longer the case though because the current edition has rules in many areas that would charitably be dubbed "unfinished" years ago when rule zero/rule of cool were being printed & talked about. Without that crunch there is often nothing for the rule of cool to bypass. Lacking any rules to bypass rule of cool/rule zero is now often used to invoke decades of good will in order to do things like throw the dice out the window in order to shift from role playing to play acting.

Spoiler: difference between role playing & play acting

Weird that "shorts" can't embed, it's about a minute maybe less

What's the difference between role-playing and play-acting in DnD?

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Fate does a nice job of accounting for the impact of a more flexible system by splitting it into golden & silver rules

Spoiler: fate's golden rule

Before we go into specifics, here’s our general Golden Rule of Fate:
• Decide what you’re trying to accomplish first, then consult the rules
to help you do it.
This might seem like common sense, but we call it out because the order
is important. In other words, don’t look at the rules as a straitjacket or a
hard limit on an action. Instead, use them as a variety of potential tools to
model whatever you’re trying to do. Your intent, whatever it is, always takes
precedence over the mechanics.
Most of the time, the very definition of an action makes this easy—any
time your intent is to harm someone, you know that’s an attack. Any time
you’re trying to avoid harm, you know that’s a defense.
But sometimes, you’re going to get into situations where it’s not imme-
diately clear what type of action is the most appropriate. As a GM, don’t
respond to these situations by forbidding the action. Instead, try to nail
down a specific intent, in order to point more clearly to one (or more) of
the basic game actions.

Spoiler: fate's silver rule

the corollary to the golden Rule is as follows: Never let the rules get
in the way of what makes narrative sense. if you or the players narrate
something in the game and it makes sense to apply a certain rule outside
of the normal circumstances where you would do so, go ahead and do it.
the most common example of this has to do with consequences
(p. 162). the rules say that by default, a consequence is something a
player chooses to take after getting hit by an attack in a conflict.
But say you’re in a scene where a player decides that, as part of trying
to intimidate his way past someone, his pc is going to punch through a
glass-top table with a bare fist.
everyone likes the idea and thinks it’s cool, so no one’s interested in
what happens if the pc fails the roll. however, everyone agrees that it
also makes sense that the pc would injure his hand in the process (which
is part of what makes it intimidating).
it’s totally fine to assign a mild consequence of Glass in My Hand in
that case, because it fits with the narration, even though there’s no con-
flict and nothing technically attacked the pc.
as with the golden Rule, make sure everyone’s on the same page
before you do stuff like this.

Even there consulting the rules first is considered important enough that the page with both of them has that as the only bolded bit of text on the page.

 

[TiQuinn]

That crunch is no longer the case though because the current edition has rules in many areas that would charitably be dubbed "unfinished" years ago when rule zero/rule of cool were being printed & talked about. Without that crunch there is often nothing for the rule of cool to bypass. Lacking any rules to bypass rule of cool/rule zero is now often used to invoke decades of good will in order to do things like throw the dice out the window in order to shift from role playing to play acting.

I would argue that if a DM is invoking “rule of cool” every session, they’re either missing or ignoring a key part of the rules in service of something else, which could span from they don’t like the system to they’re too tired to bother.

 

[Oofta]

That’s not what rule of cool means to me, and I’m not interested debating over the OP’s strawman.



So you’ve determined that you have a negative reaction by the phrase “rule of cool” which can mean different things depending on the table. It’s just a DM and group that you should simply not play with again. We don’t need new terminology because the problem isn’t the term or even the concept but how it is individually applied and rather than take one’s bad experience and blow it up to define the term, we should just say the DM made a bad call. Bad calls happen. Maybe the real answer is, tell the DM why that bothered you.

So wait ... now you're saying the OP's statement is a strawman? Which means they're lying? Really?

One relatively low impact example of "the rule of cool" I ran into was a player that had their PC grappling a huge creature. Then, because of how they described it, the target creature was effectively restrained, not just grappled. So the size difference was completely ignored since they were a medium sized PC and you can't grapple anything more than 1 size larger. Then they "flipped the creature over" as part of their description of the grapple which meant it was effectively restrained, advantage on attacking it and disadvantage on it's attacks. IIRC he also gave the creature disadvantage to escape.

There were ... other things as well that would need more explanation but in the case of the grapple the DM was clearly ignoring the rules, there were no extra checks, no other resources such as an additional attack action expended. The player just had a bubbly personality, came up with descriptions the DM enjoyed, didn't bother following the rules.

That to me is no longer following the rules of the game. Whatever we call it, I think it is bad for gaming unless everyone is on board with it. D&D can already be a bit gonzo, I don't want to play a game where people do almost anything they want just because it sounds cool.

P.S. Again the way the DM ran the game wasn't inherently bad. It's just that out of the 4 players at the table, only 1 wanted to play that kind of game.

 

[TiQuinn]

So wait ... now you're saying the OP's statement is a strawman? Which means they're lying? Really?

They’re taking their bad experience and using it to justify a larger argument.

There were ... other things as well that would need more explanation but in the case of the grapple the DM was clearly ignoring the rules, there were no extra checks, no other resources such as an additional attack action expended. The player just had a bubbly personality, came up with descriptions the DM enjoyed, didn't bother following the rules.

Did you complain?