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

[Remathilis]

And, as always, there are other games out there specifically designed to emulate that kind of play rather than being poorly tacked onto D&D. Check out the action-adventure RPG Outgunned for pure action movie rule of cool mayhem.

Oh sure. I just point out a LOT of people* who want Cool, action movie martials and dramatic spellcasting would be very upset if we went back to fighters without action surge, rogues without evasion and fireballs who expanded to fill the volume and incinerate the rest of the party.

* Obviously, AD&D fans wouldn't. That ruleset is as "uncool" as you can be in terms of action movie logic.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But the OP's example of high jumping 30 feet? Not going to happen in a game I'm running.

Agree, and mine either, but that shows how the OP was misrepresenting "rule of cool". It's never (in my experience) about just violating the rules - we already have rules saying how high you can jump and so on. It's making stuff that fits (i.e. "is cool") possible. I find his example to be... unlikely. I don't really think it happened the way he describes - I suspect the DM probably didn't see the distance as being as far as he did, for example, and quite a high roll may well have been made.

3.XE for example, if you stuck to RAW, was often pretty bad here, because you tended to need multiple rolls to achieve things which were never going to more than moderately effective - like a DM following RAW might want a check to leap and grab the chandelier (some might even want one for each), then another to attack (RAW at a large penalty, quite likely - probably -4), then assess a small (sometimes unreasonably small) amount of damage, then make the enemy make a save to see if they're knocked down, then make the PC make a check to land properly. Rule of cool approaches would tend to combine that into one or two rolls (quite likely just the attack and the NPC saving throw). Because every roll you add, in a binary pass/fail system like D&D, the odds of total failure increase drastically (this isn't true of all games, note, because many don't use binary pass/fail approaches).

 

[Umbran]

Mod Note:
@Micah Sweet @deadman1204 @Ruin Explorer

Please cut out the aggressive bickering.

Micah and deadman, in particular - you seem to not actually be listening much to folks who disagree with you, and that's quickly becoming a problem.

In general, we expect you all to treat each other with a modicum of respect. Please don't fail to meet that expectation.

 

[deadman1204]

Agree, and mine either, but that shows how the OP was misrepresenting "rule of cool". It's never (in my experience) about just violating the rules - we already have rules saying how high you can jump and so on. It's making stuff that fits (i.e. "is cool") possible. I find his example to be... unlikely. I don't really think it happened the way he describes - I suspect the DM probably didn't see the distance as being as far as he did, for example, and quite a high roll may well have been made.

Your saying I'm disengenuous because what some people say and think is not what you say and think?
Fairily certain this thread has established that many different tables approach the "rule of cool" differently.

 

[overgeeked]

Oh sure. I just point out a LOT of people* who want Cool, action movie martials and dramatic spellcasting would be very upset if we went back to fighters without action surge, rogues without evasion and fireballs who expanded to fill the volume and incinerate the rest of the party.

* Obviously, AD&D fans wouldn't. That ruleset is as "uncool" as you can be in terms of action movie logic.

We’ve played AD&D with action movie, rule of cool logic. It all depends on the referee and the players. It’s not our long-term default, but we’ve done it. All it takes is a little imagination and describing things in a cool way. If your fighter swings and hits and is boring, that’s on your players. If your fighter rolls and hits and goes off on a John Wick-style description of the action and is exciting, that’s also on your players. The “cool” does not have to exist in the game’s rules to exist in your game at your table. It mostly comes down to player descriptions and the referee not getting in the way by insisting every little thing be a roll.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Rule of Cool is a shorter way of emulating action movie level physics. It's swinging from the chandelier, walking away with the explosion in the background, or kicking the foe over the rail to their doom. You can remove that from D&D, but you pretty much cripple martial characters and weaken casters (with far more needed to begin to balance it) with it.

How so? It's not like you can't do those things otherwise. You just need it to make sense by some metric other than, "it would be neat, so I should be allowed to do it". That's a story reason, not a game reason.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Fairily certain this thread has established that many different tables approach the "rule of cool" differently.

I mean, not really - for example it looks like Payn, Oofta, Cordwainer Fish and I all run "rule of cool" fairly similarly, doesn't it?

I'm not seeing any really out-there interpretations except yours, to be real. Also, again you've dragged in other factors which have nothing to do with rule of cool, which has muddied the waters and raises questions about what you're describing by "rule of cool".

 

[Micah Sweet]

Oh sure. I just point out a LOT of people* who want Cool, action movie martials and dramatic spellcasting would be very upset if we went back to fighters without action surge, rogues without evasion and fireballs who expanded to fill the volume and incinerate the rest of the party.

* Obviously, AD&D fans wouldn't. That ruleset is as "uncool" as you can be in terms of action movie logic.

Count me in as an uncool AD&D fan then.

 

[Dausuul]

My approach with "cool moves" that go outside the established rules is to require some sort of check, and impose a significant consequence on failure. If you try to do a crazy vault into the air, I might have you roll Athletics. Succeed, and you get where you wanted to be, within reason. Fail, and you fall prone and lose your action for the turn.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I've been seeing alot of instances of "The rule of cool" in games, and while it seems neat at first, I've started to think its actually bad for the players and the game. It lets any one player do practically anything they want, cheating the other players who may have actual abilities and tools to solve the problem.

A recent example in a game I was in was one player spent several rounds being up high on pillars and stuff and jumped onto the back of a dragon the bbeg was riding. Another player who had the mcguffin to kill the bbeg wanted up, but didn't wanna spend time moving around. So they used a 5ft stick to somehow polevault up 30 feet (with zero lateral movement) into the bbeg's face.
That sure was neat for the player who suddenly developed divine levels of pole vaulting skills, but sure wasn't that great for the player who spent time up above, and all the rest of the party who might've also had ways to solve the problem.

With "the rule of cool", you never have to run away or play the right class or do the right thing. Just make up a epic sounding thing and the dm will go along with it. While they make an encounter fun for that player, these actions strip everyone else of both agency and utility. Why spend time on special class abilities or items when someone else can suddenly be 10x better than you because the idea "sounds cool". Effectievely the bar for winning gets so low that victory starts to lose meaning with "the rule of cool". You never have to run away or regroup because you can suddenly to epic anime crap to overcome any problem. How is winning fun if you cannot actually lose?

emphasis added.
I think the bolded clause is the fundamental issue here. In the specific situation where the DM automatically goes along with any suggestion the players make that sound epic, then rule of cool will outperform other methods of achieving success. However, that's true of any situation where the DM won't say no -- be that rule of cool or giving the players all the magic items they want or using any busted 3pp character options the players want to use or just plain refusing to pull the trigger on killing a PC/party when the situation ends up with that as the outcome. It isn't specific to Rule of Cool, and is only applicable to Rule of Cool if and when the DM doesn't say no.

I think there's a spectrum between "always say yes" which is associated to the rule of cool and "if it's not in the rules it ain't happening".

I think that's the fundamental issue. Is 'rule of cool' universally 'always say yes?' If it is, is it 'always say yes (with no reasonable qualifiers, checks, failure chances, or requirements-- just whatever the player suggests, no further thought or discussion)?' I ask because, if it is, it seems to overlap perfectly with '(player) authorial fiat', and 1) then I'm not sure why we have two phrases for the same thing, and 2) I haven't run into any tables where this happens. Even games with specific mechanics for players authoring gameplay event outcomes tend to have mechanical gates like Fate Point/Stress Point cost and limits and the like.

I am not a "Rule of Cool" guy - though I do agree with @Cordwainer Fish's characterization of an approach to trying things - however, I do think it is either disingenuous or misguided to say that "the rule of cool" is simply about negotiating how to proceed with something and not about the coolness factor. (I mean, "cool" is in the name!).

Yes, the characterization of "whatever seems cool always works and you always win" is also way off base - but in my experience of RoC, the purported "coolness" has been the primary factor in determining if the character can accomplish X thing, either at all or determining the difficulty.

I think this is going to depend on the group. For me, "cool" is in the name specifically because it's the kind of thing (not otherwise covered in the rules) that people want to try in the first place.

Honestly, I think everything else is going to spool off of that 'depending on group' clause. Some groups are going to have people suggest wacky shenanigans (in place of actual reasonable strategy) and expect to succeed; other groups people are going to suggest wacky shenanigans because it's perfectly emergent from the situation, do so because it would be enjoyable to try, and expect not automatic success but instead simply a reasonable hearing out of why the attempt should be allowed (despite no rules to cover it). Exactly how frequent each scenario is is undoubtedly unknown to everyone here; and I suspect how frequent each of us thinks really happens hinges mostly on our optimism/pessimism on how frequently we believe hypothetical other gamers are trying to get away with something, as it were.

The example I frequently see used is the cliche chandelier swinging. For some people, the mere presence of a chandelier means they want to swing on it and get some bonus for doing so because it is cool (I have seen many people say variations of this on ENWorld in the last 5 years alone, leaving aside the decade I was a regular on the boards in the early 2000s).

It's cliche because it's a common (type) of disjunct. swinging on the chandelier and maybe knocking over a small group of low-threat enemy henchmen is a common fiction trope in the genre media lots of people come to gaming with. It's not something covered in a lot of game rules. Firstly for the complexity and massive number of potential disparate possible actions (and are we going to have a rule for each of these iconic situations?). Secondly because a lot of games were developed with a level of quasi-realism (lower-case sim) for non-magical activity which registers below even swashbuckling and cliffhanger genre fiction.

This is what bugs me most about how so many run 5th ed (and the way the game was designed). A 5th ed game is the story about how your characters will win. All dm advice, the structure of the game (literally impossble to accidentally kill a character over lvl 2) and such all feeds into making victory inevitable.

There is some DM advise which can read this way. Other than that, I'm not sure how 5e really does this. Mind you, the default rules are dialed towards the far 'easy-mode' end of the spectrum, and sometimes it's hard to maintain verisimilitude while keeping the party from performing another resource-refresh (doom clocks for every adventure, etc.). However, beyond a default to easy, I don't see exactly what makes victory (or even success) inevitable. PCs can still hit dead ends, run out of options, piss off the wrong people (who can pursue them and not let them recover), or take on challenges they shouldn't have attempted.

Why is it bad for the DM to say "NO"? DMs don't say no enough. The rules are not faulty if a player cannot solve a problem. Maybe they need something else, or its a teamwork option, or many other things.
You keep approaching this that ALL challenges MUST be overcome and won by the party, and any rule that prevents this is bad. This means that there are no challenges,

This just plain isn't something anyone has been advocating, stating, or promoting.