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

[Reynard]

The best solution to the Rule of Cool problem (if it is a problem for you) is to provide some sort of metacurrency that essentially ensures success (perhaps at a cost).

Rule of Cool is usually invoked when a player wants to do something not just cool, but dramatically appropriate for the narrative moment of the game. They want to charge the bad guy and go tumbling into the volcano with him, only to grab on to the ledge at the last second. they want to leap onto the dragon's back and hack away at it while it flies. They want to invoke the power of their magic to break the centuries old curse. Etc...

So, give them a tool to do so. maybe it is literally a one time thing. once, in the entire campaign, you get to do that one awesome thing. Maybe it comes with a cost: you give up a level of experience to do that awesome thing. Maybe they get 3 Cool Points per session because that's the kind of game you want. Whatever. the point is, when there is a mechanism in play for this, it no longer becomes about players scrounging for bonuses. It becomes about cool moments in the story of the game.

And yes, @Micah Sweet I am talking about the emergent story of the game.

 

[overgeeked]

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

The vast majority of modern referee advice boils down to “say yes or roll.” It’s even in the DMG.

 

[Remathilis]

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 neat, so I should be allowed to do it". That's a story reason, not a game reason.

Rule of cool, as far as I've ever seen it, is about doing cool things (not impossible things) which otherwise your character is not capable of doing due to rules and or physics.

The classic example I can think of is a PC opting to jump on a table during a fight and kick some food info the enemies face as part of an attack. It's not going to grant the PC any greater advantage than higher ground, but it's cinematic and cool. A by the rules DM would demand a jump/athletic check (with all the normal penalties of moving/standing jumps) to get on the table and an attack roll to kick the food. If the PCs fails the jump roll, he misses and may even fall prone and if he misses the kick roll, nothing happens. The net effect though is that if either roll misses, the PC looks foolish and might end up in a worse position (prone) so it isn't worth the effort to look cool. Stand in your 5 ft square and trade attack rolls. But the rule of cool DM probably just lets it happen with either a ridiculously low roll or none at all. The PC gets to look/feel cool even if the rules state a standing jump is DC= height x2 (with a penalty for not moving 20ft before the jump).

Rule of cool is likewise built into certain class features. Action surge? Cool. Evasion? Cool. They don't make sense logically but martial abilities often rely on cool (if magic or supernatural abilities aren't directly referenced) to function. You can strip out the rule of cool and have a game that functions on rules as physics, but that means either you rely heavier on magic to make up the cool OR you nerf everything back quite a bit.

I used martials since they are easier to explain, but casters suffer from rule of cool too, it's just called "creative spellcasting". If your wizard ever rode a Tenser's Floating Disc like a hoverboard, congrats, you just found the wizard's rule of cool.

 

[Willie the Duck]

The vast majority of modern referee advice boils down to “say yes or roll.” It’s even in the DMG.

I responded to an entire, multi-sentence block of text declaring that someone else was advocating never saying no, players always succeeding, and no challenges. That isn't what the person they were accusing of such a stand had advocated.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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

My main issue with RoC as stated is simply that it is, essentially, a narrative mechanic, where choices are made that have mechanical consequences at the table for story reasons. Very much not my bag.

 

[TwoSix]

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.

Modern D&D, inlcuding 5e, is, at its core, a neotrad game about displaying your character's prowess through combat, social, and exploration encounters. It is not, at its core, about an actual challenge.

 

[Oofta]

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.

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).

But there are DMs, like the one in my con game, who let PCs go significantly past what the rules allowed if it sounded cool. It was kind of annoying because one person that was really good at creating evocative visuals got very significant benefits while the rest of us were more-or-less by the rules didn't get those benefits. So you can't just say "Rule of cools is X" because different DMs will have different levels of what they will allow.

So a scenario: the PCs are in a room with two levels with the second level looking down on the first. The PC is on the second level and wants to leap onto the chandelier to grab it and attack the target while falling.

This isn't really covered directly by the rules, but the DM has to look at multiple factors.

1. Is the chandelier strong enough to hold the PC?
2. How far away is the chandelier from the second level ledge and what do the rules say about how far the PC can leap?
3. What are the odds of grabbing on to the chandelier and is it just part of their move, an action, an attack?
4. When they leap down do they have a bonus of some kind?
5. What happens when they land?

So using the rules, these are all improvised actions. We're told how to handle them.

#1 Is the chandelier strong enough to hold the PC? If you're uncertain, roll a D20. Personally I'd give someone a chance to make a determination of how likely the chandelier is to hold them with advantage if they have some appropriate proficiency like carpentry.

#2 How far away is the chandelier from the second level ledge and what do the rules say about how far the PC can leap? That's pretty standard jump check based on strength and depends on whether you have a running start. If there's a railing that's more of a judgement call but I'd probably make it difficult terrain that costs 5 foot of movement.

#3 What are the odds of grabbing on to the chandelier and is it just part of their move, an action, an attack? This is a bit tougher, but I'd make it an attack roll with target AC depending on type of chandelier. A simple, heavily built one is going to easier to grab than one with a ton of glass decorations. If you're trying to do this while still holding a weapon, you have disadvantage.

#4 When they leap down do they have a bonus of some kind? I'd probably give them advantage on whatever attack action they're attempting.

#5 What happens when they land? They'll likely take falling damage as appropriate since they're still falling. I sometimes grant an acrobatics check for relatively short falls to avoid going prone. It also likely ends their turn unless they do something like spend an action surge.

So is that rule of cool or just using the suggestions on improvised action? I think it's more the latter because nothing automatically happened, there was significant and obvious risk. It was cool, but as far as I'm concerned other than the acrobatics check to not fall prone which is a house rule I'm pretty much following the rules. Because the rules tell you that the rules can't possibly encompass everything.

 

[payn]

Modern D&D, inlcuding 5e, is, at its core, a neotrad game about displaying your character's prowess through combat, social, and exploration encounters. It is not, at its core, about an actual challenge.

*Its not about player survival sim skill challenge.

 

[The Firebird]

In general, I'm skeptical of DMs who say they use the Rule of Cool. Some of them end up using it pretty reasonably. But others end up with a kind of 'anything goes' mentality that makes it more about what cool sounding story you can tell than the actual game mechanics.

That style of play can work well, but is better served by a more narrative system--PbtA, FitD, the Free League stuff--where you're more interested in telling a cool story than in playing a game. I like both styles on their own, but am not a big fan of mixing them. If you have a more simulationist game system, then the adjudication should be more simulationist.

The vast majority of modern referee advice boils down to “say yes or roll.” It’s even in the DMG.

I have also seen this. I think it's in part an (over) reaction to a set of bad DM habits: killer DMs, railroading, DMPCs, and the like. The Rule of Cool seems like an easy way to give player agency back; but in the long run, it means the effects of player choices are less predictable, because they can be nullified at a whim.

Modern D&D, inlcuding 5e, is, at its core, a neotrad game about displaying your character's prowess through combat, social, and exploration encounters. It is not, at its core, about an actual challenge.

I agree with this perspective. I run a lot of AL games, and that's what the players are looking for. Come up with a character and watch them do cool things.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My main issue with RoC as stated is simply that it is, essentially, a narrative mechanic, where choices are made that have mechanical consequences at the table for story reasons. Very much not my bag.

That's absolutely fine. There's just no need to overstate the extent its normally being used ("player always succeeds" being a particularly hyperbolic way to put that) to express that dislike. Its absolutely a counter-simulationist procedure.

(As I noted, my objection is less about that than it is about it turning into yet another situation where the person who can play the GM better gets to do this sort of thing and those not so good at it don't. But this isn't the only place that can be a thing and I've complained about those in the past).