Balanced Gaming through Rule-Lawyering?

[Renaissance Man]

Curious to know - how frequently do you refer to the rulebooks in-game? Does your group have a policy around this? Which books, if any, are your players prohibited from consulting? How do you resolve technical fouls? (Two rounds later: "Uh, DM, according to the spell desciption, I believe I should have been entitled to a saving throw...") And how does all of this affect your game?

 

[Magius del Cotto]

We only consult the rulebooks when we level or have something that none of us knows how to handle and we really need to know (like how to handle certain parts of combat for my martial-arts based fighter). It works pretty well, since everyone's pretty smart and understand how the rules work.

 

[Dagger75]

Lately my group has advanced to 13/14 level and we are in the spells we hardly saw. We are consulting the books a little more than usual right now. I let my players look at any splat book and the PHB.

The druid uses the MM for when he wild shapes and his new favorite thing summoning earth elementals.

 

[Garmorn]

My group well consult the books during the game on two occansions. The first is when we need to know the correct way to do some and waiting until latter is not an option and two when it is important and not interfer with the flow of the game. Other wise we wait until a break/after the game to look it up.

The playes use/read ever book that is being used in the game. After all the PC would have some knowlage of what the basic rules of the universe is.

 

[Renaissance Man]

Garmorn - every book? So the MM isn't off limits to the players either? Do you find that leads to a lot of metagaming?

 

[shouit]

I have played around with banning books at the table, all save for the PHB and it seems to work. I have a rules lawyer in my group and it is sometimes hard for me to deal with, but I am getting the hang of him. It was he that caused this rule to be put in place in the first place. I remember when there was a hydra and his character died and he got mad because it was a higher CR then his character. He also gets upset when the balance of magic items does not match with the PHB average money value of items that characters of certain levels should have.

Banning books at the gaming table is a good idea...

 

[broghammerj]

We consult the rules whenever one of us has some sort of question about an event that occured. It really doesn't affect game flow because you tend to check something during someone elses action.

I myself tend to be a rules lawyer but it comes with the experience of playing for many years. I just can't help myself. The key to being a good lawyer is defending the "law." I bring up rules that hurt the PCs all the time as well as helping us out. "A DM, I believe that monster is immune to piercing weapons, etc."

The MM is not banned by our group, but the players generally don't read it. You should have seen our group of 11th level characters bolt at the description of CR 8 monster that no one knew. Not because we didn't know its weakness, the description just sounded so horrible. I don't have the MM with me so I can't look up the monsters name.

The fluffy material out of FR guide is also generally off limits out of courtesy to the DM on behalf of the players.

 

[Saeviomagy]

shouit - that sounds like a whinging bastard, not a rules lawyer - you should have pointed out that CR's and character wealth levels are a guide for the DM, not a hard-and-fast rule.

 

[Garmorn]

Garmorn - every book? So the MM isn't off limits to the players either? Do you find that leads to a lot of metagaming?

Yes they look at the Monster manual. Over half of my group also DM or create stuff like spell list that give the book spells are in.

As for as metagaming, no I have had little or no problems with that even from by power gamer who does not like to roleplay.

They are very good about staying in character and will even correct another player who accidently steps out of character and says something that the character would not know.

 

[dead_radish]

I have played around with banning books at the table, all save for the PHB and it seems to work. I have a rules lawyer in my group and it is sometimes hard for me to deal with, but I am getting the hang of him. It was he that caused this rule to be put in place in the first place. I remember when there was a hydra and his character died and he got mad because it was a higher CR then his character. He also gets upset when the balance of magic items does not match with the PHB average money value of items that characters of certain levels should have.

As above - that's not rules lawyering. That's whining, and being a moron.

So how do you deal with anything not in the main book? If the rules lawyer says "I'm playing a duelist, and I get +1 to my ac for every level," and you don't know the duelist off the top of your head, do you just ban it? Do you just accept it? This seems like a bad policy to me. It would lead to a huge amount of arguments over anything not in the PHB, or just arbitrary fiat by the DM (which is allowed, but I'd be a bit pissed if every time something happened, the DM just ruled off the top of his head when there was a perfectly good (and probably tested) system in place. Especially if it was something I had based my character on...)

This seems to me like it would create far far more friction and abuse.