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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6142866" data-attributes="member: 5143">Yeah, he's my friend and lives with me...but he likes to rules lawyer a lot.  He argues about strange thing.  I've played with him in nearly every group I've played in for 20 years now.  I remember one game I ran where I ruled that even if you could breathe water, it didn't let you speak underwater.  So, I wouldn't let him use spells with verbal components while underwater.  He argued that given the lack of rules saying you CAN'T cast spells underwater, you should be able to.  He argued that the default should always be that you are allowed to do something unless the rules forbid it.  I told him I understood his point of view, but I was the DM and I was ruling that it didn't work.  He then proceeded to argue about it for the next hour or so.  He then brought it up again for the next year or so every time he'd get angry at any of my rulings.  He'd casually say "Oh, is this another situation like not being able to cast spells underwater where you just change the rules?"About a year and a half.  With him as the DM.  He joined our group around 6 months before that.  He played for 6 months(weekly) then decided that he'd really like to DM, so we gave him the chance.  But he's only DMing once a month and his sessions tend to only be about 4 hours long.  So, the total time played with him as the DM isn't huge.However, it's been abundantly clear how he DMs since the beginning.  A lot of it we've chalked up to him being a new DM and not understanding the rules well.  Jim has complained about it the WHOLE time, however.  Basically every session he makes fun of our DM for each and every mistake he makes, no matter how small.  If he forgets what bonus you get from flanking then Jim suddenly says "It's +2, which you'd know if you'd bothered to read the rules!"This has kind of been an ongoing issue.  Our DM pretty much telegraphs his intentions but Jim likes to ignore them.  One example is when we tried to get some items out of a city that was completely overrun with undead.  We ended up being trapped in a building.  The enemy was almost completely surrounding us.  Hoards and hoards of undead.  We were attacked by 4 Elites at once who were a couple levels above us and well as a bunch of minions.  Which we didn't know until we started attacking them.  Jim grumbled that the guidelines for encounters say you shouldn't use that many powerful enemies at once unless you want to kill the party.  The DM says out loud "Well, if it's that dangerous, then maybe you should run and find a better place to hide."  Jim refuses and insists on making a stand there.  We manage to kill 3 of the elites but we take a lot of damage.  We all decide to run.  However, Jim still refuses to follow us.  The DM points out that there is one side of the building that appears to be free from undead now and therefore we have an escape route.  He still refuses to go.  He points that there is are hundreds of undead out there and he can't hope to survive if he stays.  Jim asks if they are the same minions we've already fought.  The DM says yes.  He says that he has a power that lasts until the end of the encounter that does 3 points of damage to anything that becomes adjacent to him.  They only have melee attacks, so it is impossible for any of them to hurt him.  He insists on staying and taking on the whole army by himself.It's obvious that the DM is looking at it from the story point of view: "Look, there are hundreds of zombies, you should be scared and run".  While Jim looks at everything from a game mechanics point of view: "It's impossible for minions to get melee attacks against me, I can fight infinite of them."  Also, Jim refuses to acknowledge that argument happened.  Even to this day.  He insists he figured running away from the building was suicide and the entire rest of the party was stupid for doing so.  Incidentally, the DM allowed him to survive by climbing onto the roof and waiting until the morning.The same thing happened with the DM decided to run a combat against illusions created from our own mind.  There was this pollen that made us hallucinate.  But it was so realistic that we took real damage from it.  But he didn't make attack rolls or give us saves to determine if we saw the illusions or not.  He insisted we were in a forest that was filled with the pollen, so it was guaranteed to work.  Jim got really annoyed and insisted he couldn't take damage from things he KNEW weren't real and almost refused to write the damage on his character sheet.  After all, if the DM wasn't going to try to hit his will defense to see if he was affected by this pollen then he could break the rules as well.Our DM has done things like "A rock falls on you all, make acrobatic saves to get out of the way".  We're all "There's no such thing as an acrobatic save in the 4e rules" and he says "Well, then a Dex save".  We'd say "No, there's no Dex saves either.  We just have Reflex defenses.  Normally traps of this kind roll to hit our reflex defense."  Then he'd say, "Oh, then just make an acrobatics check to get out of the way."  Then you'd see a vein in Jim's neck pulse and he'd give me a look like "Why are we putting up with this?"</blockquote>

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