In 8 hours of gaming...

[CRGreathouse]

In my group, there's almost no arguing... I'm both the resident rules lawyer and the DM!

 

[Vhane]

durath: Id wager pencil fights are to first blood no real point otherwise.

 

[Henrix]

Like many of the others, I am prime rules lawyer, and DM. That helps.
A couple of my players are rules lawyers as well, but we generally manage to keep discussions at other times. So many potential rules problems are already detected and solved when we sit down to play.

 

[dagger]

Sheesh man, life is too short for this kind of garbage..

Arg... I wanna be a part of all of your groups!!!

We have a player in our group who has just admitted that he likes rules debates during the game. I'd go so far to say that he prefers them, but that's just my opinion, not his words. He's admitted to preferring complex rules systems when I said I had issues with Song & Silence needing 2 pages to handle garrotting rules. Of course, he's really good at math, so he can handle those kinds of systems far better than I can (He loves Dangerous Journeys).

Unfortunately, every single time something comes up in the game that he doesn't like or agree with (flanking's stupid, it doesn't work that way in real life; Power Attack should be limited to 5 or the weapon's maximum damage, if a 20th level character catches another high level character unarmored he can cause too much damage) or any time we find with something vague in the rules, a rules debate starts. The debates don't even have to be strictly rules oriented. We recently wasted an hour debating whether or not an outsider (a nightmare) can be turned into a Vampire! I'm perfectly happy to trust the DM with his ideas and follow up on them in game, but any time something different comes up, he has to argue about it, which in turn destroys any kind of mystery the DM may be trying to create with a cool new creature or idea. Unfortuantely, I allow myself to get drawn into them once they start, which draws out the debate even longer (since we both have very different ideeas on what's good in an RPG).

So how much time do we spend debating rules for every 8 hours of game time? At the very least 2 hours, sometimes more than 4 or 5 hours... (Never in his campaign though... the only thing that slows that down is his lack of preparation and the fact that he has the attention span of a fruit fly with ADD).

 

[Piratecat]

Steve is an individual who won't shut up about anything. He starts telling stories about campaigns he was in eight years ago when someone does something that reminds him of them. He interrupts the DM to tell him how he would resolve things. He tells us about his other characters. If everyone else is busy or won't listen, he will walk into the other room because 'it wasn't his turn' .... The DM can't control him - or won't.

You, my friend, need your Dm to implement and enforce a Pig.

The Pig is a piggybank we keep on the gaming table. Once the game is started, we have a system of fines in place:

$.05 - ooc pun
$.10 - Out of game comment ("You see that TV show?")
$.25 - unrelated war story (anything regarding an old character or game. This is the big sin.)

Fines are used by the DM to by soda for everyone. It's a constant reminder to keep our minds on the game! And it works like a charm.

 

[Paul_Klein]

We probably spend about 10 mins during an 8 hour session looking up rules.

 

[TBoarder]

The best solution to a problem like that is to start a new campaign, and not invite that player. No hard feelings; he just gets his kicks a different way to everyone else.

Part of me wishes this was a possibility, but this is a campaign that we've been playing for over 10 years. Plus there's the fact that he's the DM's roommate...

We've just explicitly told him that we hate rules debates (Took us long enough, huh? ), so hopefully we'll see a change this week... hey, I'm an optimist.

 

[novyet]

In my first 3rd Edition campaign about 10-30 minutes as we were still learning the rules.
In the second and the one I run, it's about 5-15 minutes.

In the 2e campaign I'm in, in a 5-6 game session 2-4 hours is wasted on discussions and rules arguing. I always feel like it's a waste of my time anymore.