In-game debates and rules disputes: What do you do about them?

[Henry]

I believe the law is the authority, the officer is an enforcer of the law and is bound to it, not vise versa.

However, the starting analogy is not entirely accurate; the DM is not the enforcer, the DM is the Judge (the original term was referee, anyway), whose job is to interpret the law, and an RPG is more like a constitution than a Hammurabic code. The job of the DM has changed lots over the years, but one thing that never changed even through 3E was his role as final arbiter.

 

[Celebrim]

A charge is an action that lets you move 120 feet (or so, less if you are heavily armored), usually starting from a standing start, and attack within a 6 second time frame.

Under who's rules?

You must move before your attack, not after. You must move at least 10 feet (2 squares) and may move up to double your speed directly toward the designated opponent.

Let's be clear about what a charge is under the rules. A charge is not 40 yards in 6 seconds, which is a very fast run. A charge is for characters of average speed, 20 yards in 6 seconds which is a moderate jog. In other words, a person charging is running the 100 yard dash in just about half of a minute, less a second or two to haul off and hit something. If the person is in platemail, a charge is about 13 yards in 6 seconds, which is nothing but a fast walk. For balance reasons, the game does not allow you to charge at a dead run (x3, x4 or x5 speed). I suppose it would be a nice feat to let you increase your charge distance at the cost of increasing penalties to your AC, or if you were a particularly generous DM you might just let 'reckless charges' be a combat manuever and have a feat that improved your ability to do it. I haven't done that yet, but now that I mention it, I like the sound of it because normally when we think of a 'charge' we think of people running thier full speed.

At least under the RAW, they aren't.

How fast is 20 yards in 6 seconds? Just under 7 mph. That's above walking speed, but well under the 17 mph attained by say a middle school athlete running the 100 yard dash, to say nothing of the 21 mph attained by an olympic athelete. A character that actually could charge 40 yards in 6 seconds has a base speed of 60 ft., which translates (with the Run feat) into the superhuman top speed of 34 mph - just slower than say your average farm horse or hunting dog.

That kind of speed already stretches credulity.

Yes it does, if you weren't creating a straw man by doubling the speed involved I'd think you had a reasonably good argument. But the fact of the matter is that you can sprint the 400 yard dash around a corner without appreciable loss of speed, and you can run a pattern across a football field flat out and still manage to curve your stride. It certainly doesn't force you down to 7 mph to go around a curve.

You see, that's where you just aren't paying attention to what the rules give you.

The irony of that would be amusing, except that the irony of your position has kind of worn on me by now. But anyway, why should the realism matter to you? Should the fact that the rules sometimes produce ubsurd results when followed to thier letter ever be a factor in the way you arbitrate the game? I mean, should the fact that an octagonal track could be sized such that a character of only average athletic ability in chainmail and an unencumbered olympic sprinter would run around it at exactly the same speed bother you in any way? If it does, do you say to your PC's, "Even though this may never come up in the game again, we can't change the rule to let you win the race because we don't change house rules in the middle of the game. That's a rule, and if we broke the rules we wouldn't be playing D&D would we?"

 

[DonTadow]

Bias aside, your ball example is indeed fairly close to the truth. I didn't say that a GM who makes up bad rules or silly rules calls is a good GM. No one here did. I'm not sure if that was where this comment was heading, but I wanted to make that clear. Also, in the "Minotaur Charging in an arc" example, I think that GM made a bad call. However, the point I have been arguing is that it is the GM's call to make, good or bad. The players can point it out, or bring it up after game, or even walk if they don't like the ruling.

My table rules are generally thus:

1. I try to be fair. I'm out to have fun with you, not at your expense.
2. I will generally follow the rules. Sometimes I'll need to make judgement calls, and sometimes I'll fudge something a bit.
3. Don't argue with me at the table. Feel free to point out that I made a mistake, but accept my ruling until after game. Then we can talk about it and come to a decision.
4. When in doubt, the GM is right.
5. If you don't like the above rules, you don't have to play in my game. If the group doesn't want to play in my game, that's fine, someone else can GM. I'm perfectly happy as a player.

So as to your example, if people don't want to play in my game, we can just use someone else's ball.

And to be fair, your ball example is inherently flawed. If folks don't want to play the kids way, he could just let them use the ball and play the way they want. If folks don't want to play my game, I have no ball to let them use.

---devil's advocate--- I don't think that most of the DMs whom agree with position of the DM has the last word and it is final are bad DMs. I think that they are acting like good police officers (man I'm going to regret bringing up another police officer analogy)
Despite however you disagree with the officer's interpretation of the law, he is authority on it and you have to pretty much go with what he says. The law, puts him in authority of the law at time of arrest (time the incident is brought up). The police officer does not have time to pull out Smith vs. Brown or Johnson vs. Mino, they have to make a snap decision to defuse the situation (continue the game). Society works great like this. Yes there area ton of messups, (and yes i have been on the other end of those messups) but without a system of authority we would fall into chaos. Plus we acn always appeal our case to the courts (enworld) even though they lack authority they do give cops (dms) and players (convicts) incite into how the law is interpreted ona broad scale.

 

[Celebrim]

However, the starting analogy is not entirely accurate; the DM is not the enforcer, the DM is the Judge (the original term was referee, anyway), whose job is to interpret the law, and an RPG is more like a constitution than a Hammurabic code. The job of the DM has changed lots over the years, but one thing that never changed even through 3E was his role as final arbiter.

Correct. I would like to add that the role of the DM is not only arbiter, but explicitly legislator. The DM not only interprets the rules - but unlike a judge - has the explicit authority to make up new rules on the spot. There is no one in this thread (well, maybe not noone, but certainly very few people) who have made the claim that the rules are so comprehensive that the DM never has to make up new rules on the spot to cover situations which have not been anticipated. So the for the most part, the role of the DM to be legislator is not being quibbled over.

The real question is how much authority the DM has as legislator. One side feels that the DM explicitly needs the consent of the governed. The other side believes that consent in implicitly (and often explicitly) given when you appoint someone to be the DM and agree to play in his game. As a side note, the scenes related to D&D are the one thing I really like about the movie ET (and they are an even bigger part of the novelization of the movie).

The 'law centered' side of the debate is claiming that fairness is maximized when laws are not changed without the expressed permission of the governed. Thier argument is that 'fairness' is defined by the players ability to plan and anticipate thier actions based on their knowledge of the rules in the same fashion that a person must know the rules in order to play say chess, bloodbowl, football, or DBM - and that changing those rules on the spot violates thier ability to plan. I would fully agree if I believed that an RPG was a competitive game that was completely equatable to chess, bloodbowl, football, or DBM and that the DM's job was no different than a referee in those games. But, of course I don't feel that that is a good analogy.

On the other hand, the 'chaotic' side of the debate - which I guess I'm the most bombastic member of - is claiming that fairness is maximized when fairness itself is maximized, and that while the rules are very valuable indeed, there are going to be situations where the rules just aren't fair because they disallow the PC's from doing something which is perfectly reasonable. Maximizing the adherance to the laws doesn't necessarily lead to fairness, because the laws aren't perfect and they aren't comprehensive. I am arguing that the implicit contract involved in an RPG isn't that it follows a set of rules, but that it is some sort of simulation and that the contract is violated not when the rules are violated but when the DM's rulings violate the ordinary sense of what is fair and reasonable within the context of what is being simulated. Thus, the rules for example for running should closely match peoples expectations for what can be achieved in a run. The designers of the rules designed them precisely to the standard that they would produce results that seemed reasonable and fair based on people's own experiences and expectations. By 3rd edition, the rules have gotten pretty good and most of the time this is the case.

I am arguing that for many PC's, their sense of fairness isn't necessarily violated when the rules are broken, but rather when the DM's ruling - whether based in the rules or not - violates thier expectations about what is fair. If a rule in game produces a blatantly unrealistic result that lies well outside a person's ordinary expectations, then they are going to feel that they are being treated unfairly whether its the rules or not. If a player feels that they've been treated unfairly, you can't just say, "Them's the rules, now suck it up." As a DM you have to address the fact that sometimes the rules aren't fair, and that often a PC that raises that issue has a valid point.

So far, I imagine that at least as far as that goes, most everyone agrees with me. I would imagine that if in a game, even the most hidebound DM here, if a rule came up in play that was grossly unfair to a PC, would quickly (or not so quickly) hash out a solution that all parties felt was acceptable. So to that extent, we see that even the 'law side' of the debate agrees that fairness is more important than following the rules. Furthermore, I would hope, that every DM and player here admits that when hashing out this new solution that the DM is the final arbiter. Whatever he decides should of course take into account the PC's concerns, but ultimately the PC doesn't get to decide what the rule is and what should happen because that is the DM's job.

But its at this point that the big disagreement comes up. I believe that the DM can and should do this even when the ruling at least in the short term disadvantages the PC's, because the DM - if he truly represents a neutral arbiter of the game - is not merely ruling in favor of the PC's whenever it happens that the rules of the game are unfair to them, but whenever he decides that the rules of the game are unfair period - even if it so happens that just at this time its going to place the PC's at a slight disadvantage. If the ability of the DM to change the rules on the fly is completely limited to when the player's think its fair, then the DM isn't truly being impartial at all and he is in fact reduced to merely being the instrument of the PC's will and desires. If that's the case, I'd just as soon prefer that the PC's play with out a DM at all, as I have no real interest in being relagated to the role of Santa Claus. In fact, if that's the sort of games which are to be played, then I have no interest in RPG's at all - as games like chess, bloodbowl, and football are far more interesting as competitive games than RPG's can ever be and I have no interest in holding any degree of authority over a DM when I'm a PC either. The game just stops being compelling for me when it becomes nothing more than a set of rules, and the DM nothing more than an intrument by which the PC's are fulfilling thier ego trips. To me, such games are the unbalanced inverse of the situation in which a DM starts treating the NPC's as favored beings, boasting and showing off his power as DM as if it was really anything of substance, and begins to abuse the PC's in order to satisfy thier own egotistical streak.

RPG's are an enherently cooperative game that IMO work best when the player's agree to cede final authority to the DM, and the DM in turn agrees to let the PC's be the protagonists (rather than mere props), to not abuse the his power, and to tell an entertaining and compelling story. Both groups work together to create a story. The DM provides the setting, the antagonists, the challenges, and the minor characters - the player's play the protagonists and shape the story in interesting ways by the choices they make and they amusing commentary and conversation they provide. The system falls apart when either side starts demanding too much authority over the other one. DM's should almost never tell players what thier characters do. This takes away the players free choice, and ultimately makes the game less fun for the DM because the whole point of having player's is that they do surprising things that you yourself would have never thought of. PC's should not tell the DM what happens or is supposed to happen as the result of anything, because this takes away the DM's ability to judge and ultimately makes the game less fun for them because the whole point of having a DM is that they don't know what is going to happen next and they have a person at the table who doesn't judge what should happen next by what they want to happen next.

(For those of you that are DS9 fans, think about theme of the pilot episode.)

 

[werk]

And to be fair, your ball example is inherently flawed. If folks don't want to play the kids way, he could just let them use the ball and play the way they want. If folks don't want to play my game, I have no ball to let them use.

That's the point, the kid is never going to let the other kids use his ball, period.

Just drawing analogies, I'm not saying anyone is wrong, and your guidelines match up pretty well with mine (and most people I've played with), even if they are described a little aggressively.

Everybody play fair and have a good time, that's the ideal.

I don't think the problem is when the DM steps up and fills in the blanks or smooths over rough stops, the problem is when the DM changes rules mid-stream or has horrible, unyielding interpretations of the rules. Or says there are no rules other than what I decide, which to me is ridiculous. If you (figurative you) want to house rule something, that's perogative, but it should be consistant and established...i.e. made a rule.

I personally have very very few house rules (that are intentional).

Yes the other kids should go get their own ball if they are not having fun, but emotions and interpersonal relationships muddy that water pretty well. If you are playing a one-off with strangers, walk, easy decision.

 

[moritheil]

Celebrim - Pity fool that tries to be witty instead of laying out his argument in a logical, coherent manner. He thinks he is smart, but being the loudest vessel, one can only presume that he is the emptiest one.

...

Then again, it seems that expecting honour, decency and fairness of others is too high an expectation for me to have these days.

Does anyone else find irony in someone opening a post by calling someone else a fool, ranting about their shortcomings for a few paragraphs, and closing by asking why there is no decency or fairness on the boards?

 

[IcyCool]

That's the point, the kid is never going to let the other kids use his ball, period.

As I said, your example is biased. And flawed. A closer analogy would be if the ball was permanently attached to the kid. Something the others kids couldn't use unless he was there.

At any rate, it sounds like we are (mostly) in agreement.

 

[werk]

Does anyone else find irony in someone opening a post by calling someone else a fool, ranting about their shortcomings for a few paragraphs, and closing by asking why there is no decency or fairness on the boards?

This message is hidden because Celebrim is on your ignore list.

He lost me a while back

 

[Nail]

Quote:
A charge is an action that lets you move 120 feet (or so, less if you are heavily armored), usually starting from a standing start, and attack within a 6 second time frame.

Under who's rules?

One might presume magic (such as Expeditious Retreat) is involved. Still, once magic is involved, how is credulity stretched?

 

[Nail]

He lost me a while back

Don't worry, werk. I've post the relevant quotes for you.