Most Amusing Rule Misinterpretation?

[WayneLigon]

Probably my most amazing rules blunder: in Third Edition Champions there existed for I think the first time the power Damage Reduction. Damage Reduction comes in six flavors; 25%, 50% and 75% levels for either Stun or both Stun and Lethal damage. It's applied after any armor or defences so that a 40 STUN hit could be reduced to 20 by armor, then have a further 50% taken off that before being applied to a character.

I read it the exact opposite way for years; there was precisely one character that had it, and he was a total terror for people to fight since he'd take off 75% of all damage applied to him then apply it to his very credible defences. See the difference here? He was an unstoppable juggernaut and they always had to find some way to beat him other than just pounding on him, since only massive combined attacks ever did any damage to him at all.

Boy was my face red when this was pointed out to me.

 

[tarchon]

The first time I played D&D, I thought hit points were equal to the number of hit dice. Seemed strange that everything died so fast.

 

[nameless]

Maybe out of the scope of this discussion, but nobody said it was an RPG rules interpretation. =D

When the card game for Legend of the Burning Sands (a spinoff of Legend of the Fire Rings, set in a pseudo-Arabia next door to Rokugan) first came out, the rulebook failed to include a really vital rule:

Those familiar with M:tG will understand this better, so I'll put it in shorthand. According to the original rulebook, your holdings (mana-producers) were just like every other card and was untapped and ready to be used right away, and could be used to immediately put out another holding until you had no more cards in hand. The game was incredibly unbalanced, because you drew 4 cards each turn, whoever got more raw resources at the start invariably won.

Only in the official errata was it noted that holdings came into play 'tapped' (I don't remember the specific term in LBS), and they couldn't be used until the turn after they came into play.

I guess you'll have to be a card gamer to really understand what that means, but it was a ridiculously broken game without that major rule added in.

 

[Duncan Haldane]

Back when I was in my final year of high school there was a group of first years playing AD&D. I noticed their characters had absurdly high hit points. When I questioned them about this they told me that the in the DMG it was written that when you killed a monster you got it's hitpoints.

They showed me the passage, which IIRC was attached to the XP chart, and I could see how they made the mistake. I'd have to look it up, but it was something to with XP for a creature being based on it's HD and HP. They had read the sentence and thought you gained XP based on the HD, and you gained the monster's HPs as well.

Duncan

 

[Elephant]

A friend once tried to convince me that, in 3.0, you could take a 5-foot step with Great Cleave!

 

[tsadkiel]

First time I ever roleplayed. Basic D&D. Keep on the Borderlands, fighting the minotaur. We thought that hit points meant the number of times you could be hit - basically, we had every hit doing 1 damage. The fight took a while, but surprisingly, we still won.

 

[Tuzenbach]

Back when I was in my final year of high school there was a group of first years playing AD&D. I noticed their characters had absurdly high hit points. When I questioned them about this they told me that the in the DMG it was written that when you killed a monster you got it's hitpoints.

They showed me the passage, which IIRC was attached to the XP chart, and I could see how they made the mistake. I'd have to look it up, but it was something to with XP for a creature being based on it's HD and HP. They had read the sentence and thought you gained XP based on the HD, and you gained the monster's HPs as well.

Duncan

YES! We did this, too, up until about 1994! LoL!

At the back of the 1E DM's guide in those sideways tables for monsters & stuff, there's blurbs next to each monster which says how many exp. the players got for killing the monster. But it was written like "4000 experience points + 4 per hit point".

We skillfully misinterpreted the above (and all others likewise) as meaning the party gets to divide 4000 experience points AND 4 HIT POINTS amongst its members. LoL! So that's how my 7th level dude ended up with 118 hit points!

 

[howandwhy99]

Back when I started playing in middle school my friends and I thought that experience totals were noncumulative. For at least 3 levels we began back at zero every time we leveled up.

 

[Zappo]

Back when I started playing in middle school my friends and I thought that experience totals were noncumulative. For at least 3 levels we began back at zero every time we leveled up.

I've seen another group do this as well (at least until I pointed out the mistake).

 

[Li Shenron]

When we started playing 3ed we were a group mostly made of newbies, and more than one player was sure to understand that spells/day worked so that you had to choose how many spells per day (among the ones you knew) you could cast on each day; so your 1st level Wizard had to choose every day 3 cantrips and a 1st-level spell from his spellbook, but was later able to cast them at will during the day. The players who had play previous D&D before were sure this wasn't the case and convinced the others, but it took quite some time, and obviously none of those newbie later played any spellcasters