Taking Rules to Their Illogical Extremes

[Fauchard1520]

The peasant rail gun. The bag of rats. The absurdity of minimalist disguises.

No sensible GM would allow this malarkey at a real table, but I've always always found great joy in taking rules to their illogical extremes. Most of the examples in my head come from D&D, but I'm curious what else is out there. What other "there's no explicit rule against it" type of shenanigans can you pull off?

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

A former player that was an inveterate power gamer told me about this one:


Just reading about it gives me a headache.

 

[jasper]

The bag of holding and portable hole trick arrow.

 

[Celebrim]

@Ralif Redhammer : Spike Growth has been totally broken in tons of ways since the 3e era. The spell itself needs patching, and if they have retained all of its problems into the 5e era then yeah, it's pretty stupid. You don't even need to optimize in any particular way to use that spell to break games.

 

[Staffan]

Back in 3e, the rules for cities lead to absurdities like Waterdeep having thousands of galleons, not to mention billions of chickens, for sale.

The trap making rules combined with the crafting rules meant that building a camouflaged pit trap would cost 600 gp in raw material and take a reasonably-skilled craftsman (+10) 45 weeks to build. That's for a 10 ft deep pit.

(These two are my favorite examples to bring up when demonstrating that detailed rules do not necessarily mean realistic rules.)

Oh, and in the original version of TORG, you could easily make a regular human character that could run 250 meters in one 10-second combat round. You wouldn't be able to keep up the pace for long, but still...

 

[Tony Vargas]

Most of the examples in my head come from D&D, but I'm curious what else is out there. What other "there's no explicit rule against it" type of shenanigans can you pull off?

The Champions! filibuster: soliloquys take no time, so you could eat a whole gaming session with your turn, just by speaking in character for a few hours.

 

[pemerton]

These all seem to be the result of treating the mechanics as the primary input into the resulting fiction, rather than as a way of adjudicating whether or not an intent for the fiction comes about.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

@Tony Vargas: No! Champions is the perfect game system! It can't possibly be abused...

Nah, I can't defend that.

One of my favourite Champions rules abuses is Mojito Man (or Woo Woo Woman; pick a cocktail best drunk from a banana lounge on a tropical beach somewhere.)

Basically it's mentalist who has sufficient telepathy to find a given target anywhere in the world. Once the target is located you start using you Scanners mind attack until the target's head explodes.

 

[Phion]

Once I planted a bag of beans all at once, As far as I or the DM could tell the there was no issue with this.

It was Storms king thunder and we needed a diversion with the stone giants. 2 pyramids later bursting from the ground and a range of other wacky scenarios such as 2 mummies killing a few of the giants its safe to safe to say I did my job.

 

[Tony Vargas]

No! Champions is the perfect game system!

Skill Inflation. Being a lawyer in Champions II: 2pts. Lawyer package in FRED: like 60+ points.

It can't possibly be abused...
Nah, I can't defend that.

The thing I like about the Champions! filibuster is that it's strictly a rules hole, there's no system mastery or crazy builds or anything involved, and, in-game, it does nothing (your approximately 1-3 second 'phase' doesn't take any longer, even if you're reading from a phonebook* for hours at the table), it just allows you to be a huge jerk and hold the session for ransom (and it really doesn't, anymore, the GM can unilaterally invoke cloture, but it's funny).

Basically it's mentalist who has sufficient telepathy to find a given target anywhere in the world. Once the target is located you start using you Scanners mind attack until the target's head explodes.

There was an article in an AC about the craziest things you could do (pre BBB, when you kept getting 1/2 points for successive disadvantages, and could theoretically get like a thousand CP or something), one of them was The Landlord: his base is the entire world, everyone (it was only like 4 billion people at the time) is purchased as an agent, fanatically loyal to him! Or maybe it was the whole galaxy, I forget.

There are also things you can do in Champions! just by taking an unintuitive special effect, that /sound/ whacked but are actually fine.