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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7656652" data-attributes="member: 4937">Which is why I challenged the notion that interpreting the rules is simple.  You are right.  If a rules interpretation or rule change is going to seriously inconvenience a player, a smart DM is going to initiate the conversation about the rules with the player and express his concerns even before he introduces a proposed fix.   For example, suppose you have been playing a 3e RAW campaign, and you as a player tend toward the more power gamer, competitive end of the spectrum (which is great, every table needs at least one), and you are playing a sniper character that breaks the game by being essentially undetectable.  You can fire and hide in the same turn, even against enemies with a very high spot check, but simply attacking from 120' away (or more), thereby per the RAW getting effectively a +24 bonus on your hide check.   The DM is getting frustrated as you are single handedly wiping out encounters meant for the whole group with no threat to yourself, and the DMs is getting tired of having to metagame against you in his encounter design.As a player, you've got a significant investment in this character.  Obviously, in fairness the DM needs to take that into consideration.   But equally in fairness, you know you're using a rules exploit, so you ought to expect at some point the DM to plug that hole.   The solution here is not to scream at the DM about what the rules say and demand you play only by the RAW, any more than the solution for the DM is to completely nerf your character by making it the qualifications for hiding basically impossible to meet.  One typical problem you run into here is when the rules are obviously bad, you have on one hand a player invested in 'winning' who believes that they have a right to get angry and challenge the DM, and on the other hand you have a DM who probably isn't a particularly good rules smith and believes he has a right to be angry about the player's power gaming and/or angry challenge.  Such is the stuff of internet horror stories.in general, challenging the DM will never come to anything good.  If you stay in the framework that regardless of what the DM did, it's your job to help, it will tend to work out a lot better.While I agree with the general idea, D&D is not and can never be a purely competitive game.  The DM has way to much power.   It's in the power of any DM to create impossible scenarios where the PC's couldn't possibly triumph.   A moderately clever DM can do it with the suggested level of resources simply by putting them together in combinations.   The rule book is there for a reason, but that reason is not and can never be to ensure balance between the DM and the players, as if the DM and the players are in competition.   Beating the players as a DM isn't your job and by and large is something you hope not to do.   As such, the rules also belong to the DM.   Sure, a smart DM consults with his players, but ultimately it's the DM's call.   And that's usually pretty explicitly called out in the text of the rules, so there is no sense in which a player can legitimately stand on the rules either, since those same rules provide for the DM modifying the rules.  All that said, it's not usually rules per se that really trigger table arguments.   Most table arguments are about rulings in ambiguous cases, fictional positioning, gotchas, GMs trying to tell players how to play their characters, or players trying to tell the GM how to run their game, or players trying to promote guidelines or flavor text to the level of rules.</blockquote>

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