Why Rules Lawyering Is a Negative Term

[Celebrim]

That, in essence, is the exact problem. The perfect is the enemy of the good. We see the ouroboros of instant replay with American football spreading to other sports, and that's the problem.

People want things to be perfect, but we live in an imperfect world. So the question becomes, "How much are you willing to sacrifice to make things a little better, in terms of compliance with the rules?"

Because what people don't recognize is that replay always, always, always comes with a cost.

In a lot of ways, you are preaching to the choir here, and I want to be shouting out, "Amen, brother. Preach the word!", and not just with respect to sports.

And with respect to American football, you are totally correct. Video review in American football is chasing after perfection, because that's always been the culture of American football. Referees in football for example after making a call give both elaborate hand signals and verbal clarification to the spectators to explain the call on the field as if the spectators were kings sitting in review of the proceedings. And the rule book for American football is not only the longest for any sport in the world, but gets changed yearly by committee to try to make it perfect.

But the situation in soccer is nothing like this. The situation in soccer has been up until really recently that things like "The Hand of God Goal" are just part of the sport, the referee is accountable to no one, and having every game that is actually competitive determined by questionable refereeing and/or bribery is just part of the sport and there is nothing you can do about.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Rules lawyering is the antithesis of the spirit of the game. That's why they are universally disliked. What do I mean by that? The most important rule of any game is that it's a social form of entertainment. People are there to have fun. Every edition that I know of has some sort of call out how if everyone at the table agrees, then no rule should ever make you dislike playing the game. The rules lawyer is against that. In fact, they demand that their interpretation of the rule matter more than anything else, even if it's disrupting, causing angst, and detracting from the fun of anyone else at the table. And as you mention, unlike real lawyers, they are only doing it for their own benefit.

Rules are important. They help ensure consistent game experiences. But to use rules lawyering (often for spurious interpretations of said rule and/or intentionally ignoring the context of how all of the rules fit together) to find loopholes for personal gain? There is a reason why they have the reputation they have in gaming. A person has every right to be a rules lawyer, and every right to play the game how they want. They do not have the right to suck the fun out of everyone else though.

 

[cmad1977]

If you don’t trust my call, leave my table. That’s what I say to anyone who displays this sort of behavior. Shuts them up quick and either they don’t return(much rejoicing) or they do and they’re fixed(much rejoicing).

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Jacob Lewis]

When was this ever a positive term?

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Oh man, I absolutely loved that Dragon magazine article when it came out. Still gives me a bit of a chuckle.

For me, a rules lawyer is distinct from a person that knows the rules really well. A rules lawyer exists only to try to interpret grey areas of the rules, or selectively quoted sections, to their advantage. It’s not about knowing all the rules of the game, but about using and bending them to get an unfair advantage.

The rules lawyer will only pipe up when they want to get a more favorable outcome. A person well-versed in the game rules will speak even when it means things end up worse for their character.

Let's start with the reverse order; that the RL is widely disliked is so well-known that by the end of the 80s, Dragon Magazine could publish an article (making fun of gamers at conventions by classifying them as birds) and reference that the "Great Crested Rules Lawyer ... is arguably the worst pest of all convention birds." It is easily seen that this is a pejorative term, and has been for some time. But, more importantly, why?

 

[Celebrim]

Well, the problems in soccer (esp. w/r/t bribery, for example) I don't think can be cured by instant replay during the match.* But what we are seeing at the Women's World Cup is, unfortunately, what I foresee for soccer generally- once instant replay gets it foot in the door, it doesn't stop. It will keep expanding in use.

The VAR at the women's world cup has been anything but elegant in application or result, but for me it hasn't really suggested VAR is the problem.

Let me compare the soccer VAR to the situation in Sumo which adopted video review I think back in the 1950's after a notorious bad call by the judges on the floor where everyone on TV could see just how ludicrously bad the call was created a scandal. The Sumo judges are vastly more autocratic in origin and demeanor than even soccer referees, inheriting an actual feudal aristocratic mindset. But VAR in Sumo almost immediately created a situation where the VAR judge was for the most part deferred to in practice more or less immediately. Sumo's problem comes when the VAR judge doesn't have clear and unambiguous evidence, which can occur in a couple of narrow situations, and then the floor judges who are so reliant on VAR now don't know what to do.

What we are seeing in the soccer VAR world is that situations that are ambiguous and subjective actually come up more often than not, and that sport is so used to calls being ambiguous and subjective that it's find it pretty much impossible to explain and justify the calls even after applying VAR. The problem isn't just that VAR is taking up a bunch of time, because the referee can't trust the guy with video replay to say, "You got it wrong." It's that for the most part, the guy with the VAR can't say whether it was right or wrong at all, so then the referee has to make a judgment call and it really is a judgment call. VAR can't be used to resolve issues that are judgment calls, but the more soccer relies on VAR the more the audience will naturally and reasonably suspect that VAR will explain things in a way that they'll be forced to agree with or validated by. But, if it's all a judgment call, what good is the objective evidence of video replay really?

The two problems soccer has is answering the questions: "What is a foul?" and "What is offside?" While there are some unambiguous cases of what is a foul, historically soccer has basically said, "A foul is what the referee says is a foul.", and it mostly doesn't have a rigorous standard and certainly doesn't have a rigorously applied standard. But if a foul is just what a referee says is a foul, what good is video evidence? Likewise, the offside rule seems simple once it is explained to you, and most people after they get the offside rule are like, "Ok, now I understand soccer." But the offside rule contains further bits of ambiguity that are really subjective and yet in play come up all the time. The most important is the idea of "interfering with a play". Because a lot of the time there is someone that has made a run that failed for some reason, and the run would have been onside but now the player is offside. But then play immediately continues and reaches some conclusion with the runner still offside. Is that offside? Well, it's subjective. Basically, the rule is that offside is what the referee says is offside. And again, what use is objective video evidence if the rule is subjective?

This wouldn't matter much except that it is a game which often ends with a score of 1-0, and the only penalties it can apply tend to turn the entire result of the game. So it's not like football or basketball were one bad call usually doesn't alter the outcome or at the very least, still leaves the team unfairly penalized with a reasonable chance of overcoming the hardship.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[billd91]

When was this ever a positive term?

There may be rules lawyers out there who think it's a badge of distinction honoring their encyclopedic understanding of the RAW without realizing it's considered bad.

 

[Celebrim]

Anyway, the reason I'm chasing this whole side issue of VAR in soccer and football is I think there is actually a lesson to be learned here that applies to RPGs and to the lawyer/judge relationship between the player and the GM, even in situations where that relationship is healthy and respectful (which, I think we always agree is not usually the case with someone deemed a "rules lawyer").

I'm not sure where I'm going to end up in this mental exercise, but let me explain a bit of where I'm starting from.

For most of the last 7 years I've been running a homebrew game based on the D&D 3.0e rules set. The biggest chunk of the D&D 3.0e rules, and the biggest chunk of most D&D rules is the spell system, since D&D spells are individually packetized bits of narrative force. It is a very frequent situation where a player will propose, "I cast Spell X targeting Y" or "I cast Spell X to achieve result Y", and then I am as the DM asked to judge this proposition and report the outcome. And very frequently I find the first thing I have to do is examine the text of the spell to see what the spell says happen, so I will ask the player to read the spell (which every player is expected to have open if they are proposing casting a spell in the first place). And it is a very frequent problem that even after the spell is read, I still don't know what should happen because the spell is so ambiguous. This leads to me very frequently rewriting spells to make them unambiguous in application to both the player and myself, so that in the future not only can I immediately answer what happens, but the player will have a very clear idea what is likely going to happen at the time they propose the spell, and equally importantly I will not end up in a lengthy rules argument with the player over what the spell should do, and to the extent the player is inclined to argue, I will be able to point at the spell and say "What it says is clear and unambiguous."

This is actually very much to the advantage of the player, because the wonderful thing about unambiguous spells is they actually do something. And the full weight of how much better my rules after being play-tested like this is coming through when we jump to Pathfinder (for a time) and then players are like, "What the heck does this spell do and when does it do it and why the heck do the mechanical implementations of the spell so often contrast with the flavor of the spell?"