NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 7627687" data-attributes="member: 19675">Rules lawyers exist, in part, because game designers are building complex systems, and- for a variety of reasons- are not always clear about what they actually mean.A BIG reason is using ambiguous language that is open to interpretation.  This isn’t necessarily intentional.  Sometimes people forget or never knew a word has more than one meaning.Another one is, as the systems increase in complexity- especially as the game’s rule set expands- people forget about or fail to contemplate how the newly accreted rules interact with the older rules.  Even attorneys and other legal pros run into this.Back in the 1990s, I had the privilege of taking Criminal Law with one of the lawyers who had helped the state of Texas revise huge swaths of the Criminal code.  He was lecturing on a particular section when one of the foreign students (for whom English was not her primary language) asked about how it worked, because by HER reading, there was a problem.He stopped class to read the statue in question.  He stared at it for several minutes in utter silence.  When he spoke, he said (I paraphrase), “Even that would not be the most common interpretation of that language, it is still a completely valid reading of that statute, one that could win a defense attorney a lot of cases.  After we finish in here today, I have a lot of phone calls to make so we can get this clarified.  Quickly.”Were I designing a game- and I am NOT*- I’d try my damnnednest to avoid those two pitfalls, starting with having someone else read the rules back to me, telling me what THEY** thought it meant.Since so many others are doing so, here’s my “Obligatory Lawyer Joke:Q: How many lawyer jokes are there?A: Only one.  All the rest are true stories.* Never again, nossireebob.  I’m pretty sure I suck at it.** for those keeping score from another ENWorld thread, that is a singular/plural pronoun.</blockquote>

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