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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 7627883" data-attributes="member: 53980">I hear those of you who are saying that someone who simply knows the rules well is not a rules lawyer. I might be inclined to agree. However, I think there is still a fine line between good rules lawyering and bad. For example, there have been times that I played under DMs who could be described as having a tyrannical side. There were numerous occasions that I could see that another player was upset by what I deemed to be a bad call. At those times I would aggressively engage the DM in debate on the rules. Bad table behavior? Arguably so. Rules lawyering? That's what I'd call it. Yet, I'd do it again in the interest of fairness.There's a lot of hate for RL lawyers, yet there are those lawyers who seek out clients to defend, Pro Bono, in the interest of Justice. So I think that those who call all lawyers bad are painting with a very broad brush. I've known lawyers who I'd consider scum, except for not wishing to insult scum. But they're not all like that.As I've gotten older, I've learned to stay away from bad DMs when possible and pick my battles when it isn't. Sometimes rules lawyering can definitely impede the fun of other players more than it helps. On the other hand, sometimes a bad rules call can ruin a night, particularly if it kills an invested character. At those times, I don't think there's anything wrong with talking to the DM, and even ratcheting it up to full on rules lawyering if the DM decides to dig in. For example, in a 3.x game the DM was doing his worst to engineer a scenario where we would get captured by drow. We were completely outmatched but determined to fight our way out. The drow at one point threatened to poison a teammate of ours (who had been polymorphed into a frog). Still we refused to surrender. Then the DM had the drow inflict the poison (which was the DM's invention) on the frog, which caused instant death with no saving throws. Everyone at the table looked pissed, so I stepped in arguing that in 3.x all poisons allow a saving throw. He argued that he was the DM and could do whatever he wanted. So we walked away from the table and that was the end of that campaign. He could have set an arbitrarily high DC and we might have called it BS but we'd likely have finished the fight, hoping in vain that our friend rolled a 20. That was arguably the worst incident. There were many cases were I acted more as an arbitor between the DM and player's, even arguing on the DM's behalf when a call was fair but simply didn't go the way a player had hoped. In essence, I think rules lawyering is more than simply trying to twist the rules to your advantage. I think that's simply a rules lawyer gone bad (like how some lawyers seek out the worst of society to defend). It's like how actor types can be good or bad for a table. Some will seek to hog 99% of the spotlight for themselves. Others help to elevate the quality of role play at the table, and share the spotlight. Or how one power gamer will try to build a character to outshine everyone else, while another will take the rest of the table into consideration when they build a character, either helping the others with their concepts or displaying system mastery by building a character that shines yet doesn't overshadow the others. In other words, I think there are both healthy and unhealthy ways to express an approach to the game at the table. Maybe we need different terms for the two sides of the coin, but if there's an agreed upon terminology, I'm not aware of it.</blockquote>

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