The Rules: Flypaper for fun.

[Deadlyfrog]

It seems that more and more the rules of games come under close scrutiny by both the players and the GM.

Take this scenario: A player wants his dwarf to be able to eat the equivalent of Mount Olympus in one hour while simultaneously fighting off hordes of devils using only his ass. Ridiculous, right? Your DM experience says he shouldn't do it. It's potentially game breaking, way too silly and just plain dumb.

But... What if everyone else wants to play with that dwarf player?

You compromise, you beg, you whittle it down to something that's workable, keeping to the original idea as close as possible and all goes well until you run into a speed bump: the rules don't allow it.


Can you bend or break the rules to have more fun/

Yes, and no.

Yes, because if the players aren't having fun, there is no point in playing.

No, because if bending or breaking a rule challenges design and balance, the game falls apart.

So the question I pose to you, The players and the GMs is thus:

Where do you draw the line?

[K]

The reason you have rules is so that there is a game. There is something you can play with.... otherwise you are just playing Magic Princess Tea Party.

Now, that doesn't mean you can't design things to fit certain ideas of what people want in their game. That being said, designing is a thoughtful process where you balance things out to fit in with everything else.

The reason you do that it because people sign up to play a certain game. That's why they go out to buy the same game books. Suddenly tossing in a cyberwared street samurai when you all decided to play DnD is just bad form.

[Josh_Kablack]

Where do you draw the line?

It seems that you have a serious question buried under some quasi-Gygaxian assumptions that I cannot begin to wrap my head around, so do you want to try rephrasing that?

[Deadlyfrog]

Hmm. Perhaps a better example is in order.

Resilient sphere.

A player is trapped in it. As a psion, he would normally be able to kill the wizard who trapped him with Mind thrust. The player asks if he can use mind thrust against the wizard who used it. You state that the sphere does not allow anything to enter or leave it while the spell is still active, as per the rules. The player states that mind thrust is a telepathic power, and therefore does not actually have to pass through the sphere to be used.

This is a situation where you have to ask if you are going to use rule zero and say no, or let the player have their fun and blast the wizard.

That's the question I asked. I apologize if the previous example wasn't clear.

[RandomCasualty2]

Hmm. Perhaps a better example is in order.

Resilient sphere.

A player is trapped in it. As a psion, he would normally be able to kill the wizard who trapped him with Mind thrust. The player asks if he can use mind thrust against the wizard who used it. You state that the sphere does not allow anything to enter or leave it while the spell is still active, as per the rules. The player states that mind thrust is a telepathic power, and therefore does not actually have to pass through the sphere to be used.

This is a situation where you have to ask if you are going to use rule zero and say no, or let the player have their fun and blast the wizard.

That's the question I asked. I apologize if the previous example wasn't clear.

That's a clear no. Telepathic powers require line of effect like anything else. The sphere breaks line of effect. A player asking that the rules suddenly behave differently because he arbitrarily thinks so shouldn't be treated any different from the DM who arbitrarily decides your PC breaks his leg from a fall because he thinks a 50 ft drop should seriously hurt you.

[K]

Hmm. Perhaps a better example is in order.

Resilient sphere.

A player is trapped in it. As a psion, he would normally be able to kill the wizard who trapped him with Mind thrust. The player asks if he can use mind thrust against the wizard who used it. You state that the sphere does not allow anything to enter or leave it while the spell is still active, as per the rules. The player states that mind thrust is a telepathic power, and therefore does not actually have to pass through the sphere to be used.

This is a situation where you have to ask if you are going to use rule zero and say no, or let the player have their fun and blast the wizard.

That's the question I asked. I apologize if the previous example wasn't clear.

You play by the rules.

It breaks down like this: players buy the books so when they play the game they can make meaningful choices about when and how to use their abilities.

If the DM suddenly decides on the fly to start changing rules "because its cool", then he eliminates the option of the players to be able to make meaningful choices. I mean, this is the reason so many groups in DnD never used Charm and illusion.... for the most part the DM decided what charm and illusions would do and how they worked, so unless you had a very long conversation with your DM AND he kept to home-rules, then you couldn't make meaningful tactical choices.

[Kaelik]

Ignoring for the moment that you would only use Mind Thrust if you were retarded:

1) To hit a character with Mind Thrust, you must have line of effect.

2) Resilient Sphere blocks line of effect.

The makers of Mind Thrust were presumably aware of the fact that this occurred. They had the option of requiring line of effect, or not. They choose to require it.

That is how it works.

If you are going to revert to stupid shit like "but it's not an actual physical object, it's telepathic, so I should be able to brain hurt people through Force/Stone/from outside the Range/who I've never even seen." Then you can just as easily say "but I'm conjuring Fire, it's not physical fire travelling from me to him, it just appears on him, it's magic not physical, so beltyn's burning blood should work through the force field/stone wall/from outside range/on someone I've never seen."


Long story short, your example is stupid. I suspect this is because you are stupid.

[Prak]

I'd be tempted to say Mind Thrust works because it appeals to my tastes in fantasy, but given the rules I'd tell the player "sorry, the rules don't allow it, come up with something else.

as for the Dwarf character I'd say, "ok, we can do this, we'll just use Mutants and Masterminds, and you take the powers Matter Eating and Blast/Strike. Anyone mind using this system with a D&D setting?"

[Lokathor]

Right now I'm doing an aWoD kind of thing with nWoD+Shadowrun, but sticking a bit closer to Shadowrun than aWoD did because of my immediate target audience. As part of the project, I'm admitting right in the introduction that everything I've written down and everything I will write down before I'm done won't add up to a complete "you can actually do anything cause the rules tell you how" kind of game, and lots of actions will have to use ad-hoc rules and rolls or they'll just be outright fiat and hand-waving. And I'm okay with that, because I'm writing it as more of an action game and trying to keep it really simple to learn and use at the expense of having complexity in the "metagame" layer. Ultimately, I'm just being lazy, because the group of gamers I'm writing it down for won't care so much that there's some spots marked "color it in yourself".

At the same time, in a more "serious" kind of game (which usually also involves a more serious and crunchy kind of system), I'm willing to take a hard line and say "no, doesn't say that in the rules, we're sticking exactly to what it says in the book". In those games you do what the book says to do whenever you can (or almost whenever you can) and you "let the dice fall where they may" and so on.

So what I'm saying is, the line moves based on what the group is interested in doing, and also partly based on what the system can support. BattleTech and 4e can't take much bullshitting before things just go wild, but 3.5 and ADnD have lots of sections where you can just say "oh fuck it" and stuff will still fuzzily come out in a "kinda okay" way.

[Crissa]

Kaelik, having a dumb example or dumb question does not make someone dumb.

Please don't bring that sort of language here.

-Crissa

[CatharzGodfoot]

I thought that "target" powers required line of sight (but not line of effect) and "effect" powers required line of effect (but not line of sight). Good to know that they both need LoE, I guess.

[Psychic Robot]

A globe of shimmering force encloses a creature, provided the creature is small enough to fit within the diameter of the sphere. The sphere contains its subject for the spell’s duration. The sphere is not subject to damage of any sort except from a rod of cancellation, a rod of negation, a disintegrate spell, or a targeted dispel magic spell. These effects destroy the sphere without harm to the subject. Nothing can pass through the sphere, inside or out, though the subject can breathe normally.

The subject may struggle, but the sphere cannot be physically moved either by people outside it or by the struggles of those within.

Does resilient sphere actually block line of effect? I might just be missing some rules thing here, but I'm not seeing it.

[Username17]

The fact that things can't pass in and out of the sphere means that line of effect is blocked.

Line of Effect requires a free area that can be traveled through.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Kaelik, having a dumb example or dumb question does not make someone dumb.

Please don't bring that sort of language here.

What sort of language? Calling people stupid? Yeah, that's never been done before.

Having a dumb question does not "make" someone dumb. But you'll notice I didn't say it did. I said that I suspect that his stupidity caused his question to be stupid. Firstly, I didn't say that only because his question is stupid, but also because all his posts have been stupid, they are about a stupid topic, and the random arrival of a new poster asking this specific question hints faintly of someone from another forum who ended up here and didn't take the time to actually read any of the things already here.

All of those come together to give me the suspicion that he is in fact stupid.

Secondly, you'll note that I said suspicion, and not certainty or probability. That's because I suspect, and am not certain.

[mean_liar]

All class, that Kaelik.

[ggroy]

[Lich-Loved]

Deadlyfrog, you just gotta laugh at some of the posturing here; by all means do not take it seriously. Some people here are convinced they are the world's greatest reasoners and the other billions of us upon the planet, the mundane, are all to be quite glad that we are protected from their direct radiance by the magic of the interweb.

Anyway, "where you draw the line" is pretty much where K said. Rules changes are ok, but doing so on the fly can lead to madness. Consistency and communication are key or the game devolves into "Let's Pretend".

Edit: oh and one way (and I am not overly sure on this) your psion could use Mind Thrust on the Wizard is if you are using the Psionics Are Different variant. Since psionics work in an anti-magic shell in this variant, I could see a case being made for them passing harmlessly through a wholly magical construct like a resilient sphere. This doesn't mean that your psion wouldn't be trapped (he is still a meat puppet and the wall is really "there"), but the wall is "not there" from a psionics standpoint and thus he has LOE. Just a thought.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Edit: oh and one way (and I am not overly sure on this) your psion could use Mind Thrust on the Wizard is if you are using the Psionics Are Different variant. Since psionics work in an anti-magic shell in this variant, I could see a case being made for them passing harmlessly through a wholly magical construct like a resilient sphere. This doesn't mean that your psion wouldn't be trapped (he is still a meat puppet and the wall is really "there"), but the wall is "not there" from a psionics standpoint and thus he has LOE. Just a thought.

That's not how the "psionics are different" variant works. Using PaD means that when spells refer to "spells", they don't work on psionic powers. Since the sphere blocks everything, it would still block psionic powers requiring LoE.

[ggroy]

[Lich-Loved]

That's not how the "psionics are different" variant works. Using PaD means that when spells refer to "spells", they don't work on psionic powers. Since the sphere blocks everything, it would still block psionic powers requiring LoE.

meh. I can see your point. No argument here. As I said, just a thought.

[Prak]

from a thematic standpoint, it's very flavourful and interesting for resilient sphere to not block psionics, but from a rules standpoint it does. Now you could change it, but that would almost certainly be completely unbalancing.

[Kaelik]

Yes, clearly I am the one with a problem, for calling a stupid question stupid.

What a huge problem I have.

Certainly not the line of retards who each made a post larger than anything I did all about how I personally have problems because I called a stupid question retarded.

Yeah, it's me with the problem, I think I'm too good for everyone, always making paragraph long posts about how other people would get arrested or about how they think they are better than other people, or talking about how classy people are like class actually means anything.

Everyone knows that rule one is that when someone asks a stupid question you can't point out it's stupid.

[Wyzzard]

It really isn't a very good example, given that the XPH has a feat to let you do exactly what you propose:

Burrowing Power [Metapsionic]

Your powers sometimes bypass barriers.

Benefit

To use this feat, you must expend your psionic focus. You can attempt to manifest your powers against targets that are sheltered behind a wall or force effect. Your power briefly skips through the Astral Plane to bypass the barrier.

The strength and thickness of the barrier determine your chance of success. To successfully bypass the barrier with your power, you make a Psicraft check against a DC equal to 10 + the hardness of the barrier + 1 per foot of thickness (minimum 1). Assign a hardness of 20 to barriers without a hardness rating, such as force effects (or a wall of ectoplasm). Force walls or walls of ectoplasm are assumed to have less than 1 foot of thickness unless noted otherwise.

If a power requires line of sight (which includes most powers that affect a target or targets instead of an area), you cannot manifest it as a burrowing power unless you can somehow see the target, such as with clairvoyant sense.

Using this feat increases the power point cost of the power by 2. The power’s total cost cannot exceed your manifester level.

Resilient Sphere exist specifically to block stuff, and Burrowing Power exists specifically to counter that.

If you let John Q Psion skip his powers past Force effects willy-nilly, you spit on everyone who casts Resilient Sphere and everyone who takes Burrowing Power.

[Murtak]

Deadlyfrog, your examples are pretty bad. Are you asking whether it is ok to ignore the rules when they are getting in the way of having fun? If so, the answer is yes. Sort of.

Let's say you are playing 3E and one of the players wants to polymorph into a bee. Don't ask me whether that works by the rules, by now I don't even pretend there is an answer to be found. But for this example we will pretend the rules say "no, can't polymorph into fine creatures". The players and GM all agree that the story would be much better if the player could infiltrate the stronghold as a bee.

At this point your options are:
a) Just let the player polymorph into a bee and get on with the story. Upside: No time lost, play continues immediately. Downside: the player will expect to be able to do this again, no one knows whether they can turn into wasps too, or into titans for that matter.
b) Play it by the rules and continue playing. Again no time is lost and the rules stay consistent. Your game becomes less fun though. How much depends on the rule in question of course.
c) Change the rules. You pause the game, come up with a new rule and then continue with clear and fun rules.

Personally I usually go for a mix of the three approaches. If the downsides are minimal I just keep the rule. Minor incongruencies are fine with me. If the rule is so bad it kills immersion or disrupts balance I fix it. If the fix is dead simple I do it on the spot. If it is not I note the problem, ad-hoc a solution and tell the players I will come up with a good version between sessions. This usually takes a minute or two, then play continues.

[ggroy]