Rules lawyers, Something to think about Options

[Heath Robinson]

@ Heath.

The problem with that argument is that the "point of perfection" is not necessarily in the same place for all players. Some might attribute always playing by the RAW as closer to their "point of perfection", while others would place their "point" towards follwoing the GMs guidance over the rules. The former would be more likely to regard rules lawering as a good thing, the latter would consider it an offense towards the GM's judgement.

Of course, I could have entirely misunderstood your point.

I never stated it was the same for every person. In fact, I stated at the beginning of my second post that no two people define perfection the same. I just find that the argument is more readable when I don't tack the words "for each individual person" on the tail end of every other word. After all, one should be able to induct that I was speaking about personal points of perfection when one accounts for the fact that nobody can agree on simple things, like whether giving money to the poor is a good idea. Or what pizza topping is the best. Or whether cheesecake is appropriate.


So I'll state it right now. I define perfection subjectively.



This isn't even addressing my real point. That "rules lawyer" is an inherently disparaging term because we call good players "good player" and only create individual terms to refer to various brands of bad player because they're easier to categorise as they're more individual. I used a phase space analogy to demonstrate this.

[ornot]

No, the fuzziness would IMO be just that. Not a loop hole. It just is. The GM could call it either way or decide in any other means he deems fit. What I did when presented with a not-specifically stated argument was to preserve that fuzziness - "Each time the situation comes up, I will toss a coin, and you can call it. Call it right and you get it in your favor. Call it wrong and it won't. It would be your call."

I guess that's one way to deal with it, though I suspect where we differ is in the definition, be it fuzziness or loop hole. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

@Heath: I don't really see how a subjective definition of perfection really supports your earlier comments. What one might consider a rules lawyer, another might not due to their own personal opinion. I think what you might be saying is that a rules lawyer can never be good, since it is a label applied to those that fall outside a given subjective range by those that hold that particular range of perfection.

[Heath Robinson]

I think what you might be saying is that a rules lawyer can never be good, since it is a label applied to those that fall outside a given subjective range by those that hold that particular range of perfection.

That's exactly what I'm saying. The whole phase space thing is an aside that helps put it in mathematical terms.

In terms of pseduomathematics, there's a smaller volume of good players. The rest of the phase space is significantly larger, hence good players are more uniform relative to the entire range. Relative is important. Fact is that we can define tighter and tighter volumes inside "good player" that gradiate how good the player is. Each volume is smaller and, therefore, more uniform. A point is perfectly uniform, having no alternatives within it. Perfection is a point.

The point those volumes contract towards differs for every person. That's what a subjective definition of perfection means. I can't see how this conflicts with earlier statements which defined the above in a terser manner. I assume it was the way it was stated that lead people to believe that I was speaking in objective fact instead of the subjective.

[ornot]

All I can say in response to that, Heath, is that I'm a microbiologist, so maths for me only has to really be accurate to the same order of magnitude. When you're talking about the difference between 10 million and 1 billion, a couple of thousand here or there are insignificant!

[Nkari]

I just came to the realization that generally in group game dynamics to have a long term game you need at least one person who is willing to make sure it all happens. Generally though it is the rules lawyer who will call, and call, and call each and every person to make sure game happens.

That is sooooo true, I arrange most if not all our gaming sessions, and Im a a rules laywer some would say, and if I butt head with other rules laywers the gaming groups sigh, since we can twist and turn on diffrent wordings alot, even tho we more or less know the intent on the rule, (we generally do this for fun, but we keep that to a bare minimum when we are actually playing.. =)

Gamesworkshop rules are rules written by "roleplayers" who have no clue how to write solid rules..


Flames of War is written by rulelawyers, who does not mix fluff and rules, and makes the INTENT of the rule clear in the fluff.



There are good rules and there are badly writen rules.. badly writen rules makes rules laywers cry..

[AWOL_Seraphim]

Personally, I define rules lawyers as people who insist on following RAW regardless of the circumstances, and who is willing to argue every technicality until he "wins his case". Of course, my definition is informed by my own personal experience. For instance, I played with a guy many years ago who would not accept house rules from the GM, even temporary ones in not-so-clean-cut situations, no matter what. If the GM said: "i'm not sure how to rule this, let's do it this way for now and I'll figure it out later", the Rules Lawyer would make sure the game stops until the exact rule was found. This was in a group that had EVERY SINGLE BOOK FROM SR1 and SR2 (no SR3 back then) so of course it would take a lot of time to go through all that material. And in a 4-hour session, the Rules Lawyer would do this about 3 or 4 times each game, meaning there was barely any playing at all.

This is bad, I think, because it ruins the game. At the moment, I am GM for a group in which a few players like to have a good grasp of the rules. They know I'm not perfect, rules-wise, and sometimes they do correct me. These are not rules layers, just players who know the rules well. However, I am very grateful to them because they are more than willing to tolerate my mistakes, and even to let me have my way if I think a scene would be better played with rule-related "creative license" (that is, not playing exactly by the book.) Of course, I let them know when I do this. Also, I don't use a screen and instead roll everything right in their face, so they know I don't cheat (although I warned them that I may fudge some rolls* every now and then.) Finally, I think the main reason why they let me have my "creative license" is because they know that, no matter what, I'm in it to give them lots of fun. (As a matter of fact, I have the hardest time ever getting any sort of criticism. I always get comments like "your game is really, really fun, don't change a thing!")

*It may sound impossible to fudge a roll when everyone sees the result, but, never having GMed behind a screen, I developed some tricks!

[PBI]

There are good rules lawyers and bad rules lawyers. The good ones know when to defer to the GM, the bad ones don't.