D&D Discussion: Rules Lawyering Video

hey guys how's it going what's up a little bit of an unusual video for me this is the rules layering video not a video on rules layering well partly it is but a video on another video I made and took down a while ago over the years of my youtube career I've put up a bunch of videos and also as some of you have noticed taken down a bunch of videos there was a period about a year and a half ago when I pulled a few down for various reasons either I didn't like the video felt it was too mean or I didn't like the humor sometimes there was copyright stuff because I was new to YouTube and used a Star Trek theme to make a joke or a classical Western song in my older Deadlands video so was redone and put back up I don't cut nearly any content anymore because I found that there's usually still an audience out there for some niche content but at the time I was trying to trim the content that it flopped anyway there was a video I put up a while ago on rules lowering and I hated the video I didn't like it for a variety of reasons one is just artistically it just didn't come out funny I was trying to experiment with a weird hot take kind of comedy style that just didn't work and this was a big thing I kind of disagreed with my older opinions so I took it down and that was that for the longest time but the crazy thing is that a lot of people were privately messaging me about the video like far and above more than any other video that I've ever taken down to this day every other week I still get a message about it most of the videos I take down hardly anyone even cared about after at the nobilis videos was the second most requested video even I'm actually side note when I was at PAX unplugged someone brought a copy of nobilis to get me to sign thank you but unfortunately I couldn't sign it because I wasn't there but thanks I think it showed me that rules blurring is a topic that people really want me to talk about and if I'm gonna do it I need to talk about it in a more serious kind of less silly tone alright my opinions when it comes to rules loring is that obviously we have to discuss the rules we're playing a very complex game there's gonna be issues it is nyam possible to have one person keep all the information about the game so we rely on each other to remember bits and pieces of the rules and correct one another a few things as fresh me as a player and a diem is when people are hypocritical about it or pretend to forget about a penalty or arguing specifically to get some kind of advantage on the table when you think about a lawyer when people complain about lawyers they are just saying whatever they have to say to get the thing that they want they don't actually care about the rules at all if let's say someone wanted to make 12 attacks on their turn if there's some home brew rules that lets them do that those are the ones they're going to be using if it's the rule of cool that's what they're using I've even seen people argue for rules that would completely break the game just to get some bonuses and that's a big part of the reason why people get frustrated with home brew rules which I love but you got to be very careful about it because you can lead to this spotty sometimes we're doing it this way sometimes we're doing it another way where players have to ask permission before everything or they have to ask how are we doing it at this time it's confusing they don't know so they have to ask what you have to understand is that any time you as a player are asking for some exception to the rules you're giving the DM more work to do because now he has to think about the long-term ramifications of the new system which most DMS are happy to do because we like having new things that the players are creating and introducing it into the system but then you also get into rules haggling where the DM thinks that you're flaming hands should really be 5 extra damage and player things they should be 50 have dished slowly or haggle or way down to 25 and then now the DM realizes he's made a horrendous mid-game call OSI Thank You yang and wants to retcon it but the players pissed off because he's managed to finagle out of the D on this broken ability and it gets taken away from him it's like reversed Christmas and now he's not happy diems not happy now everyone's not happy there's other debates that come up when it comes to mistakes how do you fix problems when they come up do you fix problems let's say that someone rolls an attack and a mess then just after they attack they see that they had advantage some players will see that it's miss and then pick up their dice and then roll again therefore getting three rolls when really if it was a reversed if they had hit and it was advantaged they just keep the head something like that was really hard to catch because you as the DM have to be really observant and keeping an eye on the play and you already got a lot of stuff that you're doing to keep track of and you don't want to be watching the players dice rolls or let's say I'm the DM rollin attack it's a hit does damage three turns later the player sees that I had disadvantage on the role do we retcon that hit three turns ago re rolling it or do we play it as is whatever you decide is fine the issue comes in when there's hypocrisy where if the situation were reversed the player wouldn't want to re-roll all the hits you can be really frustrating when a player rolls it's wrong you correct them and they just shrug and go oh well maybe next time and it's it literally their turn okay you can fix it right now it's hard to catch exactly because it's inconsistency is the issue and it doesn't come from one encounter it comes from multiple encounters and the the discrepancies between them and it sucks because you as the DM find one problem and you fix it in a 9 others crop app and it's it's tiring to keep on top of it I came here on a Friday night to roll dice and have fun I didn't sign up to be the dad and a solution if if it's really bad is sadly maybe not play with that group because if you correct them and it just gets worse it's impossible to keep up with it you can never compete with that it can get pretty bad at times there was another group I had where they wouldn't tell me stuff like if the character was poisoned or if an effect had ended and we'd find out and they don't want to retcon that stuff because they didn't want to get hurt or they want didn't want to have some kind of a penalty and sometimes there even be people that would blame the DM as well in order to kind of get out of trouble and be like you're supposed to be keeping track of my HP and spell slots and stuff as well sometimes it's an honest mistake you know it's tough I get it you got a lot of stuff going on plus there's inconsistency between the player and DM that can be a nightmare like with a rule of cool the player wants to jump up 500 feet in the air and punch the dragon to the balls three times before ripping his head off okay fine but if the DM wants to have an enemy jump over to him oh no suddenly were rules as written and we gotta stop the game to look up long jump and high jumper limit for this bugbear and what about the ceiling you can't long jump of the ceiling short shouldn't heat a bludgeoning damage from his head ha and with the rule of cool it sometimes can extend to one player and no one else and that's what I have a problem about he's perfectly fine getting his plus 30 flaming longsword of doom because that's cool but if another player gets his plus 35 great sword of ice suddenly that's not in the rules he can be frustrating with rolling for stats one time I was going to run D&D for a veteran group we were discussing what kind of base stat system where we're going to do and all the players seemed to be leaning towards rolling for stats instead of point by and they were saying things like well with rolling for stats with 46 re-roll ones I could make a pretty strong character and I raised an eyebrow and said no no no no no when I said roll for stats I was considering 3 d6 not 46 rear old ones and the players all immediately wanted point by because they realized it was statistically better and that rubbed me the wrong way because like I'm thinking of myself like if you're gonna be picking one system or of another it should be because you like that system better I was talking with one of the players and he said man I love rolling for stats but I just I hate that it's random and I'm thinking to myself what are you doing the reason you roll is because you want it to be random there's a lot of reasons why you'd roll for stats like it provides a fingerprint makes the characters unique makes it more exciting sometimes provides a new challenge because you don't know what to expect but if you want higher numbers but hate randomness just use an expanded point by a table just give the players more points the reason you do a random system is because you want it to be random like that's the reason you're using a random system if you're someone who doesn't like it random don't do random if you don't like random that's what it means to be random it's random what frustrates me is picking a system just to get an edge that's kind of how you start to get this like power creep here's another example that bothered me we talked about a system we want for initiative and there was a long debate and partway through I realized it was going nowhere because all the players that were going to get a bonus to their initiative wanted to use the new system and all the players that were gonna get a penalty didn't there's no way to have a discussion when it's like that it didn't matter if it was longer slower made sense didn't make sense clunky whatever or here's another debate the player is trapped in darkness and blinded they want to teleport out of it but misty step says they have to be able to see out of it the player is now arguing about how that's stupid and that's totally not how that would work in real life it's magic just because they're panicking they're in a tight spot and they don't want their character to get hurt I don't think that wanting to play by the rules is a problem it's that spotty rules are for everyone else other than me that's an issue or rules are for me to inflict on other people that's the problem anyway those are my thoughts on it one of the reasons I had taken down the video all that time ago was I felt that I was being kind of combative with the audience and saying things like this is what the internet thinks and this is why it's wrong and what I learned from the video is that you shouldn't point to the audience and go this is the opinion that you guys have because the audience is not a singular person is a collection of people with their own opinions and sometimes you're just really talking to a minority no one complained about that to me everyone was very supportive but I saw that in me in the video also I don't like classifying people as those min/max errs or those power gamers I don't like using that like group terminology anymore also a big part of the issue was that I use rules luring in an unusual way than I've seen it was the time when I see it used people use the term to describe someone who adheres strictly to the rules and doesn't sway it all from them and I actually don't consider that to be a problem maybe if they're telling other people what to do it is whereas I consider rules luring at least the bad form of it to be someone who may or may not adhere to the rules but who constantly argues because they don't want to get hurt never want to miss etc this particular person doesn't care what the rules say unless it helps their case in which they care a lot or they want everyone else to obey the rules except for them anyway that's the rules lawyering video hopefully I didn't appears to have too many people I think arguing about the rules is fine I just don't like when people our being a jerk about it put them probably so you guys have happy gaming and good luck and I hope everything goes over well all right cool have have good games [Music]

Channel: Puffin Forest

Views: 808,672

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Id: xOxvoVM444c

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020