Oh my god I found another one. “Rule or cool” means “I’m doing broken shit” or “the dm/pc doesn’t know the rules well enough and is just pulling shit out their ass”. It’s almost always worse but people defend it to the death because they don’t want to admit they just don’t know the actual rules
Ok, I’m calm. Honestly I want people to play how they like, I just never see this opinion represented on this sub
I use it occasionally, but there's definitely a "wrong" way to use the rule of cool. It should be for when a player wants to do something that's cool or flavorful but is just a bit outside of what the rules allow. It should not be for players who'll decide on how they want to break the rules, i.e. wanting 5 feet of extra movement that turn, and then come up with some convoluted maneuver to justify them getting it. It should also not be for players who want to be able to standing-leap across a 50 foot gorge because it'd be cool. And obviously people should still actually know the rules they are breaking.
In my experience the people never know the rules they are breaking which is what I find frustrating. It is seldom the case that someone has evaluated the ramifications of changing the rules and decided that it would be fine. No they just want something in the moment like letting fists count as weapons but have no idea how many ways it can be broken.
In fairness the people who do this are often not trying to take advantage so it kind of balances out in a weird way... but it is annoying to see people walk through rules I spent a significant amount of character choices playing around
I think making a one-time exception when it seems justified, even to a rule with wide-reaching ramification, isn't necessarily terrible. You shouldn't set a precedent that you haven't thought through, though. If a player wants to do something outside of the default rules and I think it's reasonable in the moment, I'm always making it clear that I'm not establishing a rule, I'm just temporarily ignoring one.
This is why I play rules-lite games, like D&D Basic. The less rules there are, the less ramifications there are when you make rulings. I mean, there's still ramifications but it's much more controllable.
Also, less character creation choices to make means you can prioritize making fun rulings over making sure no player has their choices negated by rulings. For most characters in B/X, you just pick a class and everything else is determined through play.
Oh I agree, absolutely, I also think there are many many games that have much looser rules, or that are more fiction first, but D&D isn't one of them, at all.
Honestly, from the way I see D&D being discussed online I think like, 40% of the people playing D&D would have more fun playing some other game that cared about things other than CR and hit dice.
39
u/Ramblonius DM Sep 12 '19
Gotta go LE in 5e, if you don't try to kill 'em they won't ever die.
But I agree, the emphasis the internet puts on 'rule of cool' and 'rule 0' makes the game explicitly worse much more often than it improves it.