Power Gamers & Rules Lawyers

[slimykuotoan]

https://youtu.be/dVwaoyslTR8

[alcyone]

Your videos are kind of relaxing, something to look at besides some guy mugging for the camera. And I've learned a bit about motorcycles; I didn't know that the swerving had a purpose; I'll be less pissed off next time I see it.

Onto powergaming; the problem is when someone can't get into the SPIRIT of the game, or denies that such a thing exists or is important.
To the powergamer, you are being a sucker if you give up something that can help you "win" in exchange for the softer goal of keeping the game consistent, keeping the tone even, helping everyone have fun (though, some may truly not understand how "losing" could be fun.)

One thing the power gamer has taught me though; they put a lot of time into making their character work how they want it to, so it's a punch in the gut when you pull out the Jenga piece that makes the whole concept crash down. In a game like 3.5e, this is easy to do when the DM re-interprets a rule. You can spoil several hardcore nights of their clever planning by ruling something doesn't stack, or that some class isn't really intended to work with another.

In C&C, this rarely happens, but then makes it much more important that you remember, of the few things on someone's sheet, it's crucial for them to expect they work as advertised, or they'll wind up with a character they didn't want. Whether they are power gamers or not. So, while I reserve the right as a CK to be arbitrary (and often must be), I try to make sure that the few things the characters have on their sheet work in the way they expect, and if they don't, lay that out early.

[slimykuotoan]

Thank you Aergraith!!!

[Treebore]

Rules CONSISTENCY is important. You can't run campaigns handling things differently every time you run into a given set of circumstances. Which is why I go through the trouble of creating and maintaining my House Rules. My players deserve to know how I will handle things, in advance, as much as possible. This is off greatest importance on the rules I handle differently from how it is written in the book, but it is also important to give my players as solid an idea as possible how I will handle issues not adequately covered by the rules as written.

So that is why I do my house rules. To prevent myself from inconsistently handling similar issues throughout my campaigns. To be as consistent, and as predictable, as I can be for my players. After all, that is what rules are for, to create a level of consistency throughout a given campaign.

The "Rules Lawyers" I cannot stand, are the ones who take a long standing rule, and try to twist it into meaning something it never meant. If they are calling me out on not using a rule as written, or inconsistently applying it, or altering it every time it comes up, I am fine with that, because that is why I, and my players, agreed on following the set of rules chosen. So if I fail to do that, use the rules as written and agreed to, or fail to consistently apply my "house rules", I fully expect to be questioned on it.

So Rules Lawyers only bother me when they try to twist rules into things they aren't meant to do. When I am not doing it as written, or as previously established as a "House Rule", then I fully expect to be questioned on why I am doing it differently. Consistent application of the rules, official or house, is important to long term play.

[slimykuotoan]

Yeah definitely. It's totally all a matter of degree and intent I believe.

[finarvyn]

Part of what I find interesting is that to the power gamer, finding the best way to beat the rules is the real challenge. Personally, I find often that if I find a way to "break" a particular RPG rules set then I no longer want to play that rules set.

One thing the power gamer has taught me though; they put a lot of time into making their character work how they want it to, so it's a punch in the gut when you pull out the Jenga piece that makes the whole concept crash down. In a game like 3.5e, this is easy to do when the DM re-interprets a rule. You can spoil several hardcore nights of their clever planning by ruling something doesn't stack, or that some class isn't really intended to work with another.

Well said!

[Treebore]

Yeah, Power Gamers is whole different story, even though they often go hand in hand with the "Rules Lawyers", especially the ones I do not like.

[serleran]

All PG and RLs need to play one full session of Kobolds Ate My Baby!

[Omote]

Rules lawyers I generally don't really care about, unless they argue the the rules are being use incorrectly when in fact they are the ones whom are incorrect.

But powergamers in the other hand... I really have a bad habit of playing up their powergamey aspects only to crush them at a later time. Powergamers are the scum on the bottom of my boot, and they shall be crushed.

For example of how I loathe them, I joined a cool v3.5 campaign earlier this year. The DM generally is pretty easy-going, and loves combat but creates good stories. A bunch of us built story based characters with lots of skill points, and cool backgrounds, with lots of roleplay potential. We started the campaign in just such a way. One of the players was playing a straight up fighter, or so we were led to believe. After the first few combats, this player and his "fighter" lights it up, kills most of the enemies on his own, has 3 attacks at the first level of experience, and is a combat monster. He's hoopin and hollerin', and having a good old time. When it comes to RP, and interacting with NPCs and what not, he sits back, doesn't say a word... until we had a single session with no combat. He was irritated more and more as the game went on, and as the session wrapped up, he went to bitchin' about how his character wasn't made for this kind of game, and that Dungeons & Dragons should have roughly 3-4 combats per session to keep his character in line with advancement rules.

My jaw dropped. The DM said something along the lines of "it just happened that we avoided combat, and the session was generally combat light. The power gamer fighter was miffed, and said he hope for more combat in the next session to "optimize the whole reason for his character's existance."

The next game was just that, tons of combat to appease the fighter-guy. As expected, he mopped up again, doing many crazy things that the v3.5 rules let a character do. As the game went on, and the rest of us were kind of useless against the enemies, I started question how his character can do all of the things is does during combat... 3 attacks, move-attack-move again, etc. he explained, and I didn't really understand. So I kept questioning how his character at the same level can be so much better than everybody else. He got miffed, and eventually blurted out that he found a tricked out figher concept on the internets, modified it a bit for out game, and used all of the official v3.5 resources he could to bend the combat rules in his favor. Bravo. I literally clapped. Said to him something along the lines of your whole point to ROLEPLAYING was to get a cheating character off the internet and own the boardgame aspect of this whole game? He said "yup, and the get the loot." His whole purpose in playing was to bend the rules, and play a boardgame. I called him a cheater, and a friggin' loser for not playing any other aspect of the game. I told the GM I'm not playing in a campaign that bends to the fighters need to be UBER KEWL P0WERZ LOOT guy. F-That. I said told everybody at the table that if the fighter-guy didn't scrap his dumb character, I wasn't going to play with him.

The rest of the table agreed for the most part, and the guy came back the following week with a new cheating character concept, still combat oriented, but not nearly as broken as the previous.

Perhaps some of you reading this will not like heavy-handed approach to playing with a power-gamer. Some of you will say that the v3.5 game caters to such players, and perhaps I should find another game. Well, maybe you are right, and maybe power-gamerZ are a blight upon the gaming world and should be turned into mewling piles of steaming offal. Whose to say whom is right. I know this, power-gamerZ ruin the ability to ROLEPLAY in v3.5 D&D to such a degree that I can't and won't play with those people any more.

Here's a concept, create a character and let the damn DM determine the type of campaign is played!

Power-gamerZ suck.

~O

[Jyrdan Fairblade]

The road spooling out is hypnotic. I think power gamers and rules lawyers, indeed, spring out from the same source. As you said, it's about wanting to win, playing the game in a competitive way rather than a collaborative way.

The person at my table that is most likely to rules lawyer up on me is one of our resident power gamers. Generally when he's trying to avoid some sort of damage or effect. The funny thing is, he's not even the person with the best rules-knowledge at the table.

[alcyone]

I'm not a rules lawyer, but maybe I am worse. Someone will cast a spell and there will be a quibble over the effect and next thing you know I'll have every version of D&D laid out to compare and contrast every version of the spell since 1974.

But that's just because I find it interesting. Rules Historian?

[Treebore]

Rules lawyers I generally don't really care about, unless they argue the the rules are being use incorrectly when in fact they are the ones whom are incorrect.

But powergamers in the other hand... I really have a bad habit of playing up their powergamey aspects only to crush them at a later time. Powergamers are the scum on the bottom of my boot, and they shall be crushed.

For example of how I loathe them, I joined a cool v3.5 campaign earlier this year. The DM generally is pretty easy-going, and loves combat but creates good stories. A bunch of us built story based characters with lots of skill points, and cool backgrounds, with lots of roleplay potential. We started the campaign in just such a way. One of the players was playing a straight up fighter, or so we were led to believe. After the first few combats, this player and his "fighter" lights it up, kills most of the enemies on his own, has 3 attacks at the first level of experience, and is a combat monster. He's hoopin and hollerin', and having a good old time. When it comes to RP, and interacting with NPCs and what not, he sits back, doesn't say a word... until we had a single session with no combat. He was irritated more and more as the game went on, and as the session wrapped up, he went to bitchin' about how his character wasn't made for this kind of game, and that Dungeons & Dragons should have roughly 3-4 combats per session to keep his character in line with advancement rules.

My jaw dropped. The DM said something along the lines of "it just happened that we avoided combat, and the session was generally combat light. The power gamer fighter was miffed, and said he hope for more combat in the next session to "optimize the whole reason for his character's existance."

The next game was just that, tons of combat to appease the fighter-guy. As expected, he mopped up again, doing many crazy things that the v3.5 rules let a character do. As the game went on, and the rest of us were kind of useless against the enemies, I started question how his character can do all of the things is does during combat... 3 attacks, move-attack-move again, etc. he explained, and I didn't really understand. So I kept questioning how his character at the same level can be so much better than everybody else. He got miffed, and eventually blurted out that he found a tricked out figher concept on the internets, modified it a bit for out game, and used all of the official v3.5 resources he could to bend the combat rules in his favor. Bravo. I literally clapped. Said to him something along the lines of your whole point to ROLEPLAYING was to get a cheating character off the internet and own the boardgame aspect of this whole game? He said "yup, and the get the loot." His whole purpose in playing was to bend the rules, and play a boardgame. I called him a cheater, and a friggin' loser for not playing any other aspect of the game. I told the GM I'm not playing in a campaign that bends to the fighters need to be UBER KEWL P0WERZ LOOT guy. F-That. I said told everybody at the table that if the fighter-guy didn't scrap his dumb character, I wasn't going to play with him.

The rest of the table agreed for the most part, and the guy came back the following week with a new cheating character concept, still combat oriented, but not nearly as broken as the previous.

Perhaps some of you reading this will not like heavy-handed approach to playing with a power-gamer. Some of you will say that the v3.5 game caters to such players, and perhaps I should find another game. Well, maybe you are right, and maybe power-gamerZ are a blight upon the gaming world and should be turned into mewling piles of steaming offal. Whose to say whom is right. I know this, power-gamerZ ruin the ability to ROLEPLAY in v3.5 D&D to such a degree that I can't and won't play with those people any more.

Here's a concept, create a character and let the damn DM determine the type of campaign is played!

Power-gamerZ suck.

~O

I am happy to say I've never dealt with one THAT bad. Within the same ball park, but still not that bad.

[slimykuotoan]

Thanks for watching guys!

[slimykuotoan]

And great discussion!

[slimykuotoan]

Don't forget to listen to part 2!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyYZ5f63E14

[slimykuotoan]

The road spooling out is hypnotic.

Thanks Jyrdan Fairblade!

[Tadhg]

I'm studying for the bar!

This should be a slam dunk for me!

JD . . or

JS (just stop)

[slimykuotoan]

Lol

[finarvyn]

I think I've discovered a whole new layer of power gamers -- the DM perks for the 5E Adventurer's League.

I started running AL sessions almost two years ago and they had a DM perk that you could earn 300 "DM XP" every time you ran a complete story arc. Kind of nice and over a year's worth of DM'ing HOARD OF THE DRAGON QUEEN at the store I earned a couple thousand XP that I could spend on my own characters. Kind of cheating, I suppose, since I could bulk up a character with XP not actually earned by the character, but a nifty little perk.

The 5E Strahd storyline seems to have taken this to a new level of absurdity an in the Dungeon Masters Guild you can download a four-page list of DM goodies you can earn. Now if you run a game on your birthday you get lots of extra stuff, if you run a game with a magic item you get one as well, the XP awarded to the GM seems to be 5x to 10x as large as when I ran it, and so on. Hearing the DM's brag about how many XP and free magic items they get for running a game is starting to make me sick to my stomach. Some of them can just start out by creating a 5th or higher level character (complete with magic items and so on) without even doing a single adventure as a player. It's to the point where I'm thinking of quitting play at the store and going back to homebrew games where this stuff doesn't happen.

Thank goodness for C&C. No crazies here yet.

[miller6]

Discussing power gamers and rules lawyers is a touchy subject so I'll avoid it for now except to say the following...

There are many power gamers out there. In fact they're the majority with a significant percentage of the overall gaming society. As an advocate of balance between role playing and strategy, I've always sought to show power gamers that role playing is just as important. I've come to the realization that the solution is and always was (hitting myself in the head for not figuring this out earlier) simply to offer power gamers a type of RPG game that emphasizes power gaming. And that's exactly what we plan to do next Gary Con. Role Players need not be concerned, we'll still have events emphasizing that as well. Just adding more types of C&C events for Gary Con 9.

Power gamers: look for the Player Versus Player and Party versus Party C&C games at Gary Con 9. I think you'll enjoy them and I know a few GMs who are anxious to run 'em.

Brian Miller