My relationship with the rules has evolved over time. I've got a write-up over here, but the TLDR is this: After years of play, my hoped-for system mastery never quite materialized. I still get rulings wrong, but I care less about it. In other words, I've grown more comfortable with handwaving. My group's ultimate solution to the wonderfully complex system of Pathfinder is to do a little more of what feels right, and a little less of what is absolutely 100% correct.
Question: Do you strive to be 100% rules correct, or do you view that as an unattainable ambition?
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Unattainable and undesired.
What the rules do for us is provide an area of shared expectations. I.e. if I want to avoid the notice of a guard, I should expect to roll Stealth to do so, using a d20 modified by blah blah blah, vs a DC depending on yadda yadda.
However, while the basic ruleset is very simple, there are uncountable exceptions. What I provide is a framework to deal with them that I find to be in the spirit of the rules.
More is just a fool's errand.
Rules as written often have unintended and undesirable consequences.
I try to run rules as intended, and although sometimes intent can be unclear I feel most of the time it's fairly obvious.
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Pure RAW leads to stupid things. RAI leads to less stupid things. RAI with houserules leads to new stupid things. I go for RAI with minimal houserules simply because that's what seems to work best.
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Question: Do you strive to be 100% rules correct, or do you view that as an unattainable ambition?
I believe that there is no such thing as 100% rules correct. It can literally NOT be obtained (and by literally I mean actually truly literally like it used to mean :-)).
1) The wording IS often ambiguous and reasonable people can read it in different ways. This is true of ALL written or oral language and is especially true of books meant to be reasonably easy to read.
2) The rules in the book flat out contradict themselves in quite a few places.
3) The rules are flat out incomplete. The old "joke" about "the dead condition is not defined" is an egregious example but there are lots, lots more.
Like Claxon said, I run a rules intended game. I'll sometimes handwave something if it makes a scene more dramatic or cinematic. The astounding amount of rules for Pathfinder is much to unwieldy to keep a 100% rules to run a game faithful to all of them.
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I think "rules as written" is a fiction, albeit a useful one. Useful primarily as a way to interrogate the rules absent specific game context. But within a given game context, I cling to the rules as I believe they were intended above everything.
I mean, the purpose of natural language is to take a thought in my head and via a series of signals recreate that thought in your head. Sometimes this is easy to do since the thought is fairly unambiguous (e.g. "the fire is hot, do not touch it" or "how power attack works") so there's really no interpretive work to be done. But I find it telling that the most natural reaction to a rules quandary is to ask "okay, how is this supposed to work?"
Fundamentally a GM who insists on a particularly narrow reading of a rule is just requiring the game to be played as the GM intends. Nobody else made them do that after all.
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I follow all the rules. Even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff.
We deal with the problems as they come up. While we may handwave in the interests of keeping the game going, afterwards we'll figure out what the right interpretation is for our group and stick with it.
The problem with handwaving too much is that the rules are the laws of physics for the universe. If they change too much it's hard to reasonably know what your character is going to do.
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No matter what else you feel about it, this is one places where D&D4e shined. Their rules all went through the same team, and they were really specific about how they were used. In most cases, reading the rule literally solves the confusion.
My relationship with the rules has evolved over time. I've got a write-up over here, but the TLDR is this: After years of play, my hoped-for system mastery never quite materialized. I still get rulings wrong, but I care less about it. In other words, I've grown more comfortable with handwaving. My group's ultimate solution to the wonderfully complex system of Pathfinder is to do a little more of what feels right, and a little less of what is absolutely 100% correct.
Question: Do you strive to be 100% rules correct, or do you view that as an unattainable ambition?
If you are asking do I strive to memorize every rule I come across then the answer is yes, but I don't really expect it. However the fact that I shoot for it has helped. I still consult the book during games. It generally doesnt take any longer than 30 to 45 seconds because I know what chapter and book the rule is in. I even know the exact page 99% of the time. When I was playing 3.5 I even had the page number memorized.
With that said I'm not a slave to the rules. I like to know how the rules so that I can have an understanding of how they are intended to work together, but there are times I don't agree with the rules so I change them.
PS: If you mean interpret the rules correctly yes I strive to be 100% correct. I'm right over 90% of the time, but with times and different devs the view on the rules change. As an example when SKR was here I don't think I ever got an FAQ wrong. When he was replaced by Mark I was still correct most of the time, but not as much. SKR's view on taking 10 vs Mark's which became an FAQ, and made it into Starfinder is an example of this.
RAW is necessarily silly.
RAI is necessarily subjective unless you wrote and edited the rule for publication. It is also sometimes silly.
I run what makes sense at the time. Generally I stick to the text until it becomes ridiculous, house rule on the fly if necessary to keep the game running, then have a chat with players between sessions to decide how things should continue in the future.
At the risk of being overly irreverent: I care about what makes the game fun for everybody, not what Mark/Sean/etc. drank/smoked the day they hit "send" on their rules copy or what fresh horror resulted after the editors hacked the important clauses off to save on page count two hours before press.
Edit: @wraithstrike, academically, how does Mark's interpretation of taking 10 differ from Sean's?
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RAW is necessarily silly.
RAI is necessarily subjective unless you wrote and edited the rule for publication. It is also sometimes silly.
I run what makes sense at the time. Generally I stick to the text until it becomes ridiculous, house rule on the fly if necessary to keep the game running, then have a chat with players between sessions to decide how things should continue in the future.At the risk of being overly irreverent: I care about what makes the game fun for everybody, not what Mark/Sean/etc. drank/smoked the day they hit "send" on their rules copy or what fresh horror resulted after the editors hacked the important clauses off to save on page count two hours before press.
Edit: @wraithstrike, academically, how does Mark's interpretation of taking 10 differ from Sean's?
As an example a common argument was that if someone had to jump over a pit they couldn't take 10 because the pit counted as danger. The other side which I was on wouldn't count the pit as a danger. It isn't doing anything. It's just there.
SKR's said that as long as you weren't in danger or threatened you could take 10. It was basically a player decision. He even listed examples.
Mark's version has it so that the GM can decide at any time that you can't take 10. The GM decides when you can use it for pacing, and refused to give any examples of when it would be ok. He felt like the other way was taking the power out of the GM's hands.
The purpose of Take 10 is to allow you to avoid the swinginess of the d20 roll in completing a task that should be easy for you. A practiced climber (5 ranks in Climb) should never, ever fall when climbing a practice rock-climbing wall at a gym (DC 15) as long as he doesn't rush and isn't distracted by combat, trying to juggle, and so on. Take 10 means he doesn't have to worry about the randomness of rolling 1, 2, 3, or 4.
The rule is there to prevent weirdness from the fact that you can roll 1 on tasks you shouldn't fail at under normal circumstances.
I'm not an athlete, but I can easily to a standing broad jump of 5-6 feet, over and over again without fail. It doesn't matter if I'm jumping over a piece of tape on the floor or a deep pit... I can make that jump. With a running start, it's even easier. If I were an adventurer, a 5-foot-diameter pit would be a trivial obstacle. Why waste game time making everyone roll to jump over the pit? Why not let them Take 10 and get on to something relevant to the adventure that's actually a threat, like a trap, monster, or shady NPC?
Let your players Take 10 unless they're in combat or they're distracted by something other than the task at hand. It's just there to make the game proceed faster so you don't have big damn heroes failing to accomplish inconsequential things.
When I made the FAQ I listed other examples which had come up such as swimming, climbing, perception (to locate a trap), perception (reactive check to locate hiding enemy, and disable device (disarm a trap.
That would give us examples without forcing them to list every possible combination.
However part of the reply was:
.....To that end, it would be counterproductive to attempt to make a strict ruling on what counts as “immediate danger and distracted” because that’s going to vary based on the pacing and dramatic needs of the moment. "
Under this ruling that pit can now be a danger/distraction when it wouldn't have been before.
The game breaks down if you try to run by pure RAW.
A certain amount of handwaving and house ruling is required to make games run smoothly.
RAW is necessarily silly.
RAI is necessarily subjective unless you wrote and edited the rule for publication. It is also sometimes silly.
I run what makes sense at the time. Generally I stick to the text until it becomes ridiculous, house rule on the fly if necessary to keep the game running, then have a chat with players between sessions to decide how things should continue in the future.At the risk of being overly irreverent: I care about what makes the game fun for everybody, not what Mark/Sean/etc. drank/smoked the day they hit "send" on their rules copy or what fresh horror resulted after the editors hacked the important clauses off to save on page count two hours before press.
Edit: @wraithstrike, academically, how does Mark's interpretation of taking 10 differ from Sean's?
As an example a common argument was that if someone had to jump over a pit they couldn't take 10 because the pit counted as danger. The other side which I was on wouldn't count the pit as a danger. It isn't doing anything. It's just there.
SKR's said that as long as you weren't in danger or threatened you could take 10. It was basically a player decision. He even listed examples.
Mark's version has it so that the GM can decide at any time that you can't take 10. The GM decides when you can use it for pacing, and refused to give any examples of when it would be ok. He felt like the other way was taking the power out of the GM's hands.
...The purpose of Take 10 is to allow you to avoid the swinginess of the d20 roll in completing a task that should be easy for you. A practiced climber (5 ranks in Climb) should never, ever fall when climbing a practice rock-climbing wall at a gym (DC 15) as long as he doesn't rush and isn't distracted by combat, trying to juggle, and so on. Take 10 means he doesn't have to worry about the randomness of rolling 1, 2, 3, or 4.
The rule is there to prevent weirdness from the fact that you can roll 1 on tasks you shouldn't fail
Huh, interesting. Thanks for the synopsis. I could argue with Mark about that one all day. : D