Sunday, August 21, 2016

RPGaDay 2016 #21 What Was The Funniest Misinterpretation Of A Game Rule In Your Group?

Off the top of my head, I don't think I have the precise story the question seems to be looking for. No strong memories of ""OMG! If I had known that rule worked differently, that thing never would have happened!"

One recent amusing misinterpretation that has no real rules effect comes from one of my current players. He loves magical characters and so is playing a wizard in my Pathfinder game. His handwriting is not sloppy by any stretch of the imagination, but it is peculiar in places. His 1's occasionally look like 7's. That sort of thing.

His most amusing typo came when he got the spell floating disk. It's very useful for carrying treasure and other heavy things out of the dungeon until you get cool items like bags of holding or portable holes. But his S came out a bit more like a C when he wrote it on his spell list. So rather than a floating disk, it looked very much like he could use his magic to create a floating dick.

We sometimes tease him about this, but I have never made a ruling that his spell actually creates anything resembling a penis.

Another story similar to this would probably be from my GURPS Technomancer campaign many moons ago.

I had purchased the book GURPS Martial Arts at DunDraCon that year. Since I was so enthused by the new content, I allowed my players to rebuild their characters to take advantage of the new rules. They couldn't change their point totals, but they could swap out old abilities for cool kung fu,

One player took this a little too far. In order to avoid changing his point total, he piled on an excessive amount of disadvantages to afford all of his new martial arts abilities. And since he was a fairly dedicated roleplayer, he insisted on playing out all of them.

It actually took me some time to clue into this. Because even though his behavior was disruptive, it never seemed petulant or spiteful. he was simply playing his character. Though once I clued in that he had written down every disadvantage in the book, I told him to tone it down and rewrite his sheet without so many disadvantages, even if it meant toning down his martial arts or his magic. Or both.

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