I was playing my every-other-week Pathfinder Society game at my FLGS the other day when I got distracted by a loud voice from somewhere outside of the game room. There was a table of people playing some sort of social persuasion game, and one person was emphatically arguing that the Lord of the Rings trilogy was impossible to find boring. It was an empty argument, but one done with such weasel-wordy stridency that I found it supremely off-putting. But, hey, the dude wanted to win.

My attention snapped back to the game before me, however, and I immediately thought about the Rule of Cool, how it’s abused, and how to remedy that. After the game, the GM and I talked about this, and he gave me some really good advice.

What is the Rule of Cool, and how can it be abused?

Simply put, the Rule of Cool, when applied to TTRPGs, is letting the character attempt anything if it sounds cool. The GM might assign a high DC for it - higher than a specialized character might get - but still allow it.

I’m not opposed to this sort of ruling framework, but I feel as though it’s misused. In old-school games (where the assumed play style is that the game moves more by what you as the player come up with than what’s on your character sheet), it’s practically required, as they don’t often prescribe many things characters can and can’t do. I don’t have a beef with that, as their frameworks are sparse by design and the table has to come to some sort of consensus about what’s appropriate for a character and what isn’t based on the scaffolding provided. However, in new-school games (where the opposite is true - a character is defined more mechanically and needs to cleave to the features given inside of the rules), Rule of Cool can cause issues.

Firstly, it lessens the use of investing in features the rules give people. Let’s say that you’re playing a Fighter and you want to plant some evidence on an enemy. The Rule of Cool would suggest that, since that’s a cool scene, you should be able to do that. But what if the Rogue in the party has taken a feat that mirrors that same action? It would seem to me that this would invalidate the investment the Rogue had made. Even if the ruling was that the Fighter’s DC would be higher than the Rogue’s, the fact that they can still try it means that that feat is less potent than something wholly unique to the class.

Secondly, I feel like this dilutes from the classes’ identities. I’m personally a fan of defining classes by what they can do as well as what they can’t. (That’s not to say that classless games are bad, just that they’re a different beast, and their assumptions don’t play well with class-ful games.)

Lastly, I think Rule of Cool adds a degree of unwelcome challenge to the sharing of the table spotlight. Like the guy yelling about Lord of the Rings at the beginning, the person wants to persuade the judge (the GM in this case) to their way of thinking. They too want to win, in a sense. Anecdotally, I’ve been at tables where the game grinds to a halt where the GM and player hash out if their move is acceptable. Ultimately, I feel like it boils down to a feeling of “how can I convince the GM to bend the rules to make my character look awesome, regardless of the cost to the rest of the table?”

How can you fix this?

Now, I understand that Pathfinder is a rules-tight game with only modest wiggle room for GM interpretation of the rules. But the GM that night gave me some amazing advice - look for where the rules are deliberately vague, and only within those narrow windows, allow for rulings that make the whole table feel awesome. For example from that evening: I used Nature with an Aid check to check prevailing winds to set the archer up for a better roll. Another example: I used Recall Knowledge to determine that a certain enemy wasn’t mindless, and that we could use emotional effects on it. (This saved the archer’s hide, as application of Demoralize prevented a devastating critical hit.) The Rule of Cool facilitated teamwork, not grandstanding and hero moments.

It dawned on me recently that my preference for grid-and-minis play isn’t just a playstyle preference (though I love tactical TTRPGs, don’t get me wrong). I have aphantasia, so having a physical reference of what’s going on is critical to me having fun.

This isn’t to say that I don’t rock with non-grid games, but I need other accommodations - range bands work well for abstracting distance, or working entirely in narrative terms is cool too. But I can’t envision what “moving 30 feet” looks like, so I need help in whatever way works.

I’m writing this about a month after Wizards of the Coast did amazing damage to their Dungeons and Dragons brand. The dust has settled and, at least anecdotally, the landscape has changed. I’ve seen D&D-only channels switching to Pathfinder 2E, or even looking at more esoteric systems like City of Mist and Mothership.

D&D’s presence has always been outsized in the TTRPG hobby, but in the latter years of the 5E lifecycle, it’s been hegemonic. I see that as a bad thing for the hobby overall, because it leads to every creative project either being funneled into the 5E design space, or held up against the reigning champ (aka “why should I play X when my table already knows 5E?”). WotC broke this hegemony entirely by accident, and the hobby is better for it.

While I’m glad that WotC finally caved and put the 5.1 SRD under a Creative Commons license, the damage has already been done. As a Pathfinder 2E fan, I’m happy that new people are looking at the game, but I’m also excited that there’s interest in games further afield, like MÖRK BORG, Mothership, Blades in the Dark, Call of Cthulhu, and others. The hobby is so much more than “d20-based class-based heroic adventure in quasi-medieval settings” and I’m thrilled that people are looking beyond the biggest player.

I’m tentatively going to move my long-form blogging over to here, I think. write.as is a good platform, but CHost has better tools than what I have over there, plus there’s a community here. I often felt like I was opining into the void. That’ll probably also be true here, but… less so?

Hmm. Anyway:

The other day I was talking RPGs with my friends. I’m the most pro-Pathfinder 2E/anti-D&D 5E of the lot of us, for context. One of them said something to the effect of “Pathfinder 2E’s feats get in the way of letting the GM letting you just do things”. And, y’know, he’s right. However, I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing, nor is it an ahistoric trend. I’m not trying to put said friend on blast, but rather outline two different approaches to game design.

A Tale As Old As Ti… I Mean, The Hobby

This sort of hard delineation between characters’ abilities has been in the game for several decades, if not the inception of the hobby. After all, if you wanted to cast spells, you had to be a Magic User or a Cleric. If we pull up OSRIC, the faithful 1E clone, we see that the Thief has an entire table dedicated to stuff it can do that are unique to it.

Even in this early state of the game, we see that classes not only define what they can do, but what they can’t, in relation to others. Clerics don’t get access to the Thief’s abilities, nor does the Thief get to Turn Undead. The Assassin has a special carve-out for them getting Thief abilities at two levels lower.

What games like Pathfinder 2E bring is a modularity to this design. You can lean in hard on Feat choices that reinforce the classic tropes of a sneaky Thief or a tanky Fighter, but you have the tools to subvert these tropes as much or as little as you want.

That’s fine for class feats and features, but what about stuff outside of the class scaffold? That’s a bit trickier.

Two Roads, Diverging

When I got back into D&D in 4th Edition, I was struck by how modal the game was. Here, there was a very rules-y, tightly structured game while in combat, giving way to a very light, loose game of skill-rolling outside of combat. 5th Edition still does this, although the in-combat game is looser. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it does raise a couple of complications to be aware of:

1. It increases the work the GM has to perform, in order to adjudicate the scope and effects of skills.
2. In-combat abilities/powers become more enticing.

In the first point, the scope, limitations, and overall effectiveness of any skill roll has to be adjudicated by the GM. While this is unavoidable to a certain extent in any TTRPG, being able to delegate authority over a certain set of effects to a ruleset, and then to distribute the understanding of the effect to the entire table, frees up a non-zero amount of the GM’s cognitive and creative overhead. The second point allows that bifurcation between in-/out-of-combat modes to blur a bit. Combat still has that tactical bite, but out-of-combat activities have special effects that a player can invest in and have toys and systems to play with that don’t involve swinging axes or throwing fireballs. Feeding back into the first point, this also frees up the GM in term of session and encounter design. Perhaps it’s just me, but players having interesting tools to solve problems means that combats don’t have to be the only way a player engages with the crunch of a game.

Yes, But…

But still, my friend is right. This approach does take away from a GM’s authority to make decisions that are right for their game, and some GMs would not be cool with that. Some games (13th Age springs to mind, as does the OSR family of games) have a system that can’t support this non-combat rules-heaviness.

All that said, however, having feats determine a part of how class abilities and skills work is also an excellent design space.