Making a Ruling

Header Art: Gamemastery Guide (2020) by Paizo Inc.

Game Masters have a lot to think about when they make a decision, a ruling, or anything else that will affect the world. Will the choice they make now be canon? Does that mean that the table can use an exploit over and over? Will the choice be weird to accept based on what else you have ruled? There are dozens of questions and there is no one right answer. Running a TTRPG is going to vary based on your table, how you as the GM run a game, and how your players react.

With that said, when you have to make a ruling, what is most important to you?

Rule of Cool

When you rule by the Rule of Cool, players will often try to be “creative” until they find a win button and then press that over and over. All people are incredibly good at taking the fun out of something when we find a win button. If you ever find a strategy in a video game and you keep winning with that strategy, regardless of whether it was ever intended or not, you will keep using that strategy over and over.

This continues until the game is no longer fun, but you can’t change your strategy as doing anything else would just be inefficient. You are stuck in a cycle of play where your playstyle is counter to your fun. There is even a famous quote by the designers of the Civilization series:

Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.
- Soren Johnson & Sid Meier

Of course, I’m not saying you can’t ever use the Rule of Cool, but when you do, you must make it very clear that it will only happen one time. Otherwise, the players ‘learn’ a new strategy that will help them win, and then that strategy becomes the only thing they ever do.

We can see this in RPG forums where a GM asks for advice on dealing with strategies that the players utilize that, while pretty cool when the table first started doing that action, became the only thing that the party now does. If it worked once, a table of players might argue, it should keep on working because you allowed it to work once.

This mindset can cause issues because the player expects one thing and then gets ruled otherwise. To fight this effect off, which won’t always stop players from trying again, is to say it only works this one time because of weird circumstances, and then make it clear it will not work again in the future. When a player tries it again, don’t allow it to work and remind them that it would only happen once.

Ruling by Logic

When you rule by logic, you disregard what the rulebook might say, what fun thing your players want to do, and what the world might require. By ruling with logic, you take all of the knowledge you have and then apply it to the situation, like logically, if you coat a creature in a grease spell and then use fire, shouldn’t the grease catch on fire?

But that goes counter to the rules of the system. The fact someone is covered in grease has nothing to do with a fireball spell. You face two choices here, you can either use your logic of fire and grease (and maybe past experiences) or you can follow the rules of the game.

This can be applied to other situations, like shooting a line of lightning in water, but only affecting the normal area of effect, or casting fire magic underwater, or launching a ball of fire, but the buildings in a city block don’t catch on fire.

Logically, there should be some consequence because that is what would happen in our world. In the game world though, we can’t always follow what is logical. We are playing a game and must suspend disbelief from time to time.

Refusing to do so, or ruling not to, can have effects that you won’t see. Just cause logically you think something will happen, doesn’t mean that everyone at the table will logically think. Not all grease catches on fire. Saltwater is a poor conductor of electricity. The player thought the buildings were made of stone or thick logs that won’t catch on fire easily. Sometimes fire can happen underwater.

When you rule based on what you believe to be logical, then you open yourself up for debate. On top of that, players can create ‘logical’ choices that should function one way, but logically it doesn’t… or does it?

For example, let’s take the well-known idea of the peasant rail gun. You have a line of hundreds of commoners and, on their turn, they all take the ready action to take propel a spear forward. The first peasant moves the spear to the peasant in front of them, and then that triggers all of the peasants to move the spear forward hundreds or thousands of feet in just six seconds. Logically, that can’t happen. But what if it did? Well, logically, that spear would be moving so fast that the commoner at the end of the line could then launch that spear tens of thousands of feet and obliterate anything that got in its way.

When we play games, we mix logic and fantasy. Some things use fantasy, some use logic. It creates confusion and makes the world feel both real, but also way too unbelievable. It’s a jarring transition from logic to fantasy, making the world feel inconsistent.

Ruling per Rules

Rules are great. I’ll be the first to say that. When you sit down at the table and begin to play Dungeons & Dragons, everyone is making a tacit agreement that they are going to play by the rules of the game. This means they aren’t going to try and bring in a character they made for Starfinder or try to use the magic system of Blades in the Dark.

Rules keep a table pushing forward, keep players and GMs in agreement, and ensure that things are not exploited… or at least, not as exploited as much. Unfortunately, rules can’t exist for everything that a table comes across. If there were rules for everything, a table wouldn’t need a GM to guide their band of murderhobos across adventures, allowing them to terrorize the local villagers who somehow still love that band of ragtag misfits.

If you stick closely to the rules, refusing to deviate from them, you are going to end up stifling creativity. We want players to come up with goofy or odd ideas, and there won’t be a rule for everything, nor should there be. Rules are awesome, but we can’t expect designers to think of everything and plan rules for everything. Otherwise, the Dungeon Master’s Guide would be thousands of pages long and we’d still need three more to encompass all the rules.

Ruling by the World

While you will often be guided by the rules of a game, this last way of ruling at a table is the most important for creating a cohesive world and table. When you rule by the world, you remain logically consistent to the world you have created or are playing in, and your players understand how to work with it.

This does mean that sometimes, you will be at odds with the rules, but the vast majority of the time, since everyone agreed to play a specific ruleset, your world will stem from the rules. You don’t build an entire world and then decide what game system best fits it. You decide what game system to play, and then create a world that values that game system.

Ruling by the world isn’t without issues that you might come across. If something is true to the world, like how a desert is completely devoid of magic, it could be unfun for a table to go adventuring for several sessions within as the wizard feels useless and can’t use their toolkit. In such a situation, you may have to come up with a ruling for the wizard, like they can cast only cantrips, they have access to a specific magic item, or there are strobes of magic that they can try and utilize to help them cast within the anti-magic desert.

I am personally a big believer in first and foremost ruling by the world. If the rules, like in Pathfinder 2e, don’t specify a skeleton doesn’t need to breathe, I rule by the world. The skeleton doesn’t need to breathe, but it can still be impacted by inhaled gases. In my world, despite the rules, skeletons have no reliance on breathing even if the rules don’t specify that.

Ruling Together

If all elves in your world only live fifty years, then all elves are bound to that. If a player tries to say that their elf is 500 years old, well that is inconsistent with the world. You have a world you are playing from and its rules should be respected - though a player’s idea can also be respected.

While the world rules that all elves die at fifty, what does the world rule when a 500-year-old elf shows up? Are they visitors from a far land? Are they not actually elves? Is that elf lying to the world and to itself? There are sorts of ideas that can stem from making rules based on your world, while still encouraging creative ideas.

While there isn’t only a single way of making a ruling, one should always think about the world they are playing in. Just because the rules say that something doesn’t happen in a specific way, maybe your world does allow that effect to happen. Maybe because it is logical. Maybe because it is cool. Maybe because that’s just the way it is in the world.