The "Rule of Cool" needs to go

So I have a Golden Rule. It goes: "Write about what interests you; don't write to make yourself angry over basically nothing." It's important - I abandoned my previous blog (may it rest in peace) because it started feeling like a toxic way of venting gaming frustration without achieving any real catharsis.

Hopefully I won't end up trampling all over my maxim in what follows. And hopefully you'll find it interesting too. Here goes.

The so-called "Rule of Cool" needs to go. In my opinion, citing it, especially citing it often, should be seen as a form of GMing malpractice. I'm sorry Matt Mercer, I know that that and "How d'you wanna do this" are your legacy. I hope you can rest content with the number of new people you got to introduce to the fun of doing silly voices. Those people are better off now, and it's because of you.

To avoid just ragging on the RoC (see golden rule above), I'm going to advance a specific argument: The Rule of Cool doesn't actually exist. What does exist is the following rule:

The Rule of Genre: Any action can plausibly succeed if its doing so would fit the genre and tone of the game.

(Lets not worry too much about how genre and tone are distinguished, shall we?)

Any GM worth their salt is going to be exercising the Rule of Genre, or something like it - even those who believe in the Rule of Cool. But the kicker is this: The RoG does all the work of the RoC. Or, more specifically, anytime the RoC is applied well, its actually the RoG doing the work. And any time the RoC is applied badly (i.e.: to the detriment of the game), it's applied in violation of the RoG.

Okay, so still not the clearest. Here's the main point: The RoG doesn't just apply to cool actions, or implausible actions, or actions that aren't a perfect fit with the rules - it applies to all actions. And if you have the RoG, you don't need the RoC - it can only bring bad stuff. Heck, you don't even need a rule saying "Only actions that are realistically possible can succeed", or anything like that. Lets go into some detail.

🕸

Cool and realism

The Rule of Cool mostly seems to get applied when a character tries something that wouldn't realistically have a chance of succeeding - at least not a very big chance. But this shows a misunderstanding of the role of realism in RPGs.

Here's the thing. The amount of realism in your game is entirely determined by the genre and tone of the game you're playing. That doesn't necessarily mean the ruleset, although that will affect it. So anyone GMing D&D 5e isn't going to require too much realism in their games. That's not just because there are elves and wizards, it's because people can cut a swath through hordes of enemies, recover from grievous wounds in a single night, turn away arrows with their bare flesh, and so on. D&D is built for swashbuckling sword and sorcery, it pretty much says so in the Player's Handbook.

So anyone applying the Rule of Cool to D&D is misunderstanding how much realism is expected. Sorry Mr Mercer, that means you too. If your players want to jump onto a speeding magic train to battle some warforged (I assume this is 90% of gaming in Eberron) and you let them, despite the speed differential meaning they'd just bounce off, it isn't the RoC allowing them to do so - it's the fact that doing so would be tonally appropriate, and plausible within the genre of fiction being portrayed, the same reason they can do anything they're able to do.

I feel like most GMs already know this, or at least are already doing it like this; you're not assessing the players' actions for realism, then trumping your assessment with the RoC, you're just assessing them for genre appropriateness. But failing to appreciate that you're doing this is failing to understand the role of realism. I.e.: If realism ever does enter the equation, it's because the genre demands realism. So even if you really are allowing your players to attempt only what could reasonably be attempted, it's still the genre telling you to do that. The gripping, horrifying tone of your Call of Cthulhu game would fall apart if it was swashbuckling like a D&D game. That's why CoC GMs demand realism - it's still the genre doing all the work.

And it'd be abjectly wrong to invoke the RoC in Call of Cthulhu, because the immersion of the players would be broken as soon as you crossed the genre boundary. It's the same whenever you step over the line with the RoC, in any genre; the reason you've stepped too far and broken immersion or suspension of disbelief is because you've strayed too far from genre expectations. Everyone knows of something a player asked to do that was just a little too far beyond plausible - this is why.

So any work that the RoC was supposed to be doing is actually done by the RoG. And any time the RoC leads you astray, it's because it violates the RoG. So the only thing the RoC does is make your game worse; the only rule that applies to cool actions only is just a bad thing.

Take a moment. Catch your breath. Because there's more.

🕸

Cool and the rules

The other time the RoC usually gets used is when an action isn't clearly possible within the rules. Or, I should say, when the GM is unsure of how to adjudicate an action by using the rules of the game. I'm saying it like this because the other phrasing demonstrates a misunderstanding of how the rules in an rpg - any rpg - work.

The rules in an rpg are optional. The player makes a statement of action or intent, the GM adjudicates what happens and presto, you have a roleplaying game. And occasionally, occasionally, the GM will want to inject some uncertainty into proceedings. And then we resort to dice and tables and ability modifiers and such. But this is entirely inessential, and certainly not the GM's first port of call - or at least it shouldn't be.

Take a look at the Free Kriegsspeil guys. Those guys have had this revelation, and it's hit hard. Once you realise that the rules of the game are secondary, in this sense, the temptation is to strip them out and see what happens. And what happens, really, depends on the style of play you prefer. But it certainly doesn't result in anarchy - to return to an earlier point, it doesn't even result in a loss of realism. Because what you have left when you have no rules is - say it with me - genre expectations. To reiterate, whether an action is allowed is entirely dependent on its fit with the genre, and people - not rules - are the best judge of that.

This point - what the rules are for, and when to use them - really merits its own article, but the main takeaway here is, again, that what is at the heart of all of this action adjudication stuff is just genre.

🕸

Cool and trust

90% of the job of the DM comes down to cultivating the players' expectations. This means carefully - and I mean carefully - demonstrating to the players what they can and can't reliably do. If you don't do that, then your players won't ever make any plans (because they have no way of creating a plan with more chance of working than any old random action), and your game is effectively dead.

(For the curious, the other 10% of the GM's job mostly comes down to pacing, in my opinion.)

If the players don't know what will and won't (likely) work, they can't make plans. And making plans and seeing them enacted is more or less what an RPG is all about - making choices and seeing the consequences unfold. But you undermine this if you regularly invoke the Rule of Cool.

As we've seen, the RoC only really applies where an action falls outside the expectations of the game's genre. Ipso facto, if you're applying the RoC, you're undermining the consistency of the game. And doing that undermines the players' ability to make informed choices and form plans. Now, a little bit of this isn't so bad. There's something you don't see on the internet that much: A qualification. However, if you really are only doing this a little, you're probably just following the Rule of Genre described above, since nine times out of ten it's "being a superb fit for the genre" that gets read as "being cool".

What about the other extreme? What if you apply the RoC so much that it doesn't undermine the ability of the players to make predictions, because they can reliably predict what counts as a cool action, and cool actions tend to work most of the time, like million-to-one shots in Terry Pratchett's Discworld? Well, then you've just incorporated those actions into the genre. You've established a "new normal", shifting the needle towards the tone of the Fast and Furious franchise. You're still using the RoG, not the RoC - the genre of your game has just become "cooler".

(Is there anything cooler than putting "cooler" in scare quotes?)

The rub here is the middle ground, where inconsistency develops. It's a slippery-slope argument, which as a rule aren't reliable, but I've seen this problem develop - it's a real threat, not an abstract concern. If the GM regularly invokes the RoC, they invite the players to shoot for ever cooler stunts. Players want to do cool things - that may well be what sold them on the game in the first place. More than that, they want to make plans that succeed, and the GM has demonstrated that the reliable way to do that is to play to the RoC. So they'll push for even cooler schemes, until they get really outlandish. The GM gets uneasy that they're breaking the tone by acting outside genre constraints - the GM may think of this as the stunts getting too unrealistic, but again, that's only a problem insofar as the genre says it's a problem. So eventually the GM snaps back and reasserts reality (or genre-appropriateness), usually zealously and without warning, mid-action. And, usually, someone's legs get broken.

Now the player feels awful: They did something in character that, in hindsight, their character would have known was stupid. So their immersion is broken. Plus, they feel hard done by: Everyone else got to be a badass, but they got shafted. And finally, they no longer know the bounds for reasonableness for actions within the game: Their ability to make plans and choices has been compromised, because of the shifting standards of plausibility, and the game's oscillating tone. And this last consequence can stick around for a long time, especially if the GM doesn't realise that it's the RoC that's been tripping them up, because the tone will keep rubber-banding, stretching thin, then snapping back. And that really stultifies your game (in fact, I'm pretty sure it creates an insidious form of abused gamer syndrome).

🕸

Wrapping up

Wow this got long. But while the details are multiple and fun to explore, the point is a simple one: The Rule of Cool, if it does anything, only does bad things. It's the little bit of grit or muck that gets into the gears of your game and jams and rusts them from the inside, causing them to grind.

And you know this. You're probably doing it right already. You only feel the need to use the RoC to the extent that you're not in touch with your game. So you already understand that the real powerhouse everyone should get to know is the Rule of Genre - you just maybe didn't think about it like that, but you have a practical understanding that that's what's really doing the work. With that under your belt, you don't need the Rule of Cool, or even a Rule of Realism, or for that matter the game rules, except in a capacity that's secondary to judging genre-appropriateness. Respect the Rule of Genre; ditch the Rule of Cool.