The Sensibility Rule

Broken builds, mechanics-abusing shenanigans, and poor power scaling – what’s a GM to do? How do you keep players challenged when someone can just put together the right combination of feats, spells, and class features to become an unstoppable army of one? How do you maintain verisimilitude when absurdities like the peasant railgun exist?

New DMs/GMs often have questions like these, and I’ve noticed that their concerns seem couched in an assumption that the answer lies in a better understanding of game mechanics, monster stats, etc. However, I think this overcomplicates things since there is a very intuitive and organic solution here.

The answer I use at my table is what I like to call “The Sensibility Rule.”

The Sensibility Rule is, at its core, as follows:

If a combination of mechanics or rules as written would lead to an absurd outcome, a more sensible ruling should be made.

Clean and simple. If a character does something that wouldn’t make any sense in the real world, then the GM should make a ruling that creates a more believable result.

Of course, this may require the GM and the players at the table to view the game with a different mindset. A lot of TTRPG players see the rules as a set of parameters for a competition against a predetermined set of challenges, much as one might approach a video game. However, tabletop games have much wider possibilities that may not actually be definable within a specific set of rules, and as such, benefit a great deal from GM rulings. These rulings allow for much more flexible interpretations of the game world, allowing common sense to trump game rules as written.

The Precedent for Sensibility in Tabletop Gaming

This approach has a pretty strong precedent within D&D’s own history. The game of Dungeons & Dragons ultimately stemmed from tabletop wargaming in which players would control armies and try to best one another in a clearly defined conflict. In many of these games, a referee would have been present who could make rulings on the fly in the event that a player had an idea on how to use terrain, position troops, etc. Many of these ideas may not have been explicitly spelled out in the game’s rules, in which cases an experienced referee would determine how these actions should be handled in-game.

The way many players currently view TTRPGs – i.e. as a sport-like exercise where all challenges and tactical possibilities are explicitly defined in the rules – seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon (in the RPG space, anyway). The roots of tabletop gaming appear to prefer a more open, common sense-driven approach to the game with a referee making rulings as needed.

World First, Rules Second

With that in mind, this concept goes much deeper than simply deterring the abuse of game mechanics at the table. Fundamentally, The Sensibility Rule is an attempt to get players to think more about the game world than about game mechanics. If something would be impossible or implausible in the real world (even assuming stuff like dragons and magic), then it wouldn’t work in game (unless there’s some defined magical reason for it to work, of course). By extension, if a player has their character do something that would normally be a bad idea in real life, it should be be subject to similar consequences in game.

Ultimately, when the GM and players treat the game as a living, breathing world rather than as an exercise in rules mastery, logic and commmon sense reign supreme at the table. Players begin to tackle problems with rational thought and in-world information rather than with whatever feats and spells appear on their character sheet.

An Example in Practice

To illustrate the effect that a world-first, rules-second approach could have on a game, let’s take the aforementioned example of the peasant railgun.

How It “Works”

For those fortunate enough to not be aware, the peasant railgun functions as follows:

A very large number of peasants all stand in a very long line five feet apart, with one end of the line pointed at some target.
The first peasant in the line (at the end farthest from the target) has a stick, rock, or some other object that may be thrown.
The rest of the peasants use the “Ready Action” action to hold their action until some condition is met (in this case, being passed the object).
The first peasant passes it to the next one, who, with their readied action, passes it to the next, and so on down the line.
The object ends up covering a very long distance in the space of a single round (about six seconds).
Math is used to determine the velocity of the object after traveling this long distance in such a short time.
That velocity is used to coerce the GM into having the object do massive damage when thrown at the target.

This frankly absurd concept comes from an attempt to combine game mechanics and real-world physics in a disingenuous way. It’s shamelessly selective about where the game rules end and where the laws of physics begin, which is just one of its flaws.

The RAW Approach

Now, someone running the game purely as written could easily discourage this behavior by stating that since the peasant at the end of the line is simply throwing an object, it would be treated as a thrown weapon and deal damage as such. No catastrophic destruction. Just 1d6 plus the peasant’s Strength modifier or whatever.

However, this approach still concedes that it is possible for a line of hundreds of peasants to pass an object from one end to the other in the space of six seconds, which of course disrupts verisimilitude.

The “World First, Rules Second” Approach

Someone using The Sensibility Rule, however, would be free to overrule even that. The object only makes it a few spaces down the line in one round, regardless of whether the rest of the line is readying an action to pass it along. Why? Because allowing them to pass it all the way to the end in a single round is silly, that’s why.

In this case, the rules take a backseat to maintaining a plausible game world where players are able to think of physical interactions without concerning themselves with abuses of game mechanics.

Have You Used The Sensibility Rule?

How often have you found yourself running a game with sense rather than mechanics? Any cool stories from that? Let me know in the comments!

And stay tuned for a story about how narrative gameplay supported by (but not restricted to) game rules resulted in a really cool sequence of events in one of my games.

The Astral Wanderer is brought to you by the insatiable desire to elevate the common sense of the general masses through the use of blunt instruments, yet opting for the pen instead. Share this article with your friends if you like it, or print it out and burn it if you don’t. All proceeds go toward mending the tear in spacetime caused by peasants passing a loaf of bread hundreds of miles in mere seconds. Really.