History Main / ThatOneRule

'''Alan:''' She's got it!

** A few old-school cards have very complex rulings because they were made before making sure that there was no room for interpretation became one of the game's priorities. See for example [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=202494 Ice Cauldron]] or [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=202591 Word of Command.]] However, the absolute worst part of the rules is what happens when there are multiple persistent abilities that affect what a card can do, epitomized by the interaction between [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=397614 Humility]] and [[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=15142 Opalescence.]] Witness the block of rule clarification on the interaction between those two cards specifically, as well as how many times those rulings have changed.

** In Creator/RobertAsprin's ''Literature/PhulesCompany'', during the fencing match between [[EliteArmy the Red Eagles]] and the [[RagtagBunchOfMisfits Omega Company]], Phule gives a brief explanation of right-of-way to the audience prior to the beginning of the match. They are okay with it during the foil bout. confused and angry about it during the sabre bout because the Omega Company fencer loses points to it all the time (he's not a fencer at all, but an escrima fighter, and he's clearly landing attacks that would work in a real fight, but violate right-of-way), and when he announces the epee bout, they cheer when he tells them that epee doesn't use right-of-way at all.

** In Stephen Baxter's ''Time's Eye'', British soldiers from colonial-era India try to explain cricket to the army of Alexander the Great. They manage to get most of it across with gestures and broken Greek. They give up trying to explain Leg Before Wicket.
** In WebSite/SFDebris' review of the ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' episode "Persistence of Vision", a vision of his disapproving father asks Tom Paris several difficult trivia questions, which Tom successfully answers, until he asks him to explain the Leg Before Wicket rule, which Tom fails to do, causing the vision to dismiss him as useless.

** The last time Banding was printed on a physical card was back in the 90's, and for good reason. It's widely considered the strangest and most unintuitive mechanic in Magic's long history. The basic concept is fairly simple: When attacking or blocking, your creatures can form "bands", which are effectively treated as one creature in combat from then on. All but one creature in an attacking band must have banding, and at least one creature in a defending band must have Banding, which is already strange, but tons of other questions also come up as soon as combat happens, such as: what abilities the band will or won't have, how damage from and against the band actually works, how the opponents creatures and abilities interact with their banded creature and so on. And this is without even getting into the "Bands with Other", a more specific subtype of banding with an additional restriction on what could be in the band (for example, "Bands with Other Wolves"). It used to be even worse, as well, because prior to a 2010 rules update creatures with "Bands with Other" ability could only band with other creatures that also had the same "Bands with Other" ability, not any creature that met the condition.

** In 5E, the Challenge Rating system is intended to help the DM balance encounters, but is infamous for how bad it is at doing so. The Challenge Rating/CR of a monster is designed to tell you how great a threat the monster is by saying that four adventurers of the monster's CR should have a difficult but winnable fight. For example, if a monster's CR is 3, that means four party members, each of whom are at level 3, should find such a beast to be a worthy challenge, but not a deadly one. Trouble is, what counts as worthy of a high CR is completely arbitrary, self-contradictory, and hard to pin down. One monster with a CR of 10 may be surprisingly easy for a party of level 6 characters, while a monster with a CR of 12 may end up causing a TotalPartyKill on a level 15 party. Plus, even though the adventurers can only reach level 20, a monster's CR can go as high as 30, which is where the system gets really arbitrary, as in order for a monster to have a total CR of 30 its offensive and defensive statistics must both be above certain values, with there being technically no cap. What is not generally obvious but has been claimed by MCDMs analysis is that a single CR30 monster accounts to roughly half of the daily budget over a 2-short rest adventuring day for a party of 4-6 level 20 characters. While the Dungeon Masters Guides pages on calculating CR work wonders for homebrewers and Xanathars Guide To Everything contains yet more tables on quickly creating encounters, none of the books after the core rules have bothered to explain the value of specific abilities and next to no homebrewers have done so, requiring enterprising DMs to reverse-engineer the CR of monsters so they can use their abilities in other monsters.

*** Since castling is common and therefore learned early, most instances of confusion come in the form of people assuming assuming additional rules that don't actually exist. More than one master-level player has had to ask a judge mid-game if they could castle when their rook is under attack (You can).