Off the top of my head, the first two things that come to mind are to limit it to that defintion or, provided there's enough examples to do it, split it into tropes for each of those ideas and turn Rule of Pool into a disambig for them.
The second paragraph about a Police Procedural seems odd, it sounds like a different trope. But looking at the earliest version of it in Wayback Machine, it seems like it was there from the start.
There is something here, that in live-action you avoid being around a body of water unless it has to be there, so either it's scene-setting (vacationers enjoy themselves) or it's Chekhov's Gun. But there are so many ways it could go (someone falls in for a prank, someone falls in for a gory death, a dead body is found in it) that it ends up trying to cover many separate tropes.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.I think a (seemingly) dead body discovered in a pool can be own trope.
TroperWall / WikiMagic CleanupBut none of these tropes - whether dead bodies or pools being significant or whatever - are even slightly connected to the current name, which is a disconnected snowclone of the totally-unrelated trope Rule of Cool.
If this trope isn't thriving (and I think it clearly isn't), why would we even attempt to salvage it under such a useless name? People are bringing up random unrelated pool-related tropes, which might be worth creating, but I'm not sure there's enough salvaging here to help with that. In fact, people have mentioned multiple unrelated pool tropes, which shows that we can't just have a generic "Rule of Pool" for them unless it's, like, an index for pool tropes (which I guess we could turn it into.)
I don't think we should make any effort to salvage anything under the current name except an index, though. I think the thing we should be doing is either turning it into index for pool-related tropes, or sending it to TRS for renaming or cutting.
Basically I suspect that if we do anything but cutting, renaming, or indexing this name then a year or so from now people are going to come back to a still-not-thriving, still-wildly-misused name and say "why do we have a trope under such a bad name?" and the answer will be "well it was created back in the Wild Old West days and then when it came up on Trope Talk nobody wanted to go through the effort of actually fixing it, so we chose a random pool-related trope and just crammed it in."
Edited by Aquillion on Aug 3rd 2024 at 2:52:41 AM
The name is a pun. It doesn't mean anything and nor do I think it needs to. I don't think any of the misuse has to do with the punny title.
In fact the title has always made sense to me, given that I thought it was a Finagle's Law concept for "someone will always end up in the pool". It's a rule about the pool.
Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 3rd 2024 at 5:54:56 AM
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI agree it's a bad name, but the deeper issue is that it's not a trope, it's several tropes crammed together. Talk of renaming a trope is pointless if we would then end up cutting it.
But I agree an index about pools under this name might work, if there are enough tropes.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.

Rule of Pool is specifically about swimming pools, and is a bit unfocused. By the definition, it's
The first sentence is probably the real intention, "The Law of Inevitable Immersion", meaning if the camera shows a large body of water before a climatic event it foreshadows someone falling. Consequently, some examples aren't about swimming pools.
Thoughts on scope?
Edited by Amonimus on Aug 2nd 2024 at 4:23:07 PM
TroperWall / WikiMagic Cleanup