Alright. How do we square
this...
It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules, which is important. Never hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks room lawyer to force quotations from the rule book upon you.
...with
this...
Not much. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I will repeat: A forty-plus-level character is ridiculous. We feel that you must advance one level at a time, not a whole bunch at once. I don’t understand how or what happened or even if all the gods were in this battle, but if you enjoy playing this way, feel free to do so. I don’t want to spoil your fun.
...particularly in light of
this:
A rules lawyer, on the other hand? This is necessarily a pejorative term. When you read that, you might think ... Woah. No. Look, I am actually HELPING everyone out. I'm the good guy here! But like the proverbial law school gunner, the hallmark of the rules lawyer (or the barracks lawyer in the military) is a lack of self-awareness. All the time spent arguing during a game is time spent not playing the game. While the rules lawyer is busy "making the game better for everyone," the rest of the table is invariably rolling their eyes, sighing loudly, and scrolling on their phones. No RPG is written with the prolixity of a legal code, and no game should be held up by lengthy arguments over loopholes and exploits.
My issue is that the first and third things make strong claims about how the game "should" be played; the third also makes such claims, but then hedges them with "I don't want to spoil your fun."
As for me...I'm very self-conscious about any situation where I'm commenting on the rules used by others. I absolutely don't want to crap on anyone else's fun at the table. In fact, the one time I can remember where I had pointed out an error with something, I took it upon myself to find a solution afterward, and actually
did manage to make things better thereafter. (TL;DR: gonzo game, fellow player's build needed undead chars, but his method caused other conflicts. I sheepishly noted this, but later found a fix: the Deathless template. Patched up the gap, gave more perks,
and made more sense for char's story. It felt good to find that.)
The real game-breaking thing they consistently do is always try and force the game to be about what their character is good at.
Yeah, I played several games (mostly video games) with someone who was like that. If it was competitive, always pick the options that are strongest, especially if they eliminate parts of gameplay (they were BIG into any 4X-game perk that means you eat money/production rather than food.) If it was cooperative, they would always align things so the only way for the team to win was for
them to win--meaning if we didn't jump at their beck and call, if we didn't give them the resources they needed, etc., it was
our fault for not supporting them enough.
This person has actual, diagnosed mental health issues which contribute to this behavior, so their behavior is not necessarily a useful representation. That said, some folks are just....a little narcissistic in gaming, or in general. (Estimates are that somewhere between 1% and 5% of people have legit narcissistic personality
disorder, so the non-clinical narcissistic personality
type (which isn't unhealthy, but does involve more extreme narcissism than ordinary behavior) is almost certainly at least as prevalent if not moreso.
As for Rules Lawyer, whilst it's definitely intended to be pejorative, I've seen it misused far too many times by bad or mediocre or just confused DMs in the 1990s and '00s to describe "players who actually knew the rules"
Yeah, I've seen it used that way as well. I wouldn't say it is common
per se today (my gaming experience is mostly mid/late 00s and later), but it's not rare either. Sort of like how "railroad" sometimes gets thrown around to describe perfectly reasonable, above-board linear gameplay.
I'd also note I've played at the same tables as people with the "Munchkin"-type behaviour, I didn't find real kids to be the worst for it, but rather older teenagers and very young 20-somethings.
100%. In fact, I often find actual children (pre-teens or young teens, up to say 14ish) are much
more inclined to be great roleplayers because they often lack the concern about saving face or "proving" themselves. More often than not, their characters are purely vehicles for self-expression and exploration. Varies by person whether they're protective of said character or not, but I find them much less interested in rules minutiae and much more interested in asking probing questions and trying things that make sense to them (the trick, of course, is to get them to explain why it should make sense to others too.)