Rantette: The Anti-rules Association

Yup, I'm gonna rant again. I might also offend people. Yay.

This Rantette is about rules, and more specifically playing by them. But more accurately, it is about those people who think this is a bad thing.


Believe (the bastard with the Cygnar army) posted a question about the Malifaux Master Kirai, and how the rules for Placing allow her to place new Seishin into play. Textually, there is nothing to allow this; only to allow the moving of Seishin already in play.


It is a question that has genuinely come up, and that we wanted an answer to, if only a Rule Marshall telling us that, yeah, it does allow that.

Here is one of the responses we got:

You guys need to stop with the "the rules don't explicitly explain how the works" when it's obvious, there's no way you can't see the intention of how this works.

Just to be clear, the discussion was about a rule that doesn't explicitly explain how something works. In fact, the actual rule, if taken at face value, would pretty much not possibly work the way it is generally taken. The first page or so of discussion was filled up with a few reasonable people explaining why the rule was a problem, with a few - let's say less reasonable - people loudly stating that the rule worked just fine.

From later on in the thread:

Has Malifaux really degraded into the nitpicking found in Warhammer?

What the Futterwacken? Nitpicking? Seriously? There's a rule, that says it does one thing, whereas most players (apparently) read it as doing something else, and we can't ask for clarification?

And finally:

And re my comments above, my issue is the tone of a lot of new people on here who seem to down talk Wyrd, constantly complain that the rules are crap and badly written, and nit pick every small detail - often seeming for the simple sake of there "could" be confusion, not because there is. It just clutters the forum with bad feelings and gives new people the wrong impression of the game.

This is not an accurate description of anybody in the current thread. There was the original poster, asking whether there was something we had missed that allowed the rule to function the way it is generally interpreted. There were then a few of us explaining why the rule was not as clear as the firts few responders seemed to think. And then there were the quotes I've included here.

I might be biased, but I think the negative feelings were all the fault not of the ones 'nitpicking' but those taking offense. Who, exactly, is giving the 'new people' (this was Believe's first post, and the second thread I've been involved in) a bad impression?

Stolen from Schlock Mercenary. You should read it.

This is not a deep post. I know. It's a rant. It's me venting my frustration with this kind of attitude here, rtaher than over there.

I leave you with a question:

Why is it considered a bad thing to read the rules as they are written? When did it become unsporting to actually want to play by the rules that are in the rulebook, rather than the perceived intent behind that rule, or the commonly accepted, but unofficial, intent thereof?

And that's that for me.

I'll be back soon, hopefully, with something more akin to my regular posting.

Cheers.