Rulings of Cool
A couple of days ago, my friend Isaac at Afraid of Encounters prompted one of our group chats with a fun prompt from Bluesky.
For the record, my three descriptors are cooperative, contemplative, and environment-oriented
This discussion revealed that "rule of cool" was a common response, which elicited some lamentation (qualified by the lamenter admitting that it is pure pettiness). Isaac asked whether any OSR blogs have talked about the Rule of Cool, and Sam Sorensen's Doing a Cool Move was cited. Great writeup, but ultimately not germane to an interesting observation that I want to explore. Har at viendhita asserted that "rulings over rules" can fall within the purview of "rule of cool", and Dante at The Dolent Chronicle added that the popular usage of the term encompasses just about anything that isn't following rules-as-written.
I couldn't quite stomach this, so I wanted to meditate on my reaction and figure out where the daylight between the two might be.
My first-cut distinction without a difference was:
Rulings over Rules is invoked when the fiction dictates a situation that is not codified in the game rules, so the game manager tries to come up with a reasonable way to adjudicate the situation that can be reused moving forward.
Rule of Cool is invoked when the fiction could be heightened by a player decision that is not codified in the game rules, so the game manager tries to come up with a reasonable way to adjudicate the situation that should not be reused moving forward.
But is this consistent with the original intent of either turn of phrase?
Per Gus's 2023 retrospective on Maxims of OSR Play, rulings over rules represents two key concepts. The first is that RPGs "should offer the freedom for characters to act beyond scenarios already contemplated by the rules." Pretty consistent with my assertion above. The second is that:
Players must trust the referee to adjudicate unexpected situations fairly, and referees trust players by allowing them to offer unexpected solutions with reasonable chances of success. Both players and referees should not appeal to or demand citations to the rules over the referee’s judgment about events. Meta-gaming and “rules lawyering” solutions that are against the “spirit” of the setting or lack fictional consistency (e.g. the “peasant railgun”) are considered cheating or unsporting and the referee can reject them even if the rules as written allow them.
I think this idea of excluding solutions that are against the "spirit" of the setting or lack fictional consistency is both load-bearing and incredibly malleable. Fundamentally, rulings are a tool for bubbling up players' "Internal Rules" (how do I make decisions about the fictional space) and the table's "Social Rules" (what sorts of genre expectations and conventions have we agreed upon, or do we need to revisit) into more "Formal Rules" of how the game is played day by day.
In contrast, I had to visit tvtropes because I couldn't find a tabletop blog that explicitly discusses the Rule of Cool. The definition they provide is
The limit of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its awesomeness.
Just gave me a shudder with that 2010s-era way of talking about media, but that's what I get for going to tvtropes. The more useful line I found in this is that it's a "principle that seeks to dispel arguments among fans over implausibility in fiction"; everyone participating observes that there has been a breach in logical consistency, so what is our collective appetite to overlook it.
While I think this does inherently show the immediate contrast between Rulings over Rules (how can we model an agreed-upon logical consistency) and Rule of Cool (is it worth violating logical consistency for this cool idea), the process by which you arrive at either is the same. The players have to have some level of agreement on how the world should generally work so that they can know when they are following expectations or subverting expectations.
The Rule of Cool becomes more painful (to someone with my sensibilities) if it is communicated/adjudicated as a ruling rather than an exception. The tropes page even specifically calls out the idea that it's a temporary breach of world logic. And yet, it's a reasonable position for a GM to say that when they make a ruling, that is the formalization of how the table should operate moving forward; does that incentivize the table to then either never reach for "cool moves" or to continually push the boundary of how the world works? Probably neither, but the possibility is there and I know that can create anxiety for both game runners and tables.
I want to acknowledge another side of this, from Ru's Roleplay Rants essay on Stunting. Ru opens the argument with a polemic on games that essentially try to formalize or mechanize reaching for cool moments. The argument is well-taken! It tackles the real root problem of making temporary rulings in favor of coolness, because not only does a table of 3-6 people have at least N unique conceptions of the fictional world, they have probably N+1 unique conceptions of what "cool" means! To take an extreme example, if one of my players thought it would be "cool" to violently torture an NPC, would I be expected to reward that behavior?
For my money, I think a huge part of the "play" in roleplaying games is understanding the other players and our relationships to get to know them better. "Stunt fishing" to me is not about wearing down the GM to find their boundaries on "no fatigue", it's about understanding what they like and find interesting about the fictional space, but I do not expect that to be an enjoyable element of play for every person in the hobby.
Anyway.
One of these days I'm going to spend some time gathering my thoughts on "rules-as-exception-handling" because the idea merits more than an aside in a summary of a chatroom conversation, but the daylight to me between these two popular concepts is:
Rulings over Rules is a constructivist, formalizing tool that captures new permanent parts of play.
Rule of Cool is an exception-handling tool to temporarily open up the fictional space and fictional logic as a reward for player creativity.
Let me know what you think!
Also while you're here, check out my initial release of my Land Survey game, Cadastre!