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Does the GM Need To Know the Rules?
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<blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5429381" data-attributes="member: 3448"><p>Rules knowledge is helpful, but it's far from necessary. One of my favorite DMs of all time has remarkably poor rules knowledge. He'll often say "roll XYZ," and we'll say, "are you sure that shouldn't be ABC instead?" and he'll respond, "sure, that sounds reasonable, roll ABC." For lots of rules questions that are complicated, he'll delegate to other people--often to his partner if he's present, other times to whoever the resident rules geek is at a given time. His game is less good because of the lack of rules knowledge--there are times he'll do things in off-the-cuff ways that don't make any sense, or aren't entirely fair to the players--but it's still a great game.</p><p></p><p>Of course, if you're running a tactical wargame that's all about the combat, problems with rules knowledge can be much bigger. So my basic conclusion is that it depends on the game style (with style of game being more important to this issue than system), that rules knowledge is always helpful and a good thing, but it's not really necessary and is not the most important thing.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Cerebral Paladin, post: 5429381, member: 3448"] Rules knowledge is helpful, but it's far from necessary. One of my favorite DMs of all time has remarkably poor rules knowledge. He'll often say "roll XYZ," and we'll say, "are you sure that shouldn't be ABC instead?" and he'll respond, "sure, that sounds reasonable, roll ABC." For lots of rules questions that are complicated, he'll delegate to other people--often to his partner if he's present, other times to whoever the resident rules geek is at a given time. His game is less good because of the lack of rules knowledge--there are times he'll do things in off-the-cuff ways that don't make any sense, or aren't entirely fair to the players--but it's still a great game. Of course, if you're running a tactical wargame that's all about the combat, problems with rules knowledge can be much bigger. So my basic conclusion is that it depends on the game style (with style of game being more important to this issue than system), that rules knowledge is always helpful and a good thing, but it's not really necessary and is not the most important thing. [/QUOTE]
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