This Troper recently got a full table of rules lawyers (two female even). They actually argued amongst themselves about which rule superseded which, and this troper finally just dropped a dragon on the party. The one player who DID survive had an extremely lucky nat 20, preventing a TotalPartyKill.

As a DM, this troper treats rules lawyers in accordance with lines 13-18, page 230 of 1E AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide (1979 edition).

Care to explain what this is for 3rd and 4th edition noobs?

I was being ironic. But if you really want to know: ''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, if it goes against the obvious intent of the game. As you hew the line with respect to conformity to major systems and uniformity of play in general also be certain the game is mastered by you and not by your players. Within the broad parameters given in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Volumes, you are the creator and final arbiter. By ordering things as they should be, the game as a whole first, your campaign next, and your participants thereafter, you will be playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons as it was meant to be. May you find as much pleasure in doing so as the rest of us do!''

Inversion: This troper became a RulesLawyer Game Master in order to smack down a munchkin who was threatening to fatally disrupt the game. Much acclaim was accorded the troper the first time the player was told he couldn't act without a week's recovery time after being dropped to negative hit points.

This troper took up a similar vocation, especially when dealing with Game Masters who broke their games by ignoring vital rules, or when the munchkin tried to "persuade" a weak-willed Game Master. Happens a lot, actually.

This Troper finds that, properly managed and contained, a Rules Lawyer is a valuable resource. Especially if they are so good at their rules lawyering that they can tell you which book and page that elusive table you can't quite recall is on.

This troper took up rules lawyering in Magic: the Gathering, so as to make sure he never misses an opportunity to react to an opponent's moves, as well as to clarify the confusing board positions that sometimes happen in hectic multiplayer Chaos.

This troper took on the Rules Lawyer mantle a few days ago when he explained to the DM and statter of a certain character that level adjustment stacks with Hit Dice when determining ECL. Said character was immediately nerfed and this troper was dubbed the RulesLawyer Bitch Bitch Bitch Nazi Bitch.

This troper is something of a Rules Lawyer, but does his best to pull the 'Lawful Good Rules Lawyer'. In one instance he got hit with a vorpal sword. We thought it had a Fort Save DC, but no-one could remember what it was. I rolled anyway, and after getting a 19 + a reasonable high bonus, the DM agreed, "High enough". While the rest of the game continued, I decided I was curious as to what the DC was. I looked it up. Turned out there was no DC and I was in dire need of a replacement head.

Inverted? Subverted? This Troper most frequently uses his rules lawyering skills to veto the DM's decisions by pointing out each and every game-breaking combo introduced by the DM's latest House Rule.

This troper is studying to become a lawyer and goes on dire rants against rules lawyering; It has nothing to do with rules lawyers being /incorrect/, and everything to do with the rules being written to be readable by normal people. There's a lot of simple-to-explain legal terms that take /pages/ to define for a court. Now imagine if EVERYTHING were like that. Even the really complex stuff. Even simple games would be unplayable. So whenever someone claims to have some 'clever' loophole, or that no such loophole exists, this troper tends to either rant, or find the loophole, depending on the situation. Sorta like now, but without either challenge so a default of ranting..

What about when the game designers ask for it? One of the ''{{Exalted}}'' developers has explicitly stated that "Charm text is a technical description, and should be read as such", and went on at length to 'encourage' rules-lawyerly interpretation, to the point of saying (paraphrased) "This isn't the way I intended it, and it can lead to silly consequences. But it's the way I wrote it, so it's legal."

This troper enjoys preemptive rules lawyering as an intellectual exercise. Its useful to know ahead of time which areas of the rules are vague so that you can discuss it ahead of time. He also agrees with the lawyer troper above, most of the times the spirit of the rules is more accurate than the actual rules.

This Troper just had a game of {{Munchkin}} - you know, the card game - which came down to whether the Illusion card could be used to screw with a gnome's ability to summon illusory monsters. After a five-minute argument which solved absolutely nothing, it was eventually decided to roll for it rather than endure further guideline legalism.

As this troper understands it, gnome illusions aren't monsters and would thus be immune. I've found the Munchkin forums to be very useful for questions like this.

This Troper is his group's resident rules lawyer, and is proud of it. I'm trusted enough not to use it to munchkin, though - we've run entire campaigns where the GM didn't know the rules, because she could ask me and I'd fire off citations, find the page, and quote statistical probabilities and suggested courses of action.

This Troper writes the rules for a certain highly popular game which his friends play, and thus is the ultimate specimen of rules lawyer. He does, however, only ensure accuracy and not pedantry.

I know a rule lawyer so bad that most of his character deaths come from having a Fiat dropped on them.

Are we talking about fiat as in "gamesmaster fiat" or Fiat as in the car company? Because the second would be awesome.

In this case, it may in fact be both.

This Lawful Good Rules Lawyer troper actually won a game of {{Yu-Gi-Oh}} (against an acquaintance who was ''flagrantly cheating'') by pointing out that actually, his current attack (and his last one) did more damage than surmised. Deciding to check this, we re-examined the entire last turn and, for good measure, the one before. It turned out he had forgotten about a card that he had played early on — said card was Skull Invitation. He had used two Spell Cards in those two turns. He had had 500 Life Points. (For those who don't know: Skull Invitation is a Continuous Trap; whenever a player — ''either'' player — loses a card in any way, by their own effects or their opponent's, it deals that player 300 Life Points of damage. I had enough Life Points to survive the one attack that was determined to have "actually" occurred. He did not survive the backlash.) It was awesome, not least because this guy was ''infuriating'' — I had been LGRL-ing earlier on as well, and he had been arguing such silliness as ''whether or not my card, when equipped to his monster, counted as a used Spell/Trap slot on my side of the field or his.'' He continually insisted that it go on his side, despite a)this offering him absolutely no advantage over the card being placed on my side and b) taking up one of his five Spell/Trap slots, which it is typically a good idea to ''keep relatively open'' if you don't have a massive combo on the field. But he didn't care — cheating, remember — and was quite literally giggling the whole time in perverse glee. I started shouting at one point, for more reasons than one.

This Troper's teacher thought he rule proofed the test's "cheat sheet" rules by saying that they had to be hand written with no microprinting on 8 1/2 X 11 paper. Cue this RulesLawyer wondering out loud if he could bring in an 8 1/2 foot by 11 foot cheat sheet to the test. When a physics teacher forgets to include units, he deserves this.

This troper's group has a 'Neutral Good' Rules Lawyer who knows all the rules and can quote any that apply to a given situation, even when they don't advantage his character/party. Unlike many rules lawyers he is happy for the GM to say "stuff it, this way's more fun." possibly because he remembers the 'Golden Rule' (The GM's word is law).

This trope, unfortunately, is the reason I stopped playing D&D. When battles that should take 10-15 or so minutes start racking up the hours due to the entire table, save me, arguing over the wording of a rule, it takes all the fun out of the game. Doesn't help that even the [=GMs=] are just as bad.

This troper strives to be a LawfulGood RulesLawyer, and his gaming friends appreciate him for it. It has also provided some satisfaction when I made the mistake of playing Warhammer40,000 with someone who thought himself a rules lawyer. After the fourth instance in which he attempted to rules-lawyer something blatantly illegal ''in a single shooting phase'', I was relieved rather than aggravated when he quit in a huff during the middle of my second turn, proclaiming that his (actually average) die rolls were making it so that he couldn't win. No, the fact that he was finally playing against an opponent who actually knew the rules well enough to call him on his crap made it so he couldn't win.

It seems the LawfulGood rules lawyer is somewhat uncommon. The other day, I played my first game of ''DungeonsAndDragons'', and the DM told me I could throw a knife while wielding a longsword without having to switch weapons, because it was assumed I held the knife in my other hand. I asked if I took a penalty to my hit chance because I was throwing left-handed. ''Everyone at the table stopped and stared at me''. (The answer was no, by the way.)

Mild rules lawyer DM here, though I am getting better. Generally nowadays, I tend to go with "Eh, I rule this disagreement this-a-way because it's more fun." I tend to allow a lot of ridiculous stunts not covered in the rules of games like Dungeons and Dragons, mostly so the players can have some epic Crowning Moments of Awesome.

I pulled this in a Quiz Bowl competition once. Something about an animal related to a raccoon that had a special digit, I answered Red Panda, they accepted it saying the answer was Panda. One of the people on the other team (his name was Butt), he objected since they're two different things (technically correct), but I reminded the judge that the last rule on the rule sheet was "No appeals will be accepted". The guy was stunned for most of the match, and I pulled off a long string of correct answers. Unfortunately we got some bad rapid-fire questions, so we still lost, but I made Butt look like an ass so it was all good.

This Troper is one in his 40k club. Somewhat averted/subverted/inverted, as I'm the only guy who has remembered the rulebook well enough to quote all the tables from memory, so people just take my word on the ruling rather than check the book or argue. Sometimes people actually find it easier to ask me than check the rulebook! In fairness, it is easier to ask a simple question rather than flick through an index Sometimes, I've considered taking a vow of silence at the club to encourage them to look up the rule rather than assume I know every rule off the top of my head.

This Troper and his GM had an understanding - he knows I'm going to rules lawyer, and so he put up with it on two conditions. First was that I'm True Neutral - if I knew the rules say that he shouldn't be doing something that helps us, I've got to tell him that too. Second, once I've told him the rule, that's it - I don't argue if he wants to do it his way. It served us pretty well, at least until our group kinda fell apart for unrelated reasons.

Satisfying moment and a variant on the RulesLawyer trope. A particularly RailRoading GM, great at building worlds but poor at letting players play in it, decided to have a huge horde of DemonicSpiders behind a closed door. As soon as a curious player opened the door, all Spider swarmed out and attacked the first player in sight. Then there was an early onset of FridgeLogic:

PC: What does the room I just opened look like?

DM: A hermetically sealed room, aside from the door you just opened. 9x9x9ft.

PC: If the room is hermetically sealed, then how did the spiders get in?

DM: Er... you could open it right?

PC: But in your description just now, of this place, you mentioned dust was all over, and it looked like nobody has been here in decades!

DM: They just did, okay?

PC: So if the Spiders have been in the completely sealed room ''for decades'', where did they get their food from?

DM: What do you mean?

PC: Well, with no food source nearby, on account of a completely sealed room, how did they survive without a food source?

PC#2: Yeah, and wouldn't the creatures have suffocated by now?

DM sighs: You open the door, and there is a pile of spider corpses, happy now?

PC: ...

PC#2: How decomposed are their bodies?

DM: YOU OPEN A DOOR TO AN EMPTY ROOM.

This troper is generally a Lawful Good Rules Lawyer, albeit a tame one. For instance, in his first and current D&D session, if a GM forgets about a monster's attack turn, I will remind him, even though this has killed me more than once, and when I choose to take a nominally difficult action, I will ask if I need to take the relevant check (I'm generally rewarded in this case if I pass the check). He's not sure whether this counts as Rules Lawyering or calling the GM out on stupidity, though:

The Identify spell is meant to identify the properties of *any* magic item that isn't an artifact. It would probably be {{Rules Lawyer}}ing if he were to cite this once when the GM decides to add some mystery, but so far, all but one of the 15+ magic items we have picked up have been completely immune to Identify for no good reason. I guess it's less of a big deal since the GM has ruled that no spells require any kind of component, but it's still annoying to take a spell that would be ideal for our purposes only to find that the GM has arbitrarily rendered it completely useless.

I started off a D&D 4e one-shot with experienced players by saying the following: "Good News: I'm a rules lawyer. Bad News: I'm the DM. Good News: I will throw the rules right out the window if it means you get to do something cool."

One of my friends is pretty much this in our D&D group. The thing is, both he and his dad, our DM, have a very thorough grasp of the rules and so the debates that rage last for quite some time and usually involve some of us drifting away until the dust clears.

Leave it to this Troper's bard to abuse physics and other people's spells to win. For example using Geyser to send someone up while using Sirocco to push them down (Sirocco is a blast of hot air) . This would keep them pinned because two forces are keeping it in the same spot and Sirocco does damage as long as your in it.