Reclaiming the DM's Throne

Part 3: Logical Sense

This is the third part of a series of articles regarding the conflict of who is in charge, the rules or the DM. Read the first part and the second part.

My players are (slowly, I think) getting used to me making judgment calls on the fly -- you know, like what a DM is supposed to do. Things like the time it takes to pick something up and hand it to someone else. Like being able to attack a foe on a ledge above you with both ends of a double weapon, or not. In these cases, I use a technique that I picked up from Jonathan Tweet (actually, it's something I'd done long before I met him, but Jonathan put it in an easy way to explain). If someone made a movie out the gaming session, how would the specific action look on the screen? Would it be simple and straightforward or would it be complicated? Would it seem possible at all?

This is just another way to say, "Hey, DM -- just use logic." In such cases sometimes the DM has to enforce logic over the game rules. Even if a player can point to the rulebook to say that something is possible, the DM can invoke logic to say that it's not -- even if the DM have no such entry in any book to back him up.

Logic, in fact, is the ultimate DM's rule. Your players should understand that. If the logic of what's going on in your game session right now doesn't match up with the way the rule was written in a book years earlier and miles away, logic's got to win. No one can expect every situation in a game to be covered by a rule in a book. This isn't a power you should wield arbitrarily. The rules are there to provide consistency in your game, and that's extremely important. But if you don't also have things flow logically -- or to put it another way, if things in your game don't make any kind of sense if you try to imagine it really happening -- you risk having your players not take things seriously. If the game loses all sense of believability, you've really got a problem