The Rule of Cool, and I just cant do it.

LTF! Guys, Im going to get back to WoW, someday, but trying to blog about something you are unable to actively do is hard. I wish I could tell you how long I have spent trying to come up with something WoW related to say. My computer will be fixed before the 10th, until then, you will have to put up with whatever swill I put up here. (Incedentally, that is why there was no post yesterday, had nothing to do with new years.)

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So, the 'Rule of Cool.' I have not done my due dilligance, I am afraid, to find out who coined this phrase, but I first heard about it through Chatty's DnD Blog, the post is here. (I wasent even reading his blog when he posted it the first time, and thus, it is a re-run.) Now, Chatty got it from here, a site called TV Tropes.org, which discusses much of the same stuff I have been discussing when I talked about Chekhov's Gun and the Unreliable Narrator. Recently, he made another post about it here, I guess there are some people out there who think the Rule of Cool is uncool. (In case you were curious, as I was, what is a Trope? Well, according to Wikipedia, a Trope (in literature,) is a "...common pattern, theme, motif in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning.") I will be exploring TV Tropes.org in more detail in the future, I am sure Ill be posting my nerdgasms here. But back to the Rule of Cool. The Rule of Cool is easy to understand. According to TV Tropes, "The limit of the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its degree of coolness. Stated another way, all but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality so long as the result is wicked sweet and/or awesome. This applies to the audience in general, as there will naturally be a different threshold for each individual in the group. " In DnD, we use this rule all the time, anyone who says otherwise clearly does not understand our hobby. We sit around a table, and play make-belive with eachother! Without the Rule of Cool, we would all surely laugh at ourselves. As I said, there is some argument about the Rule of Cool. I belive that the people who are disagreeing with Chatty are doing so for the wrong reason. They arent against the Rule of Cool, they are against Chatty's implimentation of it. To them, gritty, hard, and rules-driven is cool, and thats cool! Im not joining the flame-fest, all I am interested in is; how do I use the Rule of Cool? For me, its all about being adaptable. I do not have any control over my players, (I want a cookie, it takes a man to admit that.) They will do whatever they want, and it will be different than what I expect. In order for my responses to be cool, I have to accept that they wont do what I want, and plan accordingly. How do you plan for the unplannable? Dont plan at all. The number one tool of a good DM is improvisation. You have to be able to improvise on the spot. Those improvisations have to be cool. If your upset that your super-cool-construct is unusable, your improvisations will suffer. So, when I make an adventure, I state to myself the goals, I limit myself to 3 or 4. These are the things that I want to achive. When I write, I would then plan a beginning, middle, and end, in whatever order I wish, and write. But when I DM, I dont plan that rigidly. Instead, I create or research the creatures and characters involved. For combat opponents, this means reveiwing and understanding their abilities, (and often, tweaking them.) For NPCs, this means an understanding of their goals, personality, and capabilities. Once I have that done, I imagine a few cool scenes or encounters. Sometimes, for more traditional adventures, this involves making a floor-plan, for a dungeon or something, but for less linear adventures, this means imagineing these scenes and encounters as sort of rooms, I create more than I need, and come up with a guideline for the rules I would need to run those scenes or encounters. (Often, there are none, Role-Play wins over Roll-Play with my group, every time.) After that, I write it down, and do not put them in order. I am a very structural guy, I tend to get caught up in the idea that things have to happen in certain ways. So, to force myself to be on my toes, I do not put these scenes and encounters into any order whatsoever, its up to the players to navigate, not me. Every time I DM, my players will hit on some of my pre-made scenes and encounters, avoid others, and go in entirely different directions. Here is where Chekhov's Gun meets the Rule of Cool. The players have taken a hostage, rather than fleeing the city, like I expected. It was a cunning plan, the hostage would logically hold back the town guard. Now, we are at an impasse. I had no plan for this. But, I did plan for the players to meet a recurring villain, Lord Kallinfruend. I cant let that not happen, he is the Gun! But, Rule of Cool dictates that the player's cool action (taking a hostage,) has to give them results. But, here is the cool part. As a DM, cool is not always equal to success. Failure can be cool too, so long as that failure imparts more cool into the story. "A bolt flies from a window in the corner of the warehouse, striking the princess in the breast with a sickening thud, she doesent even scream as she slumps, dead, in your bindings. Your eyes follow the bolt's path, and in the window, in black leather, is Lord Kallenfruend, smirking at you. The Lord-Knight is not nearly as honorable as he made you belive!" I planned Kallenfruend to be an implacible, but honorable enemy. Plans have to be malliable. Kallenfuend is not at all what he seems. And thats cool. The players are forced to flee the city after all, and they have a new villain. They may be upset, mad even, that their plan failed, but it is still very cool that their enemy has proven to be a true villain! (And before you ask, my players would so totally take a princess hostage, they are just those kinds of people.)