Discussion Main / ObviousRulePatch

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: blatant misuse (especially in game show articles), started by rjaguar3 on Apr 19th 2011 at 4:53:25 AM

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

The Animal Farm examples are surely adding loopholes (to the advantage of the pigs) not blocking them?

Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG is mostly Obvious Rule Patches. I would just add it to the examples, but I don't know what category it would go in. It doesn't quite fit in any.

Edited by 24.19.144.159 Hide / Show Replies

I put a disclaimer before the examples:

"Before writing an example, please be sure that the patch itself is obvious, not that the game obviously needed the patch. Obviously needed patches should go under either Rules Lawyer (if the exploit is in how a rule is written) or Game Breaker (if the exploit is hard-coded)."

This topic can be replied on to discuss the appropriateness of having a disclaimer for this trope how it should be worded which tropes it should recommend as alternatives.

I want to point out that the caption on the image claims that the card is an "official" one, when it's not legal in any format because it was from the joke set Unglued. I feel it's a bit misleading. Does it need changing?

A quote from a work that I like, summing up my personality Hide / Show Replies

removed

• Gödel's incompleteness theorem proves that any consistent formal system complex enough to accommodate basic arithmetic will contain things like the parallel postulate: claims that cannot be proven true or proven false.

Incompleteness says that any complex consistent system will have statements that are true, but that can't be derived from the axioms of the system. The case with the parallel postulate is something else; it's true in Euclidean geometry because it's an axiom, but if it wasn't an axiom, then it wouldn't be true.

Removed the following. Knockdown penalties for brain injury have more obvious reasons than as a patched-in way to incapacitate high-HT characters.

If returned, should be edited for accuracy.

• Also in GURPS; characters only die if they fail an HT save after dropping below -1X HT (or take truly massive amounts of damage), so it is possible to make an inhumanly tough character that can survive multiple shotgun blasts to the chest at close range by getting your effective HT to around 16 or so, easily done even in low-point realistic settings. To stop abuse of this, the game has the Knockdown rule - characters who take more than 1/2 their HP to the head have to make the HT check at -10 or be knocked unconscious.

A lot of examples, especially in the Video Games section, didn't fit. Many weren't obvious (like nerfing a weapon's accuracy a bit because it was too powerful), or were simply there to solve a bug (stopping people from walking through walls is *not* an obvious rules patch).

Since this is somewhat subjective, I've c-p'ed those examples below. If you disagree with their removal, feel free to comment and put them back in.

• On the first season of the syndicated version of Jeopardy, contestants were allowed to ring the moment the clue was revealed. Even after ringing in, they would not have to answer until Trebek finished reciting the answer, which lead to contestants ringing in within the first couple seconds to win priority for answering. This was changed in the second season to not allowing the contestants to ring in until Alex finished reciting the answer.
  • One of the most broken items in 3rd Edition was the Thought Bottle. One possible use for it was to "store" your experience total (and consequently your character level) in the bottle, so that it could be restored later. The intention was most likely to protect against level drain or lost levels due to resurrection, but it could also be used to offset the experience point cost of spellcasting and item creation. It was subsequently reworded in errata with the intention of making that impossible, but it's been argued that the experience spent on spellcasting or crafting can still be restored if you also get some levels drained legitimately.

  • The ability-boosting spells in 3.0 (Cat's Grace, etc) used to last for hours, making them perfectly acceptable replacements for costly ability-boosting items. In 3.5, the duration was reduced to minutes, making them far less appreciated.

  • Also, the book Complete Psionics nerfed the Astral Construct power (a psionic counterpart to Summon Monster) while in the same edition with the rule "can only have one construct at a time". The rule change has reportedly made little children cry.
    • Especially crazy because the Summon Monster spell has the built in ability to summon up to five monsters at the same time.

• Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons errata has had some obvious rule patches: The Ranger ability that let you make continual attacks until you miss was errated to have a 5 attack limit as it was possible to make a build which had an almost zero chance of ever missing, even against the strongest monster in the Monster Manual. Also, the entire rules on Stealth were replaced because as written, the Stealth rules could both be interpreted as being able to be continually in stealth regardless of attacks, or never in stealth at all.
  • 4E's Weapon Expertise. Weapon Focus did the same thing in just about every d20 product until 4E: a +1 to attack rolls with a certain weapon or weapon group. 4E came along and decided that bonus was too good under the new rules, and Weapon Focus was changed to a bonus on damage rolls. Then the Internets mathematically proved that players actually lag behind in attack bonus as levels go higher, and Players Handbook II included a feat called Weapon Expertise that, at 1st level, grants... yup, a +1 bonus to attack rolls.
  • The wording for Temporary HP was changed, as the old one would allow certain characters to form unending buffers of THP making them damn near immortal.

• The first patch to Battlefield Vietnam altered the machine guns to be less accurate and swapped the kits around. This is because the original release allowed a U.S. soldier to have a kit that gave him an M60 [which might as well have been a laser, considering how accurate it was] and a LAW. This meant that U.S. teams were entirely composed of Rambo until the patch came out.

• Battlefield2 had quite a few issues. Some absolute gems included:
  • Transport helicopters had side-mounted machine guns that were almost perfectly accurate. Cue teams of nothing but transport choppers dropping hordes of soldiers onto capture points while their machine-gunners effortlessly destroyed anything on the ground short of a tank. Machine gun accuracy and transport chopper armor were promptly nerfed.
  • The ability to airdrop vehicles (Usually jeeps) for your team to use was added. Jeeps could be dropped with pinpoint accuracy. Jeeps explode when destroyed. Cue "Cartillary", where a commander would drop a jeep onto a heavily fortified enemy position. Ground troops would shoot the jeep, causing it to explode and kill the defenders. It was promply nerfed so jeep explosions were smaller and vehicle drops aren't pinpoint accurate anymore.

Battlefield 2142

• Another one was using drop pods (From either Titans or APCs) to land on top of vehicles. The vehicle would instantly explode, killing everyone inside and around it...and drop-pod pilot would be fine. It made it not only possible, but entirely LIKELY for a lightly-armed APC to take down 2-4 Mechs/Battletanks by itself! Nerfed so that landing on top of a vehicle only does minor damage to the vehicle.

• Master Of Orion 2 had a fun little gem. There was a beam weapon that was not 'quite' the most powerful beam weapon in the game, but had a very good weight/damage ratio. In this game you were allowed to outfit ships however you pleased, so long as you stayed under the maximum weight allowed for a given ship type. This particular weapon was perfectly balanced during the normal range of use. However, near the end of the game when the player had no more specific technologies to research the game allowed the player to put their research towards "Advanced" series in whatever field they wanted to. A Rank in Advanced basically gave a bonus to cost/benefit for everything in that category. The Game-Breaker came about when a player rushed straight into beam technology and as far into weapons research as they could. The weapon in question became dirt cheap and very light. After that you simply load up your largest ship with a few thousand of these beams and nothing can withstand a direct hit. A patch was released that specifically upped the weight of the weapon and changed its bonus from advanced research.

• A good example from World Of Warcraft would be wall walking. Originally, it let you walk up a cliff if you did it sideways at exactly the right angle in the right place, letting you get pretty much anywhere. They took this out. In Burning Crusade it was discovered that while you couldn't walk up slopes now, you could still jump up walls in a variant technique, which was used in arenas to climb pillars to annoying effect and bypass areas of some dungeons. Now that's gone too.
  • At one point, a new Paladin talent was added which would give its possessor an extra attack after suffering from a critical hit. The amount of extra attacks you could store wasn't limited, so a paladin went in a fight with a level 1 player and got 1816 extra attacks on himself before using them all on an outdoor raid boss, killing it instantly. The loophole was fixed within 12 hours. Video.
    • More of an exploit removing update as opposed to an actual patch, but this practice is fairly common in World Of Warcraft. Recently a Mage player discovered, with a wacky talent build and clever use of invisibility potions and the "Spellsteal" spell, that he could solo an entire wing of the main 25-Player raid dungeon, Naxxaramas. Just like Paladin Reckoningbomb above, this was hotfixed very quickly when it became public knowledge. Video. The was also a situation where kissing a certain NPC outside of the Zul'Aman dungeon would grant you a small frog pet that was only supposed to be attained inside the dungeon itself. Again, fixed very quickly.

Kingdom Of Loathing

• Stasis, which involved buffing yourself with Jabanero Saucesphere (restores some MP when you are hit), reducing damage while still getting hit every round and using Saucy Salve, a combat heal. This generated rather obscene amounts of MP, even with the 30 round limit. It was eventually patched by making Jabanero Saucesphere not do that anymore.

• Flash Flash Revolution and surely many other web-games had a problem when they introduced a credit-gifting system in which you could gift the in-game credits to other people playing the game. The obvious rule patch? Don't allow negative numbers.

• The changelog for the online Flash game GemCraft has a lot of these. The final level ends with a huge explosion that instantly kills all on-screen monsters; these kills no longer count towards your score. In addition, the final level at one point had a cap of 50K XP, though this has since been removed with another update. Finally, in Endurance Mode only, Experience Shrines no longer give points for each on-screen monster. Seems the author(s) dislike anybody using strategies they didn't intend.

• They didn't make these patches to the original version, but Retro Studios, in their Player's Choice re-release of Metroid Prime, changed numerous aspects of the game to prevent the player from achieving certain game breaking achievements, like rearranging the layout of the room before the one with the Plasma Beam to ensure that the player cannot cheat their way to the top of the room and acquire the beam before they are meant to, or removing a glitch that allows the player to acquire the Space Jump Boots as soon as they arrive on Tallon IV (literally. They use a glitch jump to jump from Samus's ship to the ledge with the door that leads to the SJ Bs). This trick would lead to dozens of other tricks, such as acquiring the Morph Ball early and skipping the Hive Mecha.

Gaia Online

• When an entire crew was killed in a boss lair, all but one member of the group would awaken in the Null Chamber. The one person who stayed behind acted as a placeholder so that the crew wouldn't have to start over at the beginning of the encounter. Even though just about every crew did this and few to no players considered it to be a cheap tactic, the devs apparently thought it had to be changed. Now if your whole crew is killed by a boss, too bad. You're automatically warped away from the boss room.

Edited by Roxolan Hide / Show Replies