What's a rule you always forget?

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E-Rocker

Not a goose
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To be clear, I'm asking about rules that you literally forget, not rules that you've consciously chosen to not use for whatever reason.

I try to run my Savage Worlds Adventure Edition game as RAW as possible, but I almost always forget to enforce darkness penalties. Characters fighting in the dark are supposed to have somewhere between -2 & -6 to their actions, depending on the specific level of darkness, but I usually forget to apply any darkness penalty at all.
 
My players and I constantly forget to subtract Power Points when casting magic in BRP based games. I don’t really worry about it because we’re not excessively using magic but it’s one of those “oh crap, I forgot to track my magic points!” moments.

incidentally, my players never think to search the room when we dungeon crawl (which is not often). There are hoards of undiscovered treasure in my games lmao.
I guess it balances out the power points? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
I always forget to use (or more accurately, let my players use) Hero Points in Golden Heroes. It's a metacurrency that gets like 5 sentences in the rulebook, and there isn't a space for it on the character sheet, so I always forget it.
 
I always forget to use (or more accurately, let my players use) Hero Points in Golden Heroes. It's a metacurrency that gets like 5 sentences in the rulebook, and there isn't a space for it on the character sheet, so I always forget it.
Ah fuck 'em. It's their currency, let them remember to spend it. He said, thinking the same thing was true of MC in his own games...
 
Ah fuck 'em. It's their currency, let them remember to spend it. He said, thinking the same thing was true of MC in his own games...
I always tell my players, "I expect you to be responsible for everything on your character sheet. I'll be responsible for everything else."

{But then, Hero Points aren't on the sheet lol)
 
I like the idea actually. Just hero points essentially. Just not used to it when playing D&D.
The problem is that the mechanic isn';t really wired into any other part of the game. There's no play loop and no reason to remember it. It's cool, but not well thought out from a design standpoint. If it were then all manner of other mechanics would interact with it, but they don't.
 
I feel like most games I play, I forget 40% of the rules, and just make rulings by the seat of my pants. The folks I play with mostly don't mind.

Works great with say, Old School Essentials or something really light like a 24XX game. Not so great with Pathfinder 2e. :wink:

More seriously, in the hundreds of hours of D&D 5E I've run, I've almost always totally forgotten about Inspiration. Forget to award it. Forget to encourage its use. Am genuinely surprised the one or two times a player's brought it up.

Other than that, I usually get all the basics right. It's when a game has lots of fiddly bits and GM facing sub-systems that I can forget large swaths of rules.
 
D&D 5e stealth, climbing, jumping, swimming, inspiration, and the weird janky thing about bonus action spells vs regular spells.

To be fair the whole party went hardcore on getting magic flying and water breathing from levels 7 to 9 so that by the time 10th level rolled around we'd just fly over chasms and underwater as needed. And we replace all the stealth stuff with invisibility because nobody is playing a minimum 20+ result rogue, so that all works great. And nobody can ever remember that stupid bonus spell shit right on the first try so we ignore it.
 
It's not always, but I often forget visibility related bonuses (such as attacking someone blinded or unaware) and penalties (as already mentioned by others), and keeping track of pet attacks. It's usually like two or three rounds into combat minimum before someone remembers they had pets who could've been attacking enemies as well.

I can't really think of anything else, unless it's stuff I "forget" on purpose, which is not the purpose of this thread.
 
It's usually like two or three rounds into combat minimum before someone remembers they had pets who could've been attacking enemies as well.

What game are you playing where the PCs have pets? Sounds fun.
 
We never even talk about inspiration. It's like it doesn't exist. Multiple different players over 3 years of playing. No one has ever mentioned it.
 
What game are you playing where the PCs have pets? Sounds fun.

Various editions of D&D. In some instances it has been pets that Druids and Rangers get them as class features, or from Kits back during the 2e era. Other instances have been pet's I've allowed through DM fiat for some reason. Like dwarves having giant boar mounts, or goblin wolf rider enemies riding dire wolves.

Concentration checks. What the rules about firing weapons into melee are.

Oh yeah, I often forgot those too. And forgot that I forget them. :tongue:
 
We play mostly via Fantasy grounds these days so fortunately many of the rules are automatically taken care of.
 
Hmm, who knows... :-)

On many of the things mentioned above...

I don't always keep up with all the encumbrance stuff, but I at least use basic encumbrance in RuneQuest so their weapons and armor are accounted for. But treasure? Apparently it has no encumbrance :-) I do a bit more in Cold Iron, and a lot of that is helped by my Google Sheets character sheet that makes it pretty easy. Players don't even have to look up their weapon and armor encumbrance (the sheet has a tab of tables that include the weapons and armor details). And now that I have that, we've even been tracking encumbrance of mounts.

I do pretty good at POW/MP tracking, and that is again helped by the character sheet.

Food... oops... At least the encumbrance of it is tracked on the Cold Iron sheet, but I haven't charged PCs for food...

I know both RQ and Cold Iron really well, so a lot of the rules are internalized. That doesn't mean that I don't forget about some niggly bit, especially spell details. And until my current RQ campaign, we totally weren't using the discount on training for high Charisma...
 
I often forget circumstantial modifiers many of which have already been mentioned. This is both as a player and GM.

Hell, sometimes I've even made some house rules for a game, which I when forget some detail about when using them.
 
If I could recall a rule I always forget to reply for this thread, odds are I could recall it at the game table too. The problem is, I forgot the rule.

Sometimes, I get accused of forgetting a rule I never bothered to commit to memory in the first place. What I do is get a general feel for how the system does things like modifiers and special circumstances, and then just go with what seems right in play. In Traveller, for instance, I really can't recall what the different modifiers for range, cover and lighting conditions are. I know that in general (Mongoose 2e) modifies in increments of 2, so if the guy you're shooting at is at long range and is behind cover, I'm just gonna gut check that as a -6. I sure hope you're at peak dexterity and are well-trained with that weapon. You're going to need it. If it "should have" been a -8 or -10 RAW, I really don't care.
 
What game are you playing where the PCs have pets? Sounds fun.
Every rat catcher needs a small but vicious dog!

Who then flickers in and out of existence as we forget about and then remember its presence.

People complain about fiddly systems with rules that are easy to forget, but I find rules-light games are no better in this regard. I still find myself forgetting that, for example, someone or other is missing a limb, which should probably have an impact, even if there's no specific rule for it.
 
Every rat catcher needs a small but vicious dog!

Who then flickers in and out of existence as we forget about and then remember its presence.

People complain about fiddly systems with rules that are easy to forget, but I find rules-light games are no better in this regard. I still find myself forgetting that, for example, someone or other is missing a limb, which should probably have an impact, even if there's no specific rule for it.
Companion animals don't get forgotten quite so much when using miniatures or tokens and a battle map. But they CAN still be forgotten... The companion dog in my RQ campaign gets used in combat about half the time... And I can't recall goblins ever sneaking into the PC's camp and making off with a horse or two which honestly they would much more likely survive for a least a bit longer... (obviously PCs will chase said goblins down to get their horses back...)
 
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