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Feb 4, 2010 -- 3:20PM, Ferol_debtor_of_Torm wrote:

The alternative is that they just lose the item.

Is that any more reasonable?

Chris has recognized this exploit as legit. Sean has confirmed that the PtB are working on an interim solution. If this simply didn't work they could simply say, 'that doesn't work' and we wouldn't need a rules update.

It's better supported by RAW.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 4:49PM, bgibbons wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 3:20PM, Ferol_debtor_of_Torm wrote:

Chris has recognized this exploit as legit.

Do we have a cite for that?

If that's an actual reflection of Tulach's statement, then my feelings would shift to "I still don't like it, but it's the campaign's own damn fault it's happening."

I would tend to think that, when asked if something you feel is unequivocally bad for the campaign is legal, the proper response from campaign staff should be "No, it's not... but I might have to get back to you after I have the chance to sit down and study the rules to come up with, er, tell you exactly why not." not "Yep, that's completely legal and within the rules, but we're just hoping no one does it, or we'll have to glare at them disapprovingly and hope that makes them feel bad."

That's essentially falling into lawlessness. When a person's feelings are allowed to come before the rules, why bother having rules? Looking for ways to make people guilty (rather than cleaning up rules loopholes to prevent the behaviors you want to discourage) just leads to cliques where judges who have friends on campaign staff can get their pet problems declared illegal.

I don't like pacifist healers with Astral Seal asking people to hold off on killing enemies until they can squeeze the maximum number of hit points out, but I don't ask for it to be declared illegal. I'd rather do something like changing the target of the power to "One enemy" so that enemies who surrender aren't legal targets. The same sort of solutions can be found for most game elements, and some game elements which don't work in LFR (e.g. Fool's Gold and rust monsters) can and should be banned from use.

Feb 4, 2010 -- 11:10PM, Mirtek wrote:

Feb 4, 2010 -- 9:57AM, soccerref73 wrote:

But if you drastically reduce the XP award to a token amount and don't reduce the gold award,

Why not just make the intended XP/gold ration of LFR a hard rule for Myrealms?

Doesn't help. "Oh, look, it's another 3x3 room full of minion brutes." 

Feb 4, 2010 -- 12:43PM, Alphastream1 wrote:

Here's how it works. You come home from the end of a long day at work. You have to edit x number of adventures, review y number of adventure proposals, maybe work on one of your own, plus answer questions from other admins and maybe others above and below you. You pop in on the forums and see these types of things going on. Of course it burns you out.

We are absolutely responsible for our behavior. It absolutely impacts those involved with the campaign. It always has. I had the fortune of being close to some of the LG Triads and watching them deal with player issues... it is absolutely demoralizing for the creators/admins to see players do these types of things. You hurt the game and everyone involved when you break or bend the rules, especially if you go out of your way to create tension/grief around it. They bust their behinds to create MYRE for everyone and then they get this for it?

Thank you, my friend, for having the empathy to understand this and the willingness to mention it.

Everything that really needs to be said was already said by Sean Molley earlier in the thread.  I do feel it important to clear up a couple things.  I was in charge of creating the MYRE adventures, and I also wrote the Ecology of the Rust Monster article for Dragon.  I was acutely aware of the existence of rust monsters, and I was aware of how they could be used by the type of people who give gamers a bad name and make life difficult for others.  Both in the Ecology article and in the MYRE text, I had added text on how LFR should deal with rust monsters (and with the questionable types who feel the need to break the pretty obvious spirit of the rules in regards to them).  All such text never made it into the final versions.

The common assumption was simple: the LFR rules already handle this.  There is already a cap on how much treasure you can take out of an adventure.  You walk in with wealth equal to x gold pieces.  You leave the adventure with x + y gold pieces, where y equals no more than the maximum gold plus a bundle wealth. 

The other rule was "Don't be an idiot."  I would say that a surprisingly vast majority of the players have no trouble following this rule.  They understand that this is a game, and that the admins really bust their humps trying to provide content for the players and DMs to use to make this one big, homogenous campaign.  It's one thing to need to know how certain core rules work.  It's another entirely to go out of your way to be "that guy" and exploit every corner case, and fly in the face of common sense, and do things that are obviously not intended by the rules.

"But you can just add a paragraph here or there," says people, "and then it will be so clear."  Maybe.  But just adding one more paragraph here or there quickly turns into a page, and then 10 pages, and then 100 pages.  I've seen it happen.  And now this game that we are trying to grow and nurture becomes something new players actively avoid because not only do you have to learn the D&D rules, but they have to read that 100-page document covering all of the corner cases.  So the know-it-all, rules-lawyer types get what they want (the campaign staff wastes hours and days dealing with the problem and the know-it-alls can feel superior) at the expense of hundreds or thousands of potential players.

As others have said, this isn't really about the problematic nature of rust monsters.  There is an endless amount of hinky cheating that can be done.  This is about a tiny subset of players who embody some of the negative stereotypes of gamers: socially inept, thinking only of themselves within a context of a narrow set of rules, unable or unwilling to conceptualize the effect of their actions on others and on the campaign as a whole.  It is really just like the gamer hygiene problem, except for the fact that is a lack of intellectual and social hygiene rather than physical.  But it doesn't lessen the stench.