Rules proposal: the Brown Book rule

Heya, folks.

Let's be honest: MET is not known for consistency. Different books define the same abilities different ways.

For the sake of consistency, what I'm proposing is formally adopting this rule:

"When there's a conflict between two sources, the brown book takes precedence."

Now, am I saying that the brown book version is always the most balanced and reasonable version? No. But the problem is that, right now, there's no consistent standard for which version applies, and that can lead to arguments.

"Brown book takes precedence" is simple; it covers all the bases; it heads off arguments before they start. Most importantly, everyone has access to the brown book, and NOT everybody has access to Laws of the Wild West, or Tribebooks, or any of the other sources. People shouldn't be blindsided with rules they haven't had an opportunity to read; if we're going to say we're running the game by the brown book, then people should be able to have confidence that, barring posted house rules, what they read in the brown book is correct.''

This also isn't to say that we should slavishly follow the brown book without exception. There are some things in the brown book that just don't work well; that's what house rules are for. Changing True Fear was a good call, and everybody KNOWS it's been changed--because it's a posted house rule. The "brown book rule" would take care of the general case, and house rules take care of the exceptions.

Thoughts?

Its a very good starting point and I agree following it Slavishly isnot the way to go because lord is it inconsistant in some places.

not knowing enough of the other rules to recognize what potential conflicts are involved, I don't want to jump into this substantially. But I think having a clear standard, especially one based on the most central book, is probably good for consistency and fairness.

That's my point exactly, Patch. Most of us are in the same boat. Only a very few have comprehensive libraries of all the books. I certainly don't--but I have enough to know that certain gifts work differently from book to book, for instance--and I could easily see a situation where two players get in an argument because one is familiar with the brown book version of the gift and the other tries to use a version from a different book against him. Saying "When in doubt, use the brown book" gives us a nice easy rule of thumb for such situations.

Some of the gifts are different between the revised book and the tribe books. For instance the Shadow Lord gift "Seizing the Edge" grants bonus traits equal to your rank + 1 to any trait category each round in the revised book, but in the tribe book it grants you one social trait for every social trait you already had, effectively bringing you to your rank maximum in social traits.

Holy crap. That's a major difference. When I was playing a shadowlord, I wish it had worked the way it did in the tribe book...

...and the revised book's traits are only for the purpose of comparing on ties. Imagine the headache if one player was using the brown book version, and another came along and tried to use the tribe book version instead. And that's hardly the only gift that's drastically different as presented in the tribe books.