There is a concept I picked up from the Onyx Path forums, from a link that is now dead and a post I can no longer find. That concept is the Chicanery tag, and while I’ve primarily used it for tabletop RPGs (think Dungeons & Dragons) I find it applicable elsewhere. If you happen to be better at searching the forums than I am, a link would be lovely.

Chicanery:
Noun.
The use of trickery to achieve a political, financial, or legal purpose.
From French chicanerie, from chicaner ‘to quibble’.

I.

Imagine a magic power in a roleplaying game that says “You may change your features to look like another humanoid. You can change your entire appearance, even your sex, but cannot look like something significantly larger or smaller, or anything that isn’t humanoid.” Imagine it being positioned as a basic disguise power, not too high level.

Now imagine doing your level best to rules-lawyer this power and break it over your knee.

Can I change my features to have gold fingernails, clip my fingernails, and sell the gold? Can I change myself to look exactly like the queen? How much larger is “significantly” larger anyway, can I get tall enough for the extra reach to matter in a fight? Can I change into someone much more attractive and get a charisma boost? Can I change into a humanoid creature with claws, and cut myself free of these ropes I’m tied with? Can I change into a magic humanoid creature whose hair is on fire and have my hair be on fire, then light a match off it? Can I change into a humanoid creature with wings, then fly? Hey, I just got stabbed- can I change into me, but without the open wound? If so, does that heal me?

This kind of thing can be brainstormed by a good player in about five minutes, and a lot of it will be shut down by a skilled Dungeon Master just as fast. You can see the scar tissue of it in the fact that some versions of this power are about a page long, mostly disclaimers of what you can’t do. It seems excessive, especially since the basic disguise power is both a fun fantasy trope and also not that complicated. Wouldn’t it be great to have a rulebook that wasn’t three hundred pages long?

And yet, that kind of clever rules-lawyering can lead to some fun moments in roleplaying games.

Enter “Chicanery: No” and its partner, “Chicanery: Yes.”

II.

Here’s the idea:

When writing rules, game designers sometimes want you to ex...

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