House Rule

One of my pet peeves is when a person gets punished for doing something wrong or illegal and then get angry over it.

What were you expecting exactly?

I remember the first and only time my friends and I went to Applebee's. We drove 45 minutes to the next town over just to eat there. This is, of course, because we had pretty much exhausted Baytown in terms of food. Every restaurant seemed dull and routine, so we actively seeked out new places to eat at.

I didn't like my meal, but that is not the point of this story. The point is that Nick and Jason decided they would pull a fast one on Applebee's by having Nick buy a meal that comes with free soup and giving the soup to Jason. The thing is, if Nick doesn't eat the soup then they have to charge Jason for the soup. This is so nobody gets a freebie soup. In my opinion it is a completely reasonable rule. Its the same reason you can't have one family share a plate in a buffet diner.

When they charge Jason for the soup he and Nick get angry. They tell me not to tip her. I tell them to shut the fuck up and basically have to explain to them what they did was against the rules and that they have no reason to be angry.

If you get pulled over for speeding and your first reaction is to roll your eyes and get pissed because the man is keeping you down, go fucking swallow a cactus. You were breaking the law!

"Oh but James I don't agree with all the laws blah blah."

I don't agree that I shouldn't be able to fly and never have to poop but that's just not how it works, b. Laws, whether you agree with them or not, are meant to be followed. If you disagree, there are actual legal things you can do. Breaking the law is not one of those things, obviously. Do you think you are a rebel? If anything, law abiding citizens are the rebels. In a world where everyone pirates music, and drives through corner store parking lots to get places faster the ones that do play by the rules are a minority. How does that make you feel?

Now this is a rant for sure. But I bet I can stretch it to five hundred words.

If you're a gamer you might know that people like to make house rules. I hate house rules and I will give reasons in the following sentences. House rules tend to imply that you know better than the designers of the game. While in rare cases this may prove to be the case, you must consider that before a game hits the market it is typically tested over and over to try and create a fair, balanced product.

Imagine, if you will, playing Street Fighter as Ryu but not being able to shoryuken because of a house rule. Somebody might say it has too much priority and is unfair to the game. This is all hypothetical of course, because most people would rather ban throws because they don't want to learn how to tech. But do you see how you have fundamentally changed the game (for the worse) by removing an important part of it because you lack the knowledge and experience with the game to see why the original rule, or in this case the dragon punch, affected it for better or worse? Run on sentence.

Now there are other options. If you consider yourself an authority on the game you can try and contact the creator. You could ask why they created a specific rule, or possibly suggest changes. I recall in Battle for Edahd somebody proposed a variant that made the combat much better and now it is accepted by pretty much everyone as the way to play. You could also create a game exactly like it seeing as how you cannot claim ownership to game mechanics. Most people usually hate this sort of thing but sometimes you get good results.

Blah.