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{{trope}}
[[File:7 4358.jpg|link=Magic: The Gathering|frame|[[Self-Deprecation|Yes]], this is an [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=9771 official card.] ]]
{{quote|''That said, you ''can’t'' create a focus item that helps you create other focus items. It’s... uh, [[A Wizard Did It|it’s a magic thing]]. Just doesn’t work.''
|'''[[The Dresden Files|The Dresden Files RPG]]'''}}
Games, of various types, are about rules. They may have intricate backstories, multi-layered plots and other such. But in the end, they're about rules. Rules define what are legal moves and what aren't (even [[Calvin Ball]], which just doesn't have the ''same'' rules all the time). Rules create fun.
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Or maybe your game is out there already. Thousands, maybe millions of people are playing and enjoying it. Then some Power Gamer figures out how to game the system and auto-win with some horrific combination of moves. You certainly can't "uncreate" the game once it's out there, nor can you radically modify the rules so that particular combo doesn't work, because that would fundamentally change the game and honk off millions of customers. What do you do?
Make an '''Obvious Rule Patch'''. That is, create a completely arbitrary rule that forcibly prevents the particular interaction from happening, while having as little effect on other rules as possible. Doesn't matter if it sticks out like a sore thumb even to someone who hasn't played the previous version.
Note that issuing an Obvious Rule Patch for a competitive multiplayer game too soon can damage the evolving [[Metagame]], which can often bring potential Game Breakers back into balance. And just so we're clear, "Obvious Rule Patch" refers to the rule that obviously exists solely to patch up something rather than the something that "obviously" needs a rule patch. "Rule" here is a simple adjective- the Patch is the focus, and the Obviousness is what makes it this trope. For the obviously needed patches, see [[There Should Be a Law]]. Sort of.
This
Compare and contrast [[Nerf]]. May, if the situation is enough of a corner case, result in [[That One Rule]].
{{examples}}
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
=== Game Shows ===
* The [[Bonus Round]] on ''[[Chain Reaction (TV series)|Chain Reaction]]'' offered a $10,000 top prize for guessing nine words which were described one word at a time. Initially, the score would light up the one for the first word, then half of each zero for the second through ninth words. After the first week of this rule, where $100 was the highest bonus round win, the scoring format was changed.
* ''[[The Hollywood Squares]]'' was mostly a simple tic-tac-toe game involving celebrities. Unlike tic-tac-toe, in the case of a "cat's game" where nobody can get three in a row, a contestant has to get the correct answer to claim the final square, and (unlike with other squares) can't claim it by means of the opponent getting the wrong answer.<ref>(''[[The Match Game Hollywood Squares Hour]]''.)</ref> This led to a [[Funny Moment]] in 1999 where, with only one square (Gilbert Gottfried) unclaimed, the contestants went through '''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHmXw49t_v0 nine questions]''' before one was finally answered correctly, with the panelists shouting "[[You Fool!]]" at every wrong answer as a [[Running Gag]].
* On ''[[Jeopardy!]]'', contestants phrasing a question incorrectly (e.g., "What is Abraham Lincoln?") would be asked by Fleming to use the proper phrasing; following several instances in which contestants just could '''not''' get the proper prefix out, the rules were slightly altered to give credit for a correct response so long as it was phrased in the form of a question.
** The original Fleming era let all contestants keep of all of their winnings. When the show was brought back in 1984 with Alex Trebek, this was changed so that only the winner kept their score. Second and third place initially received parting gifts, but since 2001 were given $2,000 and $1,000 respectively. The reason for this change was that some contestants on the Fleming era would [[Complacent Gaming Syndrome|stop playing]] if they thought they won enough money, or if another contestant built a significant lead. By offering full winnings only to first place, there's more incentive to strive for a win.
* ''[[Password]] Plus'' briefly disallowed the use of antonyms in describing the password. After it was discovered that some words just can't be described with a one-word clue that ''isn't'' an antonym, this rule was reverted.
* On ''The $10,000 [[Pyramid]]'', in the event of a tie, the teams would originally play another regular, seven-word round to break the tie until one team outscored the other. After an incident where both teams managed ''three'' consecutive 7-for-7 tiebreaker rounds, the rules were changed so that whichever team completed the tiebreaker round faster won. Even this rule proved imperfect on one instance on ''The $25,000 Pyramid'' (the 1980s revival), where both teams managed to complete their tiebreaker rounds in the full 30 seconds, getting the last word on the buzzer both times.
* ''[[Wheel of Fortune]]'' has a few:
** From 1973-75, contestants could buy a vowel for $250 by landing on the Buy A Vowel wedge...and possibly even '''without''' having $250, as one eyewitness reported seeing a negative score...and possibly '''without''' having to land on the wedge (recollections are contradictory). There was also the problem of it becoming Lose A Turn if all vowels in the puzzle had been bought. Sometime in 1975 (recollections are '''very''' contradictory, spanning from "the first few shows" to "the hour-long stint in December"), the wedge was finally kicked out.
** This also showed up in the current [[Bonus Round]]. First introduced by December 18, 1981, the player originally had to pick five consonants and a vowel to aid in solving. After seven years in which nearly everyone picked some permutation of R-S-T-L-N-E, this changed on October 3, 1988 to provide those letters automatically followed by another three-and-a-vowel from the contestant.
** Yet another obvious patch was renaming the "On the Menu" category to "Food & Drink". Previously, foods that weren't necessarily available on menus were shoehorned into the category (most egregiously the bonus puzzle BIG GULP), while others were just categorized as "Thing" or "Around the House".
* ''[[The Price Is Right]]'' has had a few examples of this:
** For the first few weeks after the introduction of the Big Wheel (to determine who proceeds to the Showcases), there was no rule about how far it had to be spun. The current rule (at least one complete revolution) was instituted by the end of November 1975.
** They've also tried several tricks to make Clock Game compatible with four-digit prices, so that saying the thousands digits doesn't eat up precious time. In the 1980s, they tried spotting the thousands digit, but that proved too confusing. Prizes of over $1,000 started showing up again in 2008, but after six months in which they proved pretty much unwinnable, it was decided that the contestant should bid only on a ''portion'' of the four-digit prize (e.g., if the prize is a TV and a Blu-Ray player, the player bids on just the Blu-Ray player but wins both for giving the right price).
==
=== Board Games ===
* The "ko" rule in Go exists purely to prevent infinite loops.
** Additionally, in Chinese Go, the "superko" rule is there to prevent the rare triple ko, an infinite loop that can still occur in Japanese Go. Nobody's tried to "patch" Eternal Life, an infinite loop that's so rare it's not worth considering.
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* The [[Battlestar Galactica]] board game has had a few. In the base game, the secrecy rules were essentially a patch for the core mechanic, since the game breaks if players are allowed to openly discuss their card plays. The first expansion included replacements for a particular skill card to fix a degenerate human strategy, and an overlay for certain spaces of the board to fix a degenerate Cylon strategy. It also introduced an execution mechanic, which was patched in the ''next'' expansion so that it couldn't be used as a cheap loyalty check.
=== Card Games ===
* Forced bets in poker, including blinds, antes, and bring-ins, are designed to ensure that some or all players have a stake in the pot, preventing everyone from folding until they get a really good hand. In [[Tournament Play]], they are raised continually to prevent overly cautious play (this often leads to people winning World Championships with cards they wouldn't play in a low-limit cash game).
** The "small blind", "big blind", and "dealer button", used in cardrooms, particularly in Texas Hold'em, ensure that the action moves in an orderly manner, as opposed to previous opening rules like "forced bring-in" (the lowest showing card has to open, common in stud games) or "jackpots" (common in draw games, requiring a hand of certain strength, often a pair of jacks, to begin the betting).
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** With the recent release of Xyz Monsters, there was a brief period where there were very few written rules about how they actually work - one key problem was the fact that the monster used for Xyz Summoning stayed on the field until "detached" by an effect. Fine, but when does "leave the field" effects trigger? [[Word of God]] said when detached, and ''all hell broke loose''. Two already powerful cards got so absurdly broken that a copy could easily fetch well over 100 dollars. Konami quickly made an rule change: These cards ''never'' trigger their effects because they aren't treated as cards anymore. It's just as weird as it sounds.
* The DCI banned / restricted lists from ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'', introduced soon after the first major tournaments.
** The Urza Block is particularly infamous for producing massively overpowered cards and card combinations, to the point that one card [https://web.archive.org/web/20090320154523/http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?&id=8841 Memory Jar] was banned ''before it was even released'', after it was realized just a bit too late what could be done with it.
*** [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in the series' own Unglued and Unhinged expansions, with cards like [https://web.archive.org/web/20081003131203/http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?&id=9771 Look At Me, I'm The DCI!], which featured current Head Designer Mark Rosewater's stick-figure drawing of a blindfolded figure picking what to ban by throwing darts at cards pinned to a dartboard. Other Unglued cards have 'errata' printed on the card.
** An even clearer example would be the times MTG has had to give cards errata; it is currently not their policy to reword a card for simply being too powerful, but there are quite a few cards that have different wordings due to rules changes, or interactions that literally break the game (as in, "create situations that the rules don't cover"). This was exacerbated with two major rules changes ('96 and '09). Other cards used to often be the subject of errata which prevent them operating the way the card text might imply them to, sometimes again even ''before the card is released'', although this has been phased out over time.
*** The old errata policy allowed cards to be errata'd for power reasons, but this has since been reverted. Overpowered cards are now banned. For example, [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=642 Time Vault] has been errata'd multiple times with various awkward wording to ensure there was ''no way'' to easily untap it and gain infinite [[Extra Turn|extra turns]]. The latest errata, while much simpler than even the original card, makes the card obviously broken in half (and banned almost everywhere).
*** [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=159249 Animate Dead] has always worked (generally) functionally as it was originally intended: it enchants a creature and [[Animate Dead|brings it back from the dead]], but the creature dies if the Enchantment does (just like the various Necromancy spells from [[Dungeons
*** Before [https://web.archive.org/web/20090524235732/http://ww2.wizards.com/
** The standard Constructed Deck construction rules of today (at least 60 cards, no more than 4 copies of any non-basic card) are a major obvious rules patch. Originally, the only rule was a minimum of 20 cards per player in the game, theoretically allowing for decks that could win on the first turn nearly 100% of the time (assuming somebody willing to hunt down the requisite number of rare cards to make them work).
** Speaking of [[Magic: The Gathering|Magic]], a few powerful creatures ([http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=5713 Serra Avatar], [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=191312 Darksteel Colossus], [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=140214 Purity], [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=140168 Dread], [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=189213 Guile], [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=140227 Vigor], [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=189214 Hostility], [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=179496 Progenitus] and ''[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=193632 Kozilek, Butcher of Truth]'') have an ability that prevents them from going to the graveyard, shuffling them back into the deck instead. While this looks like an advantage, that just hides a darker motive: it prevents players from discarding the creature cards ''on purpose'' so that they can revive them using ''way'' cheaper [[Animate Dead]] spells. (This is not an idle concern, as entire decks are built around this very tactic.)
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** Later on, Fossil Cards, which are a different class of cards that can be played on the field like Basic Pokémon, count as a Knocked Out Pokémon when their Hit Points are depleted. Previously, they were simply discarded with no other penalty. This was because Fossil cards were rarely used for their intended purpose, which was to evolve them into usable Pokémon. Instead, they were treated as walls while the players charged up their Pokémon from the (normally) unattackable Bench. When the [[Pokémon Diamond and Pearl|Diamond and Pearl]] sets came out, there were now six different Fossil Cards: Dome Fossil, Helix Fossil, Claw Fossil, Root Fossil, Skull Fossil, and Shield Fossil, plus Old Amber, which has the same traits [[My Friends and Zoidberg|but isn't a Fossil Card]]. A player could conceivably put 4 of each into a deck and litter his or her playing field with them, stalling out every match.
*** Note that each of these new rules only indirectly block these loopholes. It seems Nintendo tries its very hardest not to ban anything or to directly address exploits.
** One from the game's early days was the "Mewtwo Mulligan Deck" - a deck that simply had one copy of the original Mewtwo card and Psychic energy filling out the other 59 cards. Starting a hand without a Basic Pokemon
* In the trick-taking game ''[http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/54307/chronicle Chronicle]'', wild cards have no suit and no value. There are six wild cards in the deck. Three of them are auto-win cards (the Demon beats everything but the King, the King beats everything, and the Dragon destroys the trick entirely) and three of them have effects unrelated to the trick (the Angel, Sage and Fool). So in theory, in a three-player game the players ''could'' play these three cards, resulting in the trick having no winner. The rules specify that the first player wins should this ever actually occur.
=== Tabletop RPGs ===
* This is common in logical puzzles placed in RPGs. You want perfect glue and indestructible rope and disintegration runes so that the players can figure out a clever solution to your logical puzzle - but you don't want them to use those items on anything ''[[Combinatorial Explosion|other]]'' than that puzzle. The cheap solution is to make them work only in a specific place, or on specific objects, or only once.
** In the most recent version of the [[Tomb of Horrors]], the scepter and crown of disintegration (put the crown on your head, touch one end of the scepter to it, you disintegrate) cannot be removed from the room they're in by any means (the description goes to [[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything|great lengths to cover any eventuality]]). Earlier versions of the Tomb had no such rule at all. The reason eventually emerged during a conversation on a message board: One of the artists working on an earlier copy of the module was invited to a session of the Tomb DMed by none other than [[Word of God|Gary Gygax himself.]] The artist took the scepter and crown from the room, then eventually placed the crown on the {{spoiler|fake skull}} of Acererak and touched the scepter to it, disintegrating the lich instantly. Gygax was stunned, as the eventuality had never occurred to him. The artist, on the other hand, [[Chekhov's Gun|thought that's what they were there for.]] The artist was quite surprised when he was later informed of the rule change.
* ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'' consists of many layers of those. Sometimes applied cyclically, since 3.0 dropped many changes made in AD&D2 and its refinements, most of which were fixes for specific problems... and not all of those problems were rendered moot by 3.0 changes, so they had to be fixed again.
** Pretty much all of the spell entries more complicated than "You do X damage to Y targets at Z range" in the 3.5 edition rules of ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'' consist of long strings of Obvious Rule Patches.
** There are spells like Polymorph that are one paragraph of explaining what the spell does, and roughly eleven paragraphs of explaining what the spell cannot do.
** One of the most basic Obvious Rule Patch is the rule that bonuses of the same types don't stack - only the largest one takes effect (with the exception of dodge bonuses to AC in third edition). This has led to many rule patching to give untyped bonuses types so they couldn't be so easily stacked.
** 3.0 spellcasters had a bad habit of using summoning heavy creatures in midair, causing them to deal obscene damage as falling objects when they hit opponents. Wizards of the Coast amended the summon spells in 3.5 to prevent creatures from being summoned into an environment that can't support them (i.e., no flying whales).
** You can't sunder armor in 3.5. You can break weapons, shields, even items they're wearing like pendants. Just not armor. It would be easier to just break the fallen paladin's armor and then stab him, leading to silly situations such as the above.
** Another patch was the spell Dimensional Door. In 3.5E its pretty much an early teleport spell, in previous editions (as the name implies) it created a pair of portals through which the [[Player Character|PCs]] could travel great distances. While that may not sound so bad, PCs often created [[Portal Cut|horizontal or diagonal doors to bisect enemies (or fortifications!)]] that lead to instant kills. Another tactic was to open a portal into a volcano or sea and use the exit portal to flood an enemy base with lava or drown it completely.
* In most ''D&D''-like games, you can't wear more than one or two magical items of a certain "slot" and benefit from all their powers. While it makes sense that you can't wear multiple pairs of, say, boots, there's no reason for the usual "two rings, one amulet" rule other than balance issues. This is usually justified with a contrived excuse that the magic items will interfere with each other. Even though you can often wear a helmet, armor, and a neck slot item, or gloves, bracers, possibly armor (which probably has gauntlets of some sort included), and a ring.
** In the Fourth Edition ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]]'', shields count as taking up the magic items arms slot ''and'' a wielding-in-hand slot. It means you can't use bracers+shield or two shields and get the magical effects of both.
*** Fourth Edition errata has had some obvious rule patches: The Ranger ability that let you make continual attacks until you miss was errated to have a 5 attack limit as it was possible to make a build which had an almost zero chance of ever missing, even against the strongest monster in the Monster Manual.
* ''[[Pathfinder]]'' is basically a tweaked ''[[Dungeons & Dragons]] 3.5'' and (to make up for an initial lack of content) was said to be compatible with 3.5 which lead to some game breakers. They tend to fix these by introducing their own version of the feat/skill/class ability/prestige class. Especially noticeable with spells. The Irresistable Dance spell used to be a no save incapacitation spell. Now, it allows a save though even those who make it have to dance uncontrollably for one round.
** The Quick Draw feat allows you to draw any item from your pack as a free action... except flasks of alchemist's fire or acid. You also cannot [[Back Stab|sneak attack]] with such items, unlike all other weapons. These changes were obviously put in place due to volleys of flasks being popular among 3.5e rogues as a means to fight enemies resistant to physical damage or vulnerable to fire.
* In ''[[GURPS]]'', it is possible to enchant a pair of permanent Gate spells and then arrange them to create a perpetual motion machine using electromagnetic principles that could then be tapped for an unending mana supply. However, due to the various components required, this would need a setting where both modern science existed, magic existed, and the Draw Power spell from ''GURPS Grimoire 3e'' specifically existed. In the one GURPS setting where this is canonical (''GURPS Technomancer''), three guesses which spell has an entire sidebar devoted to explaining how it specifically does not exist. Hint: Four-letter word, begins with "G".
** This probably had something to do with the fact that [[David R. Pulver]], the writer of ''Technomancer'', [http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.gurps/browse_frm/thread/f65e43a91c0ee511/5f5ba1346c6a7203?hl=en#5f5ba1346c6a7203 participated/lurked in a Usenet thread] where the "Infinite Mana Well" construct was first proposed... at the exact same time ''Technomancer'' was in final playtest.
* In ''[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=6 The Trillion Credit Challenge]'' (using [[Traveller]]), contestants had to purchase and field a fleet of ships to do battle with other fleets. Doug Lenat fed the parameters of the tournament into a computer (in 1981) which suggested that instead of sending in a balanced fleet of carriers, battleships, cruisers, and so on, he should instead build [[Zerg Rush|thousands of tiny patrol boats]]. He won in a rout - though he took incredible losses, he overwhelmed his opponents through sheer numbers. The organizers then made their first Obvious Rule Patch - they added 'fleet agility' (which could be reduced by several things, most importantly by having damaged ships trying to keep up with undamaged ones) as a parameter for the following year's tournament. When Lenat entered again, his computer used much the same strategy with one change - whenever any of his ships was damaged, they would ''self-destruct'', which kept the average mobility of the fleet up. The organizers then made their second patch - tell Lenat that it was weird to have his unorthodox plans keep winning (since, after all, they relied on ordering millions of men to knowing suicide) and say that if he continued to enter, they would [["Stop Having Fun!" Guys|stop holding the tournament]]. Lenat then bowed out gracefully.
* The rules for creating abominations in [[Old World of Darkness|old ''World Of Darkness'']]. Briefly: if you attempt to turn a werewolf into a vampire, the werewolf gets a skill roll. He wins, he dies peacefully. He loses, he dies horribly but his soul is free. He [[Critical Failure|botches]], he becomes an abomination, essentially a walking [[Game Breaker]] balanced out by [[Heroic BSOD|crippling depression]]. Since there are all sorts of abilities in ''tWoD'' that can cause a skill roll to fail or critically fail, the editors in Revised Edition state that nothing short of divine intervention can affect the roll.<ref>except the werewolf spending a Willpower point for an automatic success; this is the "in-character" thing to do</ref>
* More recent{{when}} releases of ''[[Arkham Horror]]'', as well as later versions of the rulebook included with some expansions explicitly and seemingly arbitrarily ban certain types of cards from being the initial draw—because the effects of those types can easily render the game unwinnable, typically by making the preparation necessary to actually be able to accomplish much in the game difficult or impossible.
===
* Construction rules in ''[[BattleTech]]'' often have restrictions that often seem arbitrary. For example, Protomechs (not-so [[Humongous Mecha]]) cannot mount Plasma Cannons. This seems to make no sense, as, being only three tons, they seem like perfect weapons to mount on one. Then you think about just how badly five Plasma Cannons would roast any given Battlemech in a single turn.
** There was also an instance where Battle Armor riding on an Omni Mech can be shot off of the 'mech by shots that land on the torso. Doesn't seem too bad, but given that there is no weight penalty for carrying Battle Armor, the [[Human Shield|Battle Armor were always the first to take hits]], and [[Mundane Utility|the 'mech's torso wouldn't begin to take damage until all the Battle Armor were shot off]]... it's understandable why the next rulebook created fixed locations for each Battle Armor.
* ''[[Warhammer 40,000]]'': ''A [[Commissar]] (of any rank) will never [[Ate His Gun|execute]] [[Suicide as Comedy|himself]].''
** "Under no circumstances can any [necron] make more than one teleport move in a single turn... There are no exceptions to this, no matter how clever your logic."
** "Please note that it is ''not'' possible to master-craft grenades!" <ref>In 40k "master-crafted" allows to re-roll to hit once per round; the problem is that grenades are not counted as single-use items, a model is either equipped with them or not, as tabletop tries to simplify accounting. However, ''[[Dawn of War]] 2'' has an item (and ''Space Marine'' a Perk) that disagrees with that rather blatantly.</ref> "The orbital strike relay [...] cannot be Master-crafted" either<ref>it "is treated as a ranged weapon", i.e. involves roll to hit. (from Codex: Grey Knights update)</ref>.
** Space Marine [[Drop Pod|drop pods]] are clearly 10-man craft (visible in the model and still stated in some codexes), but other codexes expanded it to 12 to allow an independent character to deploy with the squad. Without changing the model.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* In an early version of ''[[Neverwinter Nights]]'', a loophole in the rules was found that let monks wear a shield in their offhand, making them virtually unhittable for no real downside. In the very next patch, monks were made unable to wear shields and retain monk dodge / attack bonuses at the same time.
* In an early release of ''[[Battlefield 2142]]'', it was entirely possible for two soldiers with nothing better to do to destroy their own Titan (and thus force their team to lose the round) by forcing a transport through the floor of the hangar bay and into the Core.
* ''[[EVE Online]]'' has had several updates that were borderline Obvious Rule Patches. However, the patch that prevented carriers from transporting loaded cargo ships was a glaringly Obvious Rules Patch.
** Similarly, nowadays [[Hand Wave|graviton harmonics]] prevent [["Stop Having Fun!" Guys|players]] from taking a 3000m^3 cargo container that holds 3300m^3 of cargo... and putting another 3000m^3 container that holds 3300m^3 inside it leaving 300m^3 of free space. With enough cargo containers you could once haul an entire solar system's worth of ore in a single, moderately sized and priced ship.
* A fairly obscure item from ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' called the Luffa would remove any bleed effect. A boss over 20 levels later would put a hefty bleed dot on raid members at fairly regular intervals. Everyone would equip their Luffa and make Moroes a total joke. The next patch put a spell level cap on the Luffa ie. you couldn't remove bleed effects over level 60 anymore.
** Then there's the infamous Corrupted Blood incident from the release of the Zul'Gurub dungeon, which gained enough notoriety to be mentioned in major news media as an example of how populations reacted to the spread of communicable disease. In a nutshell, an exploit of a boss encounter allowed a pet who acquired the debuff to be dismissed and then resummoned in a populated area, instantly spreading it to everyone in the vicinity and decimating entire cities as a result. It was patched several days later so the debuff could not exist outside of the dungeon.
** An old patch for ''[[WoW]]'' allowed everyone in a group to place marks - graphical icons that go above monsters or players and are used to make them more visible or indicate a kill order for the group - instead of only the group's leader being able to do it. There followed an unofficial addon while allowed players to automatically strobe the marks across the group members, rapidly swapping them around, much to the annoyance of many players. The very next patch added a notification of who was setting marks.
** Two patches were done within hours of release. One patch screwed up and gave Warriors extra talent points. Another one was a dupe bug. (Very annoying and difficult to pull off, but mentioning a dupe bug for a ticket gets a very quick response and led to a patch within an hour).
** In July 2009, a hunter was discovered with a worgen (a sentient, werewolf-like creature) for a pet, and within a few hours the hunter community had figured out how and where to get [http://www.wowhead.com/npc=24277 this particular beast]; pretty much everyone who could obtain one had one. Within two days the tamed worgen were patched to have all their skills and attacks completely removed, and after a few more days they were replaced entirely by ordinary white wolves. However, considering that worgen became a playable race in the Cataclysm expansion, this [[Unfortunate Implications|may have been for the better]].
** There was a video posted on [[YouTube]] a few years back where a paladin killed, in one move, a raid boss designed for dozens of players to take several minutes to bring down. The Reckoning talent had the effect that when a paladin was struck they might gain a stack of Reckoning, causing their next attack to hit twice. One enterprising player dueled a rogue many times without ever striking back, then went up to the boss in question and proceeded to hit it more than a thousand times in one blow. Within twenty four hours the talent was nerfed so that it caused you to hit ''twice'' for the next few attacks. Of course, seeing as Reckoning was about the only ability in the entire game that possessed neither stack limit nor duration, this was only to be expected.
* In ''[[Defense of the Ancients]]'', the Batrider hero has a skill, "Sticky Napalm", that amplifies damage from the Batrider on its victims. Players took advantage of this by building the constant DPS aura item Radiance, which turned Batrider into a real damage-dealer. Apparently Icefrog disagreed, as he proceeded to change Sticky Napalm so that Radiance could not (normally) trigger the bonus damage any more.
** ''DotA'' also has an item called "Kelen's Dagger" that allows teleportation of one's own hero. So, it's even possible to teleport yourself into terrain that you cannot escape from, except by using Kelen's Dagger again once the cooldown ends. Two heroes are forbidden from using Kelen's at all. One of them has an ability to swap positions with another hero, and the other who can hook a hero and reel them in to be right next to him. Either of them could trap an enemy hero (or even a friend, if they were traitorous) into a small patch of terrain that said hero might be stuck in for the entire game, unless the other hero happened to also have bought the Dagger.
* Starting in version 1.3, ''[[Iji]]'' tells you in some places (the arena for {{spoiler|Asha's rematch}} comes to mind) that "there's no need to fire your Nanogun here". Sometimes it was literally true, but in many cases it was because firing your Nanogun there could bug out the game.
** ''Iji'' has a few things like this in the later versions. When it became possible to win the game without killing anyone, this necessitated the player not fighting one of the bosses, because the only way to get by {{spoiler|is to kill him}}. The solution? {{spoiler|Have a new character help you by one-shotting him. However, this would mean that a pacifist runthrough on the first couple of levels would be much faster than previous runthroughs, and the developer, Daniel Remar, wanted speedruns to be fair between versions. So 10 minutes are added to your overall time because Iji waits around for 10 minutes to give your helper a head start.}}
** In a later update, it doesn't count as a kill if you reflect an enemy's fire back into them with a force field weapon. Previously, "pacifist" players would gather dropped power-ups by stocking up on health, moving right next to enemies, and catching rockets with the main character's face for the [[Splash Damage]].
* ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'' automatically ends combat with a special message after 30 rounds of combat (or 50 rounds for some bosses) have elapsed with no winner, with a net result equivalent to successfully running away on the 31st round. This was apparently done originally to prevent a possible near-infinite loop that would result if the player's Muscle was too low to hit the monster and his/her Moxie was too high for the monster to hit him/her, while his/her combat initiative was too low to run away. Newer mechanics make such a situation much less plausible, but the rule has remained and still serves to cap the potential effectiveness of any strategy that involves stalling and drawing out combat for per-round effects. For example:
** The [[Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot]] familiar used to randomly give Meat with a fixed chance of about 1 in 9 per round of combat. Since this made it advantageous to drag out combat to as close to 30 turns as possible without going over and thus using up much more server resources than normal, the NPZR now only gives Meat in the first 10 turns of combat.
** Another much-maligned Obvious Rule Patch came with NS13: Before NS13, players found that increasing monster level (which also increased XP gains) and increasing noncombat encounter chance were both extremely useful. So when NS13 rolled out, the devs added a rule that made increased monster level cancel out increased noncombat chance. Unfortunately, this had the side effect of making monster level increasers less than useless. Over a year and a half later, the devs realized that [[Scrappy Mechanic|nobody liked this in the slightest]] and removed the rule.
** Another rule is "can't use Double Fisted Skull Smashing to wield a Chefstaff in your offhand." Due to the way DFSS (halves the power of offhand weapons but leaves enchantments alone) and Chefstaves (lowest power possible but incredible enchantments) work, this rule prevents two builds, a rather unpleasant one and a horribly broken one: the former, a weapon/chefstaff combo that makes a [[Magic Knight]] with no detriment for either one, the latter, a Chefstaff/Chefstaff combo that results in spells so powerful that it can take down anything almost in one hit.
** The ''KoL'' staff's usual modus operandi in the event of players accomplishing things they didn't count on players accomplishing is to reward the player for their cleverness/tenacity, then change the game so that the stunt can't be repeated.<ref>Or at least, ''theoretically'' can't be repeated; after the first person beat the final boss without the [[Unusual Euphemism|Smurf]], the changes they made turned out not to be sufficient to keep it from happening again. Now you auto-win or auto-lose depending on whether or not you have the item in question</ref>
* In the [[Programming Game]] ''RoboWar'', allowing robots to teleport and fire weapons interchangeably in the same chronon let a robot with sufficient processor speed leap a considerable distance (depending on its current energy) to put a lethal contact shot into another robot, leaving it next to no time to defend or counterattack—and executing another move after the shot (the "jerker" strategy) made it harder to target for a counterattack. That the robot's energy would already go deeply negative in the middle of the chronon didn't matter much (so long as it didn't fall below -200), since it wouldn't become immobilized by having negative energy until the next chronon. This allowed the "dasher" strategy to achieve considerable dominance, and in time most top-placing robots in tournaments, dashers or not, had to use "anti-dasher" techniques. To rebalance the game, an Obvious Rule Patch was instated (amid much controversy) to prevent move/shoot in the same chronon.
* ''[[Fire Emblem]]: Rekka no Ken'' had the absurdly broken Luna spell, which has a damage base of 0 but negates enemy resistance to magic when calculating damage, and has a very good base critical rate. For most of the game, enemies have low resistance anyway, and Luna falls somewhere between okay and kind of bad. However, in the last levels of the game, bosses start to have crazy amounts of resistance to counterbalance your ever-strengthening party. The Luna spell, however, just ignores this and allows Canas (who is arguably a broken character to begin with) to completely annihilate the later bosses in just a few attacks. It even makes it entirely possible for Canas to defeat the final boss with just ''[[Game Breaker|two hits]]''.
** It gets nerfed to hell in ''[[Fire Emblem]]: The Sacred Stones'', where its hit rate is barely half what it once was, is critical rate IS half what it was, and it has less uses. It's made extremely obvious because there wasn't a single change to any other spell.
** There's also the Silencer skill in ''[[Fire Emblem]]: Rekka no Ken'' and ''The Sacred Stones'', which gives your Assassin the chance to instantly-kill any foe, so long as they have a chance to land a critical hit. This allowed them to plow through most bosses with ease. While this was negated by the final bosses of both games, whose equipment automatically reduced the enemy's crit chance to 0, it still left most other bosses vulnerable. It was obviously fixed in ''Path of Radiance'' and ''Radiant Dawn'', where the description of the Silencer skill simply states it doesn't work on bosses without any reasoning or attempt at justification.
* In the [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]] ''Lords of Legend'', your level bonus is apparently capped at 5 times the number of troops. Few know about the cap, because in order to get even close to the cap, you have to spend weeks doing the exact opposite of what you are supposed to.
** It is also played straight with the 'invisibility' strategy (You don't show up on attack pages if you haven't won an attack yet), which has been severely nerfed with increasingly harsh and arbitrary restrictions on invisible players.
* ''[[Gaia Online]]'' has had quite a few:
** First, there's soulbinding, the most famous and controversial of the lot. In the first couple months of open beta, users were allowed to buy and sell their rings. This caused a few problems. The most obvious, of course, was that people could buy their way through the game, resulting in many CL 10s who had no idea what they were doing. Another effect was on the economy. Charge Orbs, the items that power up rings, were earned in-game, not bought. Higher-level rings are naturally more valued than weak ones, so people were charging up rings and then selling them, effectively creating expensive items with little to no cost to the users. This was quickly changed so that rings were "soulbound", meaning they could no longer be put on the marketplace.
*** But only rings acquired after the update or older rings that are equipped. Unsoulbound rings are still being sold, and there is also a new ring [[Revenue Enhancing Devices|sold for real money]] as a Valentine's Day event item. It has officially been described as being permanently unsoulbound.
** A bit later, CL caps were placed on boss lairs so that people couldn't recruit their CL 10 friends to help them beat the boss. Clever players soon found a way to circumvent this by wearing low-level rings when entering the boss area, then switching out to their stronger ones. The devs soon closed this loophole.
* In ''[[Civilization]] III'', players could initially chop down and replant forests in relatively short order. This made a certain amount of sense, up to a point anyway, but it also created an infinite supply of construction materials. It was quickly patched so that [[Fridge Logic|replanted forests contained no useful wood]].
* In ''[[Half Life|Half Life: Episode One]]'' when Gordon {{spoiler|gets the super-charged gravity gun again}}, any use of it causes all other weapons to vaporize, just like the previous game. The problem is, Alyx is also with you and can kill enemies, causing them to drop their weapons. When they do, the weapons still vaporize for pretty much no reason, almost as if they only held together because [[No Ontological Inertia|a Combine soldier was holding it]].
* In [[Final Fantasy XI]], you gain tactical points (TP) each time you hit an enemy, the amount varying based on the delay of your weapon (higher = more TP per hit). You have to have at least 100% TP (of a 300% cap) in order to perform a weapon skill. This sounds reasonable, except very early on, weapon skills that hit multiple times gave full TP return per hit, leading to being able to perform these weapon skills back-to-back with no need to accumulate TP in the mean time assuming you used a special type of otherwise useless weapon with almost no damage rating and max delay. [[Square Enix]] patched this very quickly so that only the first hit (first two when you're dual-wielding) give full TP, and subsequent hits only give 1%.
** Don't forget [[That One Boss|Absolute Virtue]], who is for all intents and purposes totally invincible due to his ability to use the most powerful abilities of every job, as well as cast high-level black magic that players don't even have access to instantaneously and frequently, wiping out alliances of players in seconds. Every time a method is discovered to defeat him, Square-Enix will immediately squash it by [[New Powers as the Plot Demands|giving Absolute Virtue new resistances and powers as his flaws were discovered]].
*** When players killed him by attacking him from areas he couldn't fight back, the developers gave him the ability to draw players to him if they got too far away.
*** Later on, the devs were pressured into rethinking the absurd difficulty of some of their bosses after some bad publicity involving an [[Bladder of Steel|18-hour-long fight against a different monster]], so they lowered the HP of both that boss and Absolute Virtue and forced them to despawn if not defeated within two hours. Players discovered that a legion of Dark Knights using a combination of the job ability Souleater [[Cast from Hit Points|(consumes HP to increase damage dealt)]] and Blood Weapon (restores HP equal to melee damage inflicted), he could be bumrushed into defeat. Within days, a patch was made that gave Absolute Virtue (and ONLY Absolute Virtue - other monsters that had previously been defeated with this method were totally untouched) increasing resistance to Souleater damage, making it useless.
*** A theoretical method of defeating him involved using the Scholar's Helix line of spells, which deal a fairly large amount of damage over time. The helix was placed on the enemy, and then a group of Scholars simultaneously use a job ability that doubles the damage dealt by the next tic of damage while halving its overall duration. The result is that most enemies in the game will drop dead immediately, although execution requires very precise timing (and, in most cases, botting). As soon as people discussed how it could be used to defeat Absolute Virtue, "certain notorious monsters" were given a resistance to the use of the JA. Guess who was at the top of the priority list?
* [[Pokémon]] had constant problems with the pokemon Wobbuffet. It's supposed to be a pokemon that cannot directly attack but is streamlined to take advantage of damage reflecting attacks, but instead of being forced to attack, an opponent can just simply switch out his current pokemon over and over until Wobbuffet runs out of PP. To prevent that, in Generation III Wobbuffet and its newly introduced pre-evolution Wynaut were both equipped with the Shadow Tag ability, which prevents the opponent from switching Pokémon in a battle against Wobbuffet/Wynaut until they were either recalled or knocked out or if the foe has some other trap-cancel ability that allows them to flee. Fair enough, except for in a competitive battle where both you and your opponents have Wobbuffet (or the much-less-common Wynaut) who are both equipped with Leftovers and facing each other. You can't fight back because Wobbuffet and Wynaut are only able to counter attacks, not dish them out. Their Shadow Tag abilities will also prevent either of them from switching out, and even if the two were to wear themselves down enough to use Struggle (the only move Wynaut/Wobbuffet knows that deals damage), Leftovers would cancel out what horrendously low damage their moves do, resulting in a draw by eliminating any chance that either of the two will faint. From Diamond and Pearl onwards, Shadow Tag was changed so that any Pokémon who has the Shadow Tag ability who is locked into battle with a foe who also has said ability can negate the effect and switch out without problems. Also, Struggle now always takes away 25 percent of the user's ''maximum'' hit points, not 25 percent of the hit point damage the user did to the other guy, so that even if two trainers wound up with Wobbuffet as each person's last Pokémon, once Struggling began the match would end in 5 turns or less (because the 25 percent rounds down, someone with an HP amount that can be divided by 4 with a remainder of 1 could last 1 more turn).
** Now in the new generation of games, (the fifth) there was a glitch involving the new move Sky Drop. The move makes one Pokemon take another into the air [[Captain Obvious|(and then drop it for damage)]], and when a Pokemon is in the air, it cannot move or be hit (except by a few moves, like Thunderbolt). There was previously a move called Gravity which made Flying-types or levatating Pokemon comes to the ground (this meaning they can be hit by Ground-type moves), and also makes Pokemon in the air come to the ground. So in a double battle, if one of your Pokemon uses Sky Drop and the other then uses gravity, both your & the opponents Pokemon will come to the ground... [[Game Breaking Bug|except while your pokemon can move, theirs is treated as being in the air and cannot move, at all, until they are fainted by a move like, say, Thunderbolt.]] The Obvious Rule Patch? Nintendo banned the move in Random online battles.
** The fifth generation games also give us a minor one involving Dream World Pokemon. Almost every Pokemon encountered in the Dream World will have an ability not normally accessible in the main game. This also came with a new breeding mechanic where these abilities could only by passed to offspring if the Pokemon with the ability is female. Starter Pokemon and Eevee's evolutions encountered in the Dream World can never be female, meaning they can have their Hidden Ability or egg moves, but not both. (Possibly due to some of them creating game breaking combinations, such as Speed Boost Blaziken, which through breeding also has access to Swords Dance and Baton Pass.) Within the [[Character Tiers|Dream World tier]] in the [[Metagame|competitive battling]] circle, however, both are allowed in the spirit of simulating a theoretically "complete" metagame. This most likely won't be the case with official tournaments to come in the future, as Nintendo uses different rules than the fandom.
** The moves Double Team and Minimize would improve evasion (with enough use, could reduce all hit chances to 1/3 their original value), which basically dominated the first gen Metagame, particularly for three types - Psychic (the original Game Breaker type), Water (which only fears Electric and Grass), and Grass (due to abuse of health-draining moves). The second generation introduced an always-hit move of the new Psychic-beating Dark type, and the third gen introduced such moves to hit all three types (Ghost, Electric, Grass, and Flying).
** Speaking of types... Psychic was ''ridiculously'' broken back in Gen. 1, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, its only weakness was Bug, and there were ''very'' few Bug-type moves available, very few actually decent Bug Pokémon, and the best ones couldn't actually learn any Bug-type attacks. Secondly, Special Attack and Special Defense were only the single Special stat, and many Psychics had high Special, allowing them to give out ''and'' absorb insane amounts of Special damage. Incidentally, this also made the move "Psychic" fairly broken, as it lowered the Special stat, causing foes to take ''and'' give less Special damage. Naturally, Gen. II did quite a bit of fixing to this: Ghost became super effective against Psychic like it was supposed to be, and the two new types, Dark and Steel, were immune and resistant, respectively, to Psychic moves, with Dark being super effective as well. More usable Bugs were introduced, along with the Fury Cutter TM, which could be learned by quite a few Bug-Types. Also, Special was split into Special Attack and Special Defense, and Psychic only lowers Special Defense.
* ''[[Final Fantasy VI]]'' had a major issue with Gau, a character who normally can't equip weapons but has a high innate attack power to make up for it, and the Merit Award, an accessory that allows its user to equip any type of weapon or armor in the game. When Gau had the Merit Award in the original version of the game, you could equip him with a weapon. Not only did this dramatically boost his attack power, but it also led to some very bizarre [[Game Breaker]] combos, such as the legendary "Wind God Gau". Later remakes of the game prevent Gau from equipping the Merit Award, sadly enough.
** Gogo, while not nearly as [[Game Breaker]] status as Gau, could also achieve "Wind God" status with the Merit Award. This managed to last into the Playstation re-release, but was finally blocked in the GBA update. Another, separate rule patch was that of [https://web.archive.org/web/20140923185940/http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Psycho_Cyan_Bug "Psycho Cyan"], but savvy players managed to find an alternate means of triggering this glitch anyway.
* ''[[Left 4 Dead]]'' had an issue with melee shoving in VS mode. Players were literally shoving zombies for the entire game instead of actually using their guns, which made it a huge hassle for zombie players to approach and attack since they would [[Cherry Tapping|get shoved to death.]] A patch then introduced melee fatigue, where survivors would have to wait before shoving again if they kept shoving too many times without stopping. This mechanic was made as a main feature in all game modes for the sequel.
** The sequel also had a few things patched for VS mode due to complaints. Explosive ammo was removed due to survivors using the special ammo only on special infected, which basically meant that the survivors could not be touched due to the explosive ammo stumbling the zombie players. Using defibrillators would induce a 25 point penalty per use for the survivors. Spitters that spit their acid into a moving elevator would potentially wipe out the survivor team since they had nowhere to move away from the spit, so a patch was made where spitting into a moving elevator would make the acid quickly fizzle out to prevent a cheap win.
** The sequel also made it where melee weapons were not very effective on a Tank in order to encourage more gunning and running when survivors fight a Tank. Before this patch, survivors would use melee weapons (which ranged from the practical, like a sword, to absurd, like a frying pan) to kill a Tank quickly because each hit took 10% of the Tank's health off, which the Tank could then die in 10 hits. With 4 survivors using melee weapons all at once, it would be quite easy to drop a Tank, which frustrated Tank players in VS mode. A patch addressed this issue where now melee weapons only do half the damage they used to against a Tank.
** The Jockey gained a slight buff after complaints from players in VS mode came pouring in; The Jockey's main attack is to latch onto the survivors and ride them somewhere else while damaging them every second. The problem was the Jockey could be shoved off his victim (which is how it works) before he could do any damage at all if survivor players were quick enough. One patch later, the Jockey can now damage survivors as soon as he grabs them.
*** Something similar happened with the Smoker. The Smoker does damage by grabbing survivors with his tongue, pulling them toward him and trapping them. Originally, the Smoker couldn't cause damage to the player until his tongue attack fully retracted, implying that the tongue itself does no damage, but rather the damage comes from the Smoker hitting the survivor directly. Other survivors, however, were freeing their friends from the Smoker's tongue long before it reached the Smoker, so the attack was changed so that the survivor also takes damage during the dragging part of the attack.
** The Witch in the sequel had received a buff for Realism VS mode after people complained that the Witch was too easy for survivors to kill. Now Witches in Realism VS cannot be instantly killed with a head shot.
** When Survival mode was introduced in Left 4 Dead, people abused exploits and glitches in the maps by placing themselves in areas that the zombies could not "see" them at (players that are "off" the map are considered non existent by zombies), thus they could earn gold meals too easily. While some of the maps were patched to plug up the exploits, many others did not get detected. The sequel upgraded the AI Director to detect cheating in Survival mode where it will spawn Spitter acid onto a player that is not in the map or are in some spot that the zombies can't reach them and if the player avoids this check, the AI Director will just outright damage players until they get back to playing fair.
* In ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'', the Gloves of Running Urgently gave the Heavy a speed boost when wielded, bringing his speed up from "extremely slow" to "about average". Another item, the Buffalo Steak Sandvich, was released later that temporarily increased the Heavy's speed to above average speed. These effects, when used together, allowed the Heavy to become one of the fastest classes in the game. Now, eating a Buffalo Steak cancels out the effect of the GRU.
** The Spy can turn invisible during which he is not able to use any of his attacks but originally he could still taunt while invisible. When the Sniper/Spy update gave him a taunt that could instant kill enemies, taunting while invisible was quickly edited out.
* ''[[Mario Kart]]'' had the problem of snaking. It was a fan made technique where the player performs a power slide on a straight road and builds up a mini-turbo quickly, releases it, and then does it again in the opposite direction, doing this back and forth until they hit a curve. Mario Kart Double Dash had this and it was even more apparent in Mario Kart DS where the best time trial records came from snaking and [[Player Preferred Pattern|everyone online always snaked with the same specific characters/karts]]. To address the issue, Nintendo made it where in Mario Kart Wii, mini-turbos could only be built up by maintaining the power slide in one direction until it gained enough power instead of wiggling the control stick back and forth quickly.
** Mario Kart Wii created a new problem with the bikes. Players quickly found out that popping a wheelie gives a small boost in speed and if it was done enough anywhere, they could boost so much that they can stay ahead of players that didn't do the same or were using a kart (karts can't wheelie). In theory, bikes are supposed to lose a ton of speed if they are bumped into while popping a wheelie but this rarely happened in the hands of skilled players. Mario Kart 7 got rid of bikes entirely due to this.
** The Fake Item Box, which is supposed to fool players by thinking it's a real item box, had been in the Mario Kart series for decades, but it was removed in Mario Kart 7. This was mainly due to the item working a bit too well where players can place the fake box inside real item boxes all the time and basically be guaranteed a player would always fall for it and since it was a big box, it could also be used on narrow paths or before jumps so players could never avoid it at all compared to a smaller item like a banana peel. The fake box became completely useless in Mario Kart DS due to players being able to spot it on the map on the bottom screen and with Mario Kart 7 using the map screen again, the fake box would be useless. With all the reasons listed above, it's understandable why Mario Kart 7 got rid of the item.
* ''[[Prototype (video game)|Prototype]]'' has a thermobaric tank that can destroy any building in one shot. There is a [[Mass Monster Slaughter Sidequest|Kill Event]] that involves using one. After doing the event, the player is left with the tank and 50 rounds for the big gun. Patch: If you use the tank to destroy a military base or infected hive, the tank will ''inexplicably vanish'', preventing you from cleaning up the entire map with it.
* Due to the infamous amount of infinite combos and glitches that dominnated competitive play for ''[[Marvel vs. Capcom 2]]'', Capcom's made a point of patching infinite combos out of ''[[Marvel vs. Capcom 3]]''.
== Non-Gaming Examples ==
=== Literature ===
* In ''[[Ender's Game]]'', Ender's final battle as commander pits his Dragon Army against two armies combined. Ender discards all combat strategy and has his boys move as quickly as possible to perform the victory ritual. Since nobody had considered doing this without defeating the opposing army first, the other team is confused enough for him to win. He is promptly told that starting in the next battle fought at Battle School, it would not be possible for an army to perform the victory ritual without first defeating or disabling everyone in the opposing army.
* The [[Discworld]]'s Assassin's Guild Diary has School Rule 16: "No boy is to keep a crocodile in his room." Followed by rules 16a to 16j to counter various forms of [[Loophole Abuse]], from the obvious ("16a. No boy is to keep an alligator or any large amphibious reptile in his room"; "16c. Nor in the cellar.") to the outlandish ("16h. No boy is to convert to Offlerism without permission in writing from the Head Master." [Offler is the Discworld's Crocodile God].)
** This is surely a [[Historical In-Joke]] referring to Lord Byron. He wanted to keep a dog when he was at Cambridge, but school rules forbid it. He inspected the rules carefully and found there was nothing prohibiting [[Everything's Worse with Bears|pet bears]], so he got one. It's unknown when Cambridge applied the highly-necessary patch.
** According to ''[[Night Watch (Discworld)|Night Watch]]'', the Assassins' Guild School is now co-ed, so that rule would have to have been rewritten to avoid girls keeping crocodiles in their room and [[Loophole Abuse|pointing to Rule 16's use of the word "boy"]].
*** Which, when they added "Read boys for girls" as a note to the list, led to this:
{{quote|School Rule No.145 : No boy is to enter the room of any girl.
School Rule No.146 : No girl is to enter the room of any boy.
School Rule No.147 : (provisional) : It has been pointed out that our injunction to 'read boys for girls, and vice versa', can, if taken together with the two previous rules by someone with little to do but argue, mean that no pupil is to be in any room at all. This was not the intention. No pupil is to be anywhere except where they should be. A girl is defined as a young person of the female persuasion.
School Rule No.148 : Regardless of [[Transgender|how persuaded he feels]], Jelks Minor in Form IV is a boy.
School Rule No.149 : Arguing over the wording of school rules is forbidden. }}
===
==== Reality Television ====
* On ''[[The Amazing Race]]'', limits on how many Roadblocks a racer could perform were instigated after Season 5, after the three women who made the Final 3 that year performed a total of three Roadblocks combined.
** In Season 1, teams were only allowed to buy one set of plane tickets, and weren't allowed to switch, even if they found a faster flight or their original flight was delayed. This was changed on the very next season, and multiple flight bookings has become an important part of the [[Metagame]] ever since.
Line 170 ⟶ 240:
===
* In ''[[Chasing the Sunset]]'', the rules are [http://www.fantasycomic.com/index.php?p=c553 automatically] patched.
* [http://xkcd.com/246/ This] ''[[xkcd]]'' panel.
* ''[[Penny Arcade]]'' parodies this with ''[[Scribblenauts]]''. Tycho explains how the goal of the game is to get Starites, and you do so by writing the names of useful items ([[The Dev Team Thinks of Everything|over 22,000 are available]]), which then appear. Gabe picks up the game and immediately writes "Starite". One appears and he wins. Note that in the actual game, doing this produces a '''fake''' Starite that's worthless. {{spoiler|Except for the very last level.}}
=== Web Original ===
* Speed running times separate "any%" and "100%" runs in large part due to how plain completion is based on skipping as much of the game as possible<ref>For example ''[[Super Mario 64]]'' has 120 stars that must completed for 100% completion, with an intended minimum of 70 stars required to reach the final boss and complete the game. Since 2007 any% has avoided collecting ''any'' of the 120 stars.</ref>. After [[Tool Assisted Speedrun]] website TASVideos.org's record for [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrspyLH0IoU catching all Pokémon] in [[Pokémon Red and Blue|Gen 1 Pokémon]] game (achieved with relatively minimal glitching) was "obsoleted" by [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXIwud48Xcs a run that used one glitch over and over to catch all Pokémon in sequence] they updated their rules so that runs based on tricking a game into executing arbitrary code can not qualify for the fastest 100% completion in a "Vault" tier (pure technical achievements, minimal entertainment value) run, only any%.
=== Real Life ===
* The International Obfuscated C Code Contest added a rule in 1995 that required all submissions to have source code at least one byte in length. Why? In 1994, "the world's smallest [[wikipedia:Quine (computing)|self-replicating program]]" won an award for "Worst Abuse of the Rules" by being zero bytes in size. Another rule, banning machine-dependent code, was added after the first winner in 1984 wrote the entire main program as a block of PDP-11 machine code.
* Even science and math have been known at various times to have Obvious Rule Patches. A couple of the famous ones:
** Euclid's ''Elements'', which was '''the''' geometry textbook for 2,000 years, begins by assuming some axioms and postulates that are obvious enough to make a solid foundation — with one exception. [[wikipedia:Parallel postulate|Euclid's fifth postulate]] is clumsy and not at all self-evident. Countless mathematicians over the years tried to derive the "parallel postulate" from the others instead of assuming it. But the old Greek's intuition was right. The postulate ''can't'' be proven or disproven that way; if you choose a contradictory postulate, you get a "non-Euclidean" geometry that's perfectly consistent.
** Betrand Russell essentially broke set theory with his [[wikipedia:Russell's paradox|paradox]]: does "the set of all sets that don't contain themselves" contain itself? To escape this paradox, mathematicians had to put restrictions on what constituted a set. The current system basically says ''no'' set can contain itself—anything big enough to do that is too big to be a set, and has to be a "class" or some such. Some mathematicians find this unsatisfying, and the debate over whether there's a better solution continues.
*** The [[wikipedia:Cantor's diagonal argument|underlying nature]] of Russell's paradox unfortunately indicates that any better solution will ''also'' need to be logically "patched".
** Should the number 1 be counted as a [[wikipedia:Prime number|prime number]]? There's a case to be made either way, and in fact it was widely considered prime until quite recently, per the classic definition ("a number whose only factors are itself and 1"). But 1 doesn't act like a prime in most of the ways we need primes to act; in particular, it has to be left out if we want the [[wikipedia:Fundamental theorem of arithmetic|Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic]] to work. Thus we now define primality in ways that are less intuitive but exclude 1, such as "a number with exactly two factors" (and hence, 0 is right out).
* The [[wikipedia:World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction|World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction]] is an extremely prestigious award intended for short stories, but was originally only defined as "speculative fiction under 10,000 words". That is, until 1991, when the judges selected [[Neil Gaiman]] and [[Charles Vess]]' "A Midsummer's Night Dream" issue of ''[[The Sandman]]'', which (horror of horrors) ''[[What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?|is a comic book]]''. The World Fantasy Convention sniffily [[Executive Meddling|changed the rules]] almost immediately, relegating any future graphic novel submissions to the Special Award: Professional category. This means the ''[[The Sandman]]'' is the only comic book that ever has or ever will win this particular award.
** According to Gaiman, "It wasn't like closing the stable door after the horse had gotten out, it was like closing the stable door after the horse had gotten out and won the Kentucky Derby."
* In 2011, UK supermarket chain Tesco ran a promotion that if whatever they had happened to be cheaper at its competitor Asda, they will pay you double the difference (e.g., an item that costs 8 pounds but is only 5 at Asda would earn you 6 pounds). However, the difference in prices could be big enough that shoppers would get back more money than they spent. Naturally, many [[Genre Savvy|savvy]] shoppers exploited this by finding products they didn't even need but potentially gave them the biggest profit and using that to do their actual grocery shopping. Tesco had since put the difference cap to 20 pounds.
* In 2009 a large German electronics chain ran a promotion where you could buy any product without the Value Added Tax (currently 19%). It turned out, however, that a company can't just waive the VAT, they had to pay it nonetheless. The products were just discounted by the amount of the VAT. Customers looked at their receipt and found that they indeed paid the tax, so they went back to the markets and got ''another'' discount for the taxes. Needless to say they added a clause for that in their next promotion.
==== Law ====
* In general when someone gets away with a crime via [[Loophole Abuse]] on a level under the federal one, it's quickly closed while bureaucracy stops the federal one from doing anything for all but the most major evasions.
* The United States Constitution was vague on how succession of a dead president worked. It took almost 200 years to add the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution and actually codify what should happen.
* Several ad hoc laws arguably fall under this trope, especially those which are quickly struck down by the country's respective supreme court.
** This applies to the US Constitution; for example, the Eleventh was passed to fix a loophole in Article III which allowed residents of one state to sue other states in federal court when states were normally immune from suit. The people suing were the State's creditors.
*** The 16th Amendment is another example. Federal income taxes had always been permitted under Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17, and had even been ruled to be "indirect" taxes not subject to apportionment as early as 1875. However, one really really wonky 5-4 Supreme Court decision declared taxes on income ''derived from property'' to be equivalent to a tax on the value of the property itself, and therefore a direct tax subject to apportionment. The 16th Amendment was drafted specifically to plug that loophole and re-classify all income taxes as indirect taxes regardless of the income's source.
** There's a law in the UK which specifically bans the operation of a hand-held digital voice recorder while operating a motor-vehicle. Can't help but get the feeling this was only enacted due to someone being a wise-arse with a particularly powerful police officer.
** In Canadian law, it's illegal to give alcohol to a moose. You have to wonder...<ref>That's perfectly reasonable. [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/drunk-elk-sweden_n_3936590 You do ''not'' want to be anywhere near a drunk moose.]</ref>
** If stating what a law does sounds ridiculous (such as "you can't put an ice cream sandwich in your back pocket"), it's probably one of these. The given example came about because of horse theft, which is a crime (understandable, since it's theft). If an animal wanders onto your property, it's yours. So if you want a free horse, all you have to do is bait it in a non-obvious manner (such as allowing it to smell the food in your pocket), and walk home, allowing it to follow you.
* In 2008 when the State of Nebraska tried to implement a [[wikipedia:Safe-haven law|safe-haven law]] it neglected to notice that its definition of "children" included anyone 18 or younger which resulted in 36 teenage children being driven in from out of state and abandoned at Nebraska hospitals. The law was patched to exclude older children later that year.
* In 2010, the polar bear was granted the status of Threatened under the US Endangered Species Act... with a rider attached by Secretary of the Interior stating that the bear's new status couldn't be used to sue oil companies or greenhouse gas emitters (arguably, the two biggest threats to the species). The environmental activist organizations that had planned to do just that were not amused.
* In many places, there are obsolete, oddly specific, and/or downright weird laws that are still on the books, many of which are clearly patches created due to some [[Noodle Incident]] or another. One has to wonder what prompted lawmakers in San Francisco to prohibit [https://web.archive.org/web/20141202024029/http://www.dumblaws.com/laws/united-states/california?page=80 elephants from strolling down Market Street unless they're on a leash or wiping one's car with used underwear.]
==== Sports ====
* The baseball rules committee instituted the [[wikipedia:Infield Fly Rule|Infield Fly Rule]] in 1895 to block a specific [[Game Breaker]] in which an infielder would let a fly ball drop and go for the easy double play (or, should the runner choose to run, catch the fly ball and throw the runner out before he could tag up for an equally easy double play) instead of just getting the one out that would normally result. Which makes this [[Older Than Radio]].
** Arguably the fly ball rule ''itself'' is such a patch (albeit an even older one)--it means batters can't just hit the ball straight up and run to first base before it comes down.
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* The two-rock, three-rock, and Moncton guard rules in curling, which state that a rock in play but not in scoring position cannot be taken out by the opposing team before a number of rocks have been thrown in that end. The issue was that one team would get a couple points ahead and then simply take out every other rock the other team threw, leaving them no opportunity to score and making for a very boring game. As the accuracy of takeout shots and the skill of the players has improved, the number of rocks that must be thrown before the guards can be eliminated grows.
* Plenty of such rules resulted from events described in [[Cracked.com|Xavier Jackson]]'s [http://www.cracked.com/article_20717_5-dumb-ways-people-have-won-at-sports.html 5 Dumb Ways People Have Won at Sports].
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