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[[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}}
==
=== 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).
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
=== 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 & Dragons]]). However, the exact mechanics of this process, if and how a creature that would otherwise be immune to a Black Enchantment can be affected and targeted by this, etc., have caused Animate Dead to be another nightmare of errata and Magic legalese. There's a reason only 2 other cards like Animate Dead have ever been made, and every other Reanimation spell thereafter are Instants and Sorceries. Damn!
*** 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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* 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.
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** 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,
* 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.
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* ''[[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.
=== War Games ===
* 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.
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** "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.
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** 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:
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== 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.
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===
* 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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