Obvious Rule Patch: Difference between revisions

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[[File:7_43587 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]]'''}}
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** The most recent major rule change in chess was allowing a pawn to move two squares on its first move. It was soon noticed that this allowed a pawn to "slip past" an enemy pawn which would otherwise have been able to capture it. Since the two-square rule was only meant to make the game faster and not to alter strategy, the ''en passant'' rule was introduced to patch the hole: if a pawn slips past another like this, the opposing pawn gets one chance to capture it anyway. (The option must be exercised immediately or lost.) Unavoidably, the two-square rule ''has'' changed chess, but ''en passant'' has helped to limit this.
*** The funny thing is that anyone strategically-minded enough to be changing the rules of chess should have noticed right away that this allowed a pawn to move such that adjacent pawns have no possibility of capturing them.
** Chess does not out-and-out ban infinite loops like Go, but does declare the game a draw if the same position occurs three times (as long as one player claims it). More complex loops are prevented by the 50-move rule: a game is drawn if 50 moves pass without a pawn being moved or a piece captured (these, being irreversible, are the key signs of progress in a game). "Perpetual check", where a stubborn player exploits the priority of defending one's king to delay the game indefinitely, is also a draw. <ref>More precisely, it demonstrates a player's ability to force a draw through the previously mentioned rules.</ref>
*** The 50 move rule was once subjected to a ''really'' obvious rule patch. It was discovered that certain positions can be won but require more than fifty moves (without captures or pawn moves) to do so. To take care of this, the rules were changed to list these positions and specifically exclude them from the 50 move rule, allowing players to win the game in such positions instead of drawing. This was abolished in 1992, because it was found that [[Combinatorial Explosion|there were far too many of such positions]] to continue patching the rules like this.
*** Note that the game isn't automatically drawn due to threefold repetition or the fifty-move rule; a player must claim the draw.
*** Chinese chess, Xiangqi, is less forgiving of perpetual checks. If you check five turns in a row without pause, ''you lose the game''. However, in Xiangqi, the general's movement is limited to a small area called the palace, so if you really can't figure out how to checkmate him, you deserve the loss.
** The castling rules in chess also have an [[Obvious Rule Patch]] requiring the king and the rook to be on the same rank, to prevent the one-in-a-million scenario of a never-moved king using ''vertical'' castling along the e-file with a pawn promoted to rook.
** And speaking of pawn promotion, that's another rule which is now specified very carefully to avoid certain abuses -- suchabuses—such as remaining a pawn or promoting to an ''enemy'' piece. Yes, there are positions where those options are good, although it's vanishingly unlikely that they'd ever occur. See [[wikipedia:Joke chess problem#Offbeat interpretations of the rules of chess|here]] for an example of when promoting to an enemy piece is more beneficial.
** There's [http://books.google.com/books?id=IopUJv7-_NYC&pg=PA173&dq=%22three+king+circus%22&cd=2#v=onepage&q=%22three%20king%20circus%22&f=false one story] where a student promoted his pawn to a king because his teacher, George Koltanowski, had forgotten to mention this was illegal. George says he responded by [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|checkmating both kings at once]].
* In [[Shogi]], almost all games end in checkmate. However, there's a situation which was not originally thought of where it can be impossible for either side to achieve a checkmate if both kings enter the opposing sides promotion ranks. This is called "entering king," and is regarded as one of the only possibilities for a stalemate. If such a position arises, arbitrary rules on counting the amount of pieces 'owned' by each side and assigning a point value to them were created. If either side has less than 24 points, then they lose. If both sides have enough points, then the game is simply replayed over again with the starting move switched to the other player.
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** Another one is the ''agari yame'' [[House Rules|House Rule]]. Normally, if the dealer wins a hand, an extra hand is played which does not count towards the total number of hands in the match, and the dealer keeps the dealer button for the extra hand(s). With the ''agari yame'' rule in effect, the extra hand is not triggered if the dealer wins on the last hand and they are in first place. This is to prevent a [[Springtime for Hitler]] scenario - in the Japanese variant, it is not uncommon for the player who ends in first place to receive a large bonus (of ranking points in league or tournament play, or cash in gambling play). Thus, on the final hand without ''agari yame'', if the dealer is in first place, they might be better off not winning the hand to end the game and secure their first-place finish, while winning the hand would trigger an extra hand, during which they would have to risk being knocked out of first.
* A game of Scrabble ends when a player runs out of tiles, or when each player takes three straight non-scoring turns ''and at least one player actually has points''. The last clause had to be added because of a strange tournament game where a player accidentally dropped a tile face up in attempting to put tiles on his rack. The opponent noticed that this tile would combine with his own rack to form a word allowing him to reach the edge of the board, and so simply passed. The player who showed the tile, however, wasn't in a hurry to make the first word either, and started by just exchanging some tiles to get a better rack. When he finally did make a play, on the 3rd turn, it was a fake word. The other player still had the opportunity to make the play he was looking for, but opted for something better: challenge the word off the board! As this was the sixth scoreless turn, the game ended immediately, and each player lost points from the value of their tiles. The player who made the challenge was able to see that by doing so, he would automatically win by a score of negative 8 to negative 10.
* The Finnish board game ''[[wikipedia:Afrikan t%C3%A4htitähti|Afrikan tähti]]'' (Star of Africa) had a small flaw in the original rules - the game could become [[Unwinnable By Mistake|unwinnable]] for one or more players because of the cost of travelling by sea and the possibility of getting robbed on one of the islands. After 50 years of unwinnable games and [[House Rules]], the sea travel was patched to resolve the formerly unwinnable situations by making sea travel free if the player has no money but only 2 spaces at a time.
* 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.
 
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** "Table Stakes": A player cannot be forced out of a pot due to lack of money (extra bets go into a side pot), and a player can't reach into their pocketbook/offer up their Aston Martin keys and/or the deed to the ranch to call a hand.
** Anti-collusion rules such as: banning cellphones tableside, requiring cards shown to another player to be shown to the rest of the table, and banning languages other than English at the table. The last one often doesn't cover [[Signed Language|ASL]], in order to avoid violating ADA requirements.
* One of the most obvious examples is [[Collectible Card Game|Collectible Card Games]]s and their restricted/banned lists.
* Lists in the ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh Card Game]]'' started as just the Limited List: normally, you can have up to three of any one card in a deck, but for game balance reasons the Limited List mandates that only one (Limited) or two (Semi-Limited) copies of certain cards can be included in a deck. Before long, players were discovering interesting ways to break the game using card combos the game designers hadn't foreseen, resulting in absurdly powerful decks that could force a win in a single turn (or even the first turn). Thus the Limited List was expanded to include Forbidden Cards, which cannot be included in a deck at all. The list is changed roughly every six months, with cards being both added to and sometimes removed from it.
** In an interesting take on this, the formerly-Limited card "Twin-Headed Behemoth" was recently knocked down to 3 because of a ruling change: Its effect (which lets it revive itself from the Graveyard at the end of the turn it's destroyed from the field with 1000 ATK and DEF) specifically states it can only be activated "once per duel". It was put at 1 after it was pointed out that multiple copies of the card would make it impossible to keep track of which copy had used its effect and which haven't, meaning anyone could abuse the confusion and reuse the card's effect illegally. Now, though, the card's ruling has changed so that only 1 copy of it owned by a player can activate its effect that duel, period. The rule change was completely arbitrary, only allowing the card to become unlimited without interfering with the reasons it was limited in the first place. A similar case happened with Treeborn Frog, which won't activate if one is already on the field, allowing it to be unlimited.
** The worst examples of this in Yu-Gi-Oh are Yata-Garasu and the two Envoys. All of the other cards on the Forbidden list are pivotal in combos; these three cards were banned just because they were ''[[Game Breaker|that broken]]''. Not helping the Envoys' case is a rule known as priority, which allows the player to activate their effects (which can normally only be activated at times when the player could activate a Normal Spell) immediately when they're Summoned, before the opponent has the chance to activate cards that would destroy them.
*** Following the introduction of the Xyz monsters in the game, the OCG and TCG had their priority rulings patched to prevent people from calling priority on Ignition monster effects.
** Green Baboon, Defender of the Forest, is another monster with an unusual [[Obvious Rule Patch]] story; its effect allows you to pay 1000 LP to summon it from your hand or graveyard if a Beast-Type monster you control is destroyed, but too many duelists were exploiting that effect by bringing it out by purposely suiciding their Beasts in battle. As such, Konami arbitrarily decided its effect can't go off, if the Beast monster was destroyed by battle. This significantly weakened the monster's power and caused many duelists to declare [[They Changed It, Now It Sucks]], but there's a twist to the tale; shortly after the ruling was implemented, guess what came out? A new monster, with the ''exact same stats'' as the original Baboon (and even named ''Yellow'' Baboon, ''Archer'' of the Forest), and the ability to summon itself from the hand if a Beast you control is destroyed by battle. Nice way of covering your ass there, Konami...
** Also, the "Archfiend" cards, an issue resulting from [[Bowdlerize|bowdlerization]] of card names. In the Japanese version, several cards used the word "demon" in their names, and this word was changed into a bunch of different words in the initial American releases: "Demon's Summon" became "Summoned Skull", "Demon's Axe" became "Axe of Despair", and so on. This worked fine until a series of cards that dealt with "demon" cards started to come out, so a ruling had to be issued to declare "Archfiend" as a "special category of card" which included all the cards that had "demon" in the Japanese name. From then on, "demon" would always be translated as "archfiend".
** 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.
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** The introduction of a new "Planeswalker" card type, almost fifteen years after the game's inception, necessitated such a patch; Planeswalkers could be dealt damage, but since they hadn't existed previously, all existing cards that dealt direct damage could only deal it to creatures and/or players, of which planeswalkers were neither. So a special patch rule was added that allowed such cards to redirect their damage from a player to their planeswalker. If Planeswalkers had been present from the beginning, such a thing would never have been necessary.
** The "M10" major rules overhaul included changes to the combat rules, which would have made the Deathtouch ability almost entirely useless, so, in the M10 rules, Deathtouch got a special rule exempting it from the new combat rules. It has since been further patched to work properly under the new rules.
* At least by the ''Special Edition'' expansion pack, the [[Star Wars Customizable Card Game]] came with a separate glossary ''three times'' the size of the (already dense) basic rulebook, which was about 50% "errata" fixing [[Game Breaker|Game Breakers]]s. The other half...well, let's just say this was a ''very involved'' game.
* At one point, it was possible to bid to take 14 tricks in [[Bridge]], despite there only being 13 in a hand, if you felt that you would lose less points by failing such a contract than if the opponents won a bid for 13. After the first time that happened in a major competition, the rules were changed almost immediately.
* In French ''Tarot'', a chelem is a bonus for winning every trick. The deck also contains a special card called excuse, which can never win a trick. Thus if a player has the excuse in his hand, he would normally not be able to complete a chelem. To patch this, if a player has already won all but the last trick and is left with only the excuse, it will win the trick regardless, completing the chelem. However, this is not enough: there is another bonus for taking the last trick with the smallest trump (number 1), so the player with both the excuse and the trump 1 would be unable to get that bonus while making a chelem. So in this case, winning the second to last trick with the trump 1 also awards the bonus.
* World Of Warcraft TCG's rulebook should be called "exception book", really.
* One of the most blatant in cards rather than errata is "Writ of Accountability" from the ''[[Star Trek]] Customizable Card Game'', which is essentially a list of [[Game Breaker|Game Breakers]]s followed by "you lose." That is not an exaggeration; the consequence is literally an [http://www.wixiban.com/images/ccg1e/roa/1EROA042.jpg automatic loss for anyone who's pursued one of a number of strategies].
* The FAQ on the ''[[Munchkin]]'' website is full of stuff like "No, thieves can not steal during combat or backstab themselves". This may be viewed as [[Hypocritical Humor]] since the term "Munchkin" refers to someone eking out every possible advantage they can from any game mechanic.
** They're willing to go along with a sufficiently devious rules abuse, though. One famous example is playing Go Up A Level cards on other players; since some monsters will allow players to run away for free if they're below a certain base level, this could be used to force a player to fight that (often quite powerful) monster. The company's response:
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== 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.
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** 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 nonobvious manner (such as allowing it to smell the food in your pocket), and walk home, allowing it to follow you.
* 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 -- withfoundation—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 -- anythingitself—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).
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** For one, early hoops lacked backboards. Backboards were created to not only make the shots a little easier, but to prevent fans on the balcony where the hoop was attached from interfering with the game by deflecting or guiding shots into the hoop. Plus, the boards were initially made from chicken wire, which caused the ball to stop dead in its tracks and [[Game Breaker|fall into the hoop]].
** A jump ball was once called after every shot as opposed to the beginning of each quarter, which killed the pacing considerably and bored the fans.
** Whenever the ball went out of bounds, it was thrown into field and the first to gain possession got a free throw. This led to both teams madly rushing after the ball -- evenball—even into the crowd.
** The shot clock was introduced to counter the four-corners offense, where the team with the lead would position four players at the corners of the offensive half-court and one at the center, then just pass the ball around ad infinitum to maintain possession and eat up the game clock. This made for a slow, low-scoring game that bored the spectators.
** Whenever an offensive player was surrounded by defensive players on the opposing team and couldn't pass (basketball creator James Naismith stated that passing was the only legal way of advancing the ball, plus the early nature of the regulation ball made it difficult to bounce), he would simply toss the ball higher than his head, thus "passing it to himself" and avoiding getting fouled for traveling. This was seen as ridiculous-looking, however, and would soon pave the way for dribbling that would serve the same purpose.
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== Tabletop Games ==
* 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 [[Obvious Rule Patch|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.
* 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 and 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.
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* ''[[Warhammer 40000]]'': ''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> However, ''[[Dawn of War]] 2'' has an item (and ''Space Marine'' a Perk) that disagrees with that rather blatantly.</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.
* 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. (Click the link in the subtopic below if you're curious as to technical details.) 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 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' 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 ''sink themselves'', 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]] ''[[Old World of Darkness|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>.
* ''[[Pathfinder]]'' is basically a tweaked ''[[Dungeons and 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.
* More recent 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 -- becausedraw—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.
 
 
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** 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 of 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.
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* ''[[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 -- andcounterattack—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.
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