Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Rules Exploitation
Many players look at the rules of a game and try to find ways to make them work to their own advantage. The mindset of these people is really the same as those people who invent new techniques for doing things in the real world. Real-world inventors look at how reality works and make it work to their advantage; game-mechanic inventors do the same but with rules instead of reality. There are two real differences:

We never really know how reality works: In reality we can only make our best guess based on observation to determine how things work, and then we make predictions from there as to what will happen in a given situation, through processes of reasoning which may be flawed. But if a player looks at the game rules, he can see with absolute certainty what will work in a given situation.

The rules may not be the same as the reality: In many games, the game-mechanic system, either through incompetent writing or because it generalises and simplifies, has rules which don’t accurately reflect the reality that they are supposed to represent.

The more complicated a set of rules is, the greater the potential for exploitation that can be found among those rules. A game that sets out to have rules for everything, like GURPS, is bound to have some bad rules in among the many that it has.

A major point that has to be borne in mind by the GM is this. A simple rule may cover a situation that is in reality complex. A rule may be written such that it deals well with the most common form of a particular situation that arises, but does not deal well with less common situations that may sometimes arise. In this case, the GM must not follow the rule blindly, but must come up with some sensible change to the written rules that covers this particular instance.

EXAMPLE: Imagine a missile combat system in which, if a shot hits, the location of that shot on the target's body is determined by rolling on a hit location table. This table can give the following results: head, left arm, right arm, chest, abdomen, right leg, left leg. A character called Jim is in a gunfight. Jim is sheltering from his opponent's fire behind the cover of a large rock, which the opponent's fire can not penetrate. Only Jim's head, his left arm (holding his pistol) and part of his chest are exposed to his opponent's fire. Now, Jim is hit by his opponent. According to a strict reading of the rules, the GM should roll on the hit location table, which could give a hit in any part of the body. But common sense dictates that the bullet can only hit in one of the exposed locations: head, left arm or chest. Thus the GM must improvise a change in the rules to make this happen.

This has quite a strong bearing on rules exploitation. There are rules in the book which, if taken literally, would make impossible things happen, because the rulebook says that a rule applies to a broad range of situations, when in reality it is only written to cover one simple situation. Players can exploit rules like this unless the GM steps in and says, 'No, that does not apply in this case.' It's a lot easier to make these decisions if the rules are transparent.