Ah, the Rule of Cool.
It’s been written about a number of times in the world of DMing blogs, and is one of my principles as a DM. It guides my play style, and (as you will see below) it guides my house rules.
The guidelines behind perpetrating this rule, however, are not laid out above, though people come out with new ways to do so every day.
Rather, the method for creating an atmosphere of cool was defined years ago, completely outside of the gaming arena. Three simple rules were laid out by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker magazine. Since then, they have been applied heavily in the marketing world, to explain why products succeed and fail. But they are useful in gaming as well.
The three rules are as follows, and are effective guidelines to use while attempting to “awesome up” your games.
- 1) The act of discovering cool causes cool to move on.