Yeah, round here, people who don't play with Rules-lawyers tend to wind up playing solitaire.
GM's who take the "My way or I kill your character" route VERY quickly run out of players up here. Long winters, and flaring tempers due to it, tend to make tolerance for the kind of BS your post implies non-extant.
Isn't your use of 'BS' a little inflammatory? No offence taken, though.
I sympathise with your lack of players and the difficulty of handling their dispositions, but I tend to agree with BytePro below.
Personally, I never engage in "My way or I kill your character", that tends to get people's backs up very quickly. I just use the original CT concept that the rules are a loose
framework that the
Referee uses to build a coherent world. The rules-light nature and especially Rule #1 - "The Referee is always right" is made explicit in my games. I find that if the Referee's decisions are fair and consistent most players accept that. The few that don't usually leave of their own accord. I don't think I've ever had to ask a player to leave, but that would be the next step.
Most rules-lawyers up here can be appeased by house rules as contract. Which made CT gaming interesting... as the first thing new-to-group players asked was exactly which rules were in use, which were ignored, which were modified...
... if we'd had eBooks back then, every group would have had custom rulebooks. Heck, my Ref Did. (Ok, so his was due to being too broke to actually buy the books...) But he made certain that, if we wanted to know how things worked in his version, it was written down. And he laboriously hand copied his house-ruled alien and character gen tables for us. Which I've still got, somewhere, I think. And, of the 5 players, 3 bought lots of stuff from GDW.
Sounds like far too much work for me. I have reams of house rules, but I only post the main ones in a game. So far, I haven't needed to publish tomes - I have enough players who are happy to play in a coherent and consistent universe without needing to know what the underlying rule structure is. When they need to make a roll, I tell them what the required roll is, and if it sounds reasonable (which it should be if I've done my job right) they accept it. I play very much seat of the pants - but fairly.
Putting everything down in writing sounds great - but easily becomes trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
The best defense against rules lawyering is having fewer rules - and making the game so fun without them, that the type is too distracted to exhibit their undesireable habits. My players never had the rulebooks (or were like minded Referees).
Exactly. You can end up writing rules and then rules about the rules, and then explanations of why the rules were made that way, and then discussions about the relative merits of alternative rules, and then...
And each point is an opportunity for dissent, argument and distraction.
I use the rules to create a universe. The players and their characters interact with the universe, not with the rules.
