The following rules of "Gamers' Logic" are culled from responses to this topic on a mailing list.  The numbering is mine, however.

Gamers' Logic is the unspoken assumptions that players make about roleplaying games, usually for no specific reason, and often in contravention of every effort of the GM to disabuse them of these notions.  Enjoy.

From Nocker23@aol.com

1- Most any story investigation can be solved in a linear fashion (point A

will give clues to point B to point C, ect.)

2- The story is assumed over or near over at the expected gunfight, or it

will at least lead to a breakthrough in the game

3 - The bad guy in town has always done it - or was involved with the story

4 - The marshal will never lead the group down a dead end for long

From Steven Sweeney:

5 - Any problem can be solved with sufficient amounts of ammo and blood.

From Paul Beakley:

6 - Simply asking for a roll indicates there's something about to happen,

even if they "fail" the roll.

7 - No matter how badly it'll screw up the storyline, it's totally cool to

let major characters die as a result of stupid decisions because you can

ALWAYS introduce another major character at any point in the story (and

this works so well in other literary media!)

8 - Clues are always clues. There are no Red Herrings.

9 - The narrator/Marshal/GM has planned for every contingency, so

everything that comes out of his/her mouth must be relevent to the Deep

Secret Plot somehow.

10 - If the GM doesn't use the known, published stats on a monster or NPC,

he's cheating. (!)

11 - If the GM makes a hidden roll, he's cheating. (!)

12 - If the GM doesn't make a roll but something happens anyway, it's

railroading.

13 - The PCs are always better than the NPCs. If they aren't, it's

railroading.

14 - If events are set in motion outside the PCs' immediate sphere of

influence, it's railroading.

15 - The GM wouldn't actually *kill* a character (another one I break all

the time).

16 - The player characters will always "win". Always. That is, of course,

because there is an unstated adversarial relationship between the players

and the GM.

17 - You can always "win" an RPG, despite various published statements

that you can't really "win" an RPG. The best way to do this is to build

characters designed to "beat" the GM, and the only way you can "beat" the

GM is by deconstructing previous adventures (see #8), better still, let

your first shmuck die like a canary in a gas-filled mine and use that

knowledge to build a GM-proofed character the second time around, which

naturally the GM would let you introduce into the game (#7).