Well, I get what you're saying and I agree that, if it was me and not Torak, I wouldn't have gotten denied. I still avoid things because I'm afraid they might be against the rules.

Recent example is traps and trapper skills. I have no way to really test these things out easily on myself and I need to test them in game. But any attempt to test them in game, without going OOC, is difficult at best. Char tells you, "Looks like this trap breaks my strength by 8 stones for 5 hours." But I'm hindered because, let's face it, coordinating testing of traps over AIM would be considered shady depending on who you talk to. But I'm sorta screwed because how would I achieve that without it? And its not unreasonable to know what the effects of the skills are.

Like look at the example with blister agent. How would you possibly know it stopped spellcasting? Now I want to know if its frequent, semi-frequent, or sorta rare. But how do I test that in game without blatently breaking role?

That's why the vagueness annoys me, I feel like I need to be ultra-conservative at the detriment to my enjoyment of the game because certain anti-social elements of the playerbase don't want anyone talking to each other OOC.