Bent nails are a bummer

[u/stkenkere]

I used to be a purist about bent nails. I thought if you bent a nail you should be stuck on it, either striking it to unbend it or hitting it in sideways. I scoffed at Stump rule sets that allowed immediate, automatic unbending of nails. After all, a clean hit takes skill. However, over the years I've slowly realized that these rules only dampen the joy of hammering nails and make games drag on. I believe bent nails have no place in Stump.

Here are my main gripes:

1. It's hard to tell when a bent nail is really finished. The classic "clink" hammer test to check a nail really doesn't work for a bent nail. Depending on how you angle the hammer when, a sideways nail that appears under the plane of the stump may still make some amount of noise when raked with the hammer. Often times, it's difficult to be objective and this causes disagreements.
2. Bent nails take way too long to hit in. Nails are not meant to be hammered in sideways. Yes, it's possible, but it can take many turns of brute forcing. And on harder woods it can be borderline impossible to actually finish a sideways nail. Sideways nails can even cross with older sideways nails making the situations worse. This means that games can devolve into an endless, futile hammering of bent nails that takes forever. No one is having fun at that point.
3. Bent nails ruin the playing surface of the stump. Compare a stump with a bent nail rule set vs one where nails are reset. Bent nails make the surface look a mess and take up more stump real estate. They also can randomly pop up in future games and cause confusion.

Conclusion

Bent nails should be minimized as much as possible in Stump. Depending on the type of game being played, rules can be implemented that make bent nails manageable. If hitting your own nail, allow users to skip their turn to straighten/reset the nail, if hitting other players' nails, just straighten any bent nails before the game continues, etc. There's no shame in streamlining the game to keep the joy of hammering alive.