Tolerance stacking is a real term at the shop, it’s what happens when a bunch of individually acceptable small errors, a sixteenth of an inch here, a hair there, all line up in the same direction across a piece with multiple joints, and suddenly a drawer that should slide smooth is binding, and every single measurement along the way passed inspection on its own. Nobody made one big mistake. A dozen tiny, technically fine ones just happened to compound instead of cancel out.
I brought this up completely by accident during a Rising Sun rules argument a few months back, and it actually settled the whole thing, which surprised me more than anyone at the table. We’d had a mandate resolution go sideways, three separate small rulings, each one defensible on its own if you read the card in isolation, that stacked up into an outcome nobody at the table thought was right, a monster ended up dominated by someone who shouldn’t have had the card combo to pull it off at all. Everyone was arguing about which single ruling was wrong, and the actual answer was that none of them were wrong individually, they’d just compounded.
Once I said “this is tolerance stacking” out loud, mostly out of habit, the table actually calmed down, because suddenly nobody had to defend one specific bad call. We just rewound to before the first small ruling and replayed it clean, and everyone accepted that a lot faster than they’d have accepted “you’re wrong” pointed at any one person. I think what actually happened is that naming the pattern took the blame out of the room. It wasn’t Pri’s fault or my fault or anyone’s fault specifically, it was just what happens when enough small ambiguous calls line up in the same unlucky direction, same as a drawer box that binds even though every single joint passed inspection.
I’ve used this move maybe four times since, at the table and once at work explaining a defect nobody could pin on one specific step in the process, and it works almost every time, better honestly than actually being right about the individual ruling would. People can defend one decision to the death. It’s much harder to defend a whole chain of small ones once somebody’s drawn a straight line through all of them and shown where they added up. I didn’t expect a phrase from my day job to become my most reliable de-escalation tool at Friday game night, but here we are, and I’ll take it.