D&D General Railroads, Illusionism, and Participationism

[Ovinomancer]

It not a valid assumption that inability to learn game mechanics and continually exhibiting poor play a result of disruptive or antisocial behavior. That is a simplistic thesis.

I agree. I didn't advance it. What I said was that your excuse is also used by many to excuse antisocial or disruptive behavior. I made a separate point about how it doesn't apply to the consideration of if people just don't learn the game or exhibit poor play -- as in "just roleplaying" doesn't cover what I was talking about.

Reality is more nuanced and each situation is unique. I encountered and had in my campaigns many players who are not disruptive or antisocial yet never personally understood tactics or how the game mechanics work. Who when left to their own devices make very poor choices.




Read I wrote again. While I have my preferences, I didn't state what they were in my reply.

Oh, then that's worse, you're making another normative statement about how thing should be. I mean, what was the point of talking about a way you think roleplaying should look if it wasn't your way? It didn't have anything to do with my points -- roleplaying is orthogonal to the point I was making.

I guess I wasn't clear, the point of this is to communicate clearly to other around the table as to what you are doing in context. The examples are specific to roleplaying a character with a personality different than your own. And based in part on what I have observed others doing that was successful in keeping the session fun.

No, they are not specific. Nor are the necessary for the task. I can roleplay a character that is not my personality without ever once engaging with the setting material -- I could, instead, create setting material. I don't have to speak in 1st person (I mean, this should be obvious). And, I don't have to ignore the system -- some systems provide excellent tools to roleplay people you are not. I've just started a game of The Between and it has some nice mechanics for doing just this.

This is an observation not a preference. Your observations may differ. But dismissing my points as "preferences" is a poor way to support your thesis.

It can only be an observation if you're observing something that is true. It's like saying that "birds are blue" is an observation. It's not, it's a limited statement. An observation on this matter would be "I have seen these things work to do this other thing." This is lacking from your statements, which are instead phrased in a normative manner. And, on the point of how one roleplays or runs a good game, these are definitely preferences. You "observation" of a good game my not meet my appreciation of a good game.

I disagree, the point of RPGs is to pretend to be a character doing something interesting within a setting. Otherwise it is a game that is little different than Shadowrun Crossfire, Gloomhaven, or Tomb. If you don't have a setting then the players don't have anything on which to make decisions as their character. However in practice all games that market themselves as RPGs have a setting however loosely defined. Even Generics such as GURPS, Hero System, and Savage Worlds make assumptions about the settings that will be used with the game. Giving each of these a particular bias that they are known for.

Nope. Go read some other RPGs. There are many possible points. As for setting, not all games have a setting, some only have a very few points. Dungeon World, for instance, has only genre, no setting. Apocalypse World has genre, a few setting details (the physic maelstrom, mainly) and nothing else. Many FATE games have no setting -- it's built in play alongside the characters by the players, along with whatever genre play is going to be.

What you're confusing here is the idea that all RPGs feature a defined setting and that play is about exploring that setting. This is also not true. In Blades in the Dark, exploring the setting is not an objective of play. There's only a thumbnail setting to start with. Rather, the setting becomes more defined as you play and you need to create parts of it to play. Here, like in AW and DW, genre is doing the heavy lifting.

What I weigh and talk about is how much work it takes to do X in the context of gaming.The next I weigh are consequences of doing X. I leave it up to the reader to decide whether putting that amount of work and those consequences are thing they would enjoy. Whether what I talk about save them time and work for their hobby. For example my comments on cues to to let other know you are roleplaying a character and when you are not. This goes to what one has to do to keep things enjoyable for a small group working together on a hobby.

So yes I am making normative statements based on specific criteria, for specific reasons, based on things I have done or observed. I replied your post to point out that there other reasons why a players appears to have poor skills or doesn't know the mechanics. If you are not convinced then so be it. If you find my observations at odds with your own that is fine it is a big hobby and a big world.

It is a common misconception that first person roleplaying requires one to be a thespian. It still works out the same in my campaigns if you interact as yourself with the abilities of the character.

The reason for this that without this the average player is more apt to treat their character as a piece on a game board and make decisions that don't make sense for the setting if you were there witnessing the action. As a result the experience feel more like playing a board game than tabletop roleplaying.

This is insulting to players and unfounded. There's zero evidence to the claim that unless people follow your advice they end up in pawn stance.

To be clear this is an average. Observed across many campaigns and many players over the decades. I can't go to a convention, game store, or play with a group and say for a specific group or individual "Yup if you don't first person roleplay, the session will feel like a boardgame.". It doesn't work like that. I do the things I do to increase the odds of people having fun while pretending to be characters doing interesting things in a setting. But odds are not equate to certainty. If things don't work out then it time to have a out of game discussion as a group and hash things out one way or the other. I had talks where it was decided that the campaign I ran wasn't for them. I had talks where it was decided that most of the campaign was fun but it would be better with another set of rules. And so on.

If this is happening in your games, you should step back and consider why you have to enact additional requirements for play to avoid it.

I am quite comfortable in asserting that if the goal is for the players to feel like if they actually visited the setting and had interesting adventures as bunch of characters. Then first person roleplaying whether one choose to be a thespian on down the scale to where one is just playing a version of themselves with different abilities is the most likely way to make it happen.

This is entirely incorrect. No doubt that using 1st person can result in this, but it's not required nor is it guaranteed to have this result.

What makes a roleplaying game is focus not mechanics. Focus on fighting out battles as giant robots you have Battletech, focus on playing characters in the time of the Succession Wars who happen to pilot giant robots into combat, you have mechwarrior. The authors of FATE, Blades in the Dark, Apocalypse World focus on the different things beyond pretending to be a character having adventures in a setting.

Um, no to the first, and no to the claim that those games focus on different things. Blades in the Dark is all about being a criminal. It's entirely structure is about making this front and center and bringing all kinds of pressure and interest onto this. There's no something else here. Apocalypse World is about being a survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, and dealing with the pressures of that world and how it affects relationships with other survivors. It's lasered in on making that visceral and evocative. FATE, well, FATE is a genre emulator, but it has some very nice ways to really evoke character in ways other games just lack -- you cannot get a FATE compel in D&D, for instance, and that's all about character.

These claims you are making make you look ignorant of anything outside of a very narrow approach to RPGs.

Railroading, illusionism, and participation as outlined in the OP are only relevant when the focus on pretending to be characters having adventures in a setting. FATE, Blade in Dark, and Apocalypse World have their own considerations when used for a campaign as the authors intended.

No, railroading, illusionism, and participation are more tied to strong GM authority/weak player authority structures where the GM has the authority to enforce the outcomes the GM wants onto play. That this is typically paired with strong backstory games is not nothing, but it's not that settings exist. PbtA games and FitD games put constraints on the GM and have systems that make it blindingly obvious if Force is being applied (and that make participationism not a thing that can happen and have a game at all). It's the actual system here that doing work to not have play that is susceptible to these things. And this doesn't make them better -- it makes them different. I'm on record saying that Force (and it's handmaiden Illusionism) are not bad things in and of themselves. They are a tool that can be used and misused. And something people can like, not care about, or hate in various degrees of application.

In most of them railroading is all but impossible because the campaign is built around collaboration at every step. The same with skilled play in these games. The skills prized are creative cooperation and storytelling not whether one learns the the mechanics and tactics well enough to use the various combos of abilities to win encounters.

Oh, no, it's not. It's entirely possible that you can railroad a game that's collaborative, because railroading is about authority structures and not about people that provide input. Skilled play is 100% available, because skilled play is nothing more than leveraging the fiction and system to achieve your goals -- player, PC, or game.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

Mind you, it's all arbitrary, all the way down: I'm the one writing the events and choosing the probabilities, so it's not like I'm unaware of what I'm doing. But a big part of my gaming style is that sense of immersion within a living (albeit fictitious) world. Having a 1-in-6 chance of the PCs encountering Artful Dodger being chased by his latest mark and offering them the opportunity to choose how to react to that improves the game, from my perspective.

I’m sceptical. Are you honestly saying the events of your world happen independently of the PCs and you track what happens in each place irresepctice of whether the PCs are involved - which seems extremely labour intensive for little game effect. Or do you forgo event based encounter design completely?

Late to the party with the OP premise, but...

Since there are negative terms for all the other playstyles, let's call the DM style where they think they are building a completely independent world down to which way the wind blows a grain of sand -- Delusionism! Kudos for Thom for acknowledging this...

Delusionism: A style of DMing where a DM thinks their random tables, calendars, faction agendas, and other devices are creating a completely objective and independent world, when instead it's just another way to express their creative preferences.

Personally, I like a little Delusionism where things are happening regardless of what the PCs do and NPCs have goals they are pursuing, but I have no problem throwing in the quantum Illusionism for things that haven't already been put on the board and don't contradict the Delusionism.

 

[Helpful NPC Thom]

Huh. We have very different ideas of what player skill is in 5e. To me, it's represented by pacing your spell slots and abilities. It's about manipulating the fiction to get rests when needed. It's about engaging with the play to achieve your character goals. I find it to be rather cynical to the system to categorize player skill as bonus stacking and playing the GM. To me, if those are on the table as primary modes of engagement, we're already in the weeds -- something has already gone wrong.

In other words, some of my 5e games focus very heavily on skilled play, but they also focus heavily on map and key style resolution and marshalling resources and engaging in player-side pacing. In these, most of my play as GM is very player-facing, with only notes kept secret until engaged.

"Player skill" is typically invoked within the OSR-sphere to refer to what I am describing. Skilled play in 5e is all of those things (plus character building), but "player skill" traditionally refers to things like probing ahead with a 10-foot pole, meticulous descriptions of safely opening potentially-trapped chests, and averting the gaze in the presence of a medusa.

 

[Ovinomancer]

"Player skill" is typically invoked within the OSR-sphere to refer to what I am describing. Skilled play in 5e is all of those things (plus character building), but "player skill" traditionally refers to things like probing ahead with a 10-foot pole, meticulous descriptions of safely opening potentially-trapped chests, and averting the gaze in the presence of a medusa.

Is this because that's what it means, or is this because this is the primary avenue for leveraging fiction and system to achieve play goals in OSR games? I mean, we need to look at the constraints for a case before we say that a case is definitional. Skilled play is something that absolutely can happen in a Blades in the Dark game and it looks nothing at all like that. It's more akin to skilled play in poker, which is more leveraging bets to be well timed for big payoffs and understanding the underlying risk/reward ratios of the game as they rapidly shift during play.

 

[pemerton]

I think a fair bit of D&D play is "illusionistic" in the following sense: it presents itself as map-and-key resolution "skilled play" dungeoncrawling, but in the actual moment of play the notes are treated as suggestions rather than binding on scene-framing, and a fair bit of consequence narration is likewise just made up.

Notionally, in this sort of play decisions about where the PCs go and what they look at should "matter" because they are the triggers for activating the situations latent in the prepared backstory. But in practice the GM's decision-making often overrides or at least heavily supplements them. That looks like Force.

Exactly, which is why people talking about "player skill" overmuch irks me without fail. Player skill is manipulating the GM into not calling for a die roll or reducing the DC until the dice are superfluous. Player skill is an undeniable aspect of D&D (it's a tactical miniatures game, no matter how you slice it), and the game has a very long tradition of mingling roleplaying with player knowledge and challenge-oriented gameplay, but it is grating when GMs act like "duh, you shouldn't have done that" when player characters make a "mistake" because there was a miscommunication or lack of proper information conveyed.

When I started reading your post I wasn't sure where you were heading. I thought I'd worked that out by the time I got to the end; but then I read this reply of yours to @Ovinomancer:

"Player skill" is typically invoked within the OSR-sphere to refer to what I am describing. Skilled play in 5e is all of those things (plus character building), but "player skill" traditionally refers to things like probing ahead with a 10-foot pole, meticulous descriptions of safely opening potentially-trapped chests, and averting the gaze in the presence of a medusa.

So any elaboration would be welcome!

In the meantime, here are some thoughts prompted by your posts:

First, I also find it grating when I hear players criticised for lacking skill in their play when what that really means is that they didn't identify the solution or pathway that the GM anticipated. Most often I see this said in the context of fatal combat encounters where the players were "supposed" to have their PCs flee or negotiate or do some other non-fighting thing.

Personally, I associate that sort of criticism with railroading: the "skill" the players were supposed to exhibit was declaring the action pre-conceived by the GM as a solution.

Second, I think that there is such a thing as "skilled play" in the OSR-ish sense that can be distinguished from both (i) guessing what the GM thinks is the right thing to do, and (ii) manipulating the GM. My canonical example for this is taking doors off their hinges and using them to surf down the frictionless corridor in White Plume Mountain, thereby avoiding the pits with the super-tetanus spikes. Because this sort of play does involve "manipulating" the shared fiction, it does require generating consensus at the table, which will include the GM. But I don't think explaining to the GM why an idea can work, and/or persuading the GM, is the same as manipulating or playing the GM. And unless the GM is extremely narrow-minded or unimaginative, it should be possible to come up with ideas about what is possible in the fiction that aren't ones the GM had already thought of.

Some examples from my own play (not OSR, but I think illustrating the idea): in a Classic Traveller session, the PCs wanted to power a vessel for a jump, but because of <reasons> didn't want to charge it's drive in the conventional fashion. So the players (as their PCs) came up with the idea of charging that vessel's jump drive by running heavy-duty cables to it from another vessel's jump drive which they were happy and able to charge in the conventional fashion. I can't remember now what checks were made - maybe a roll to check the availability of the cables, and/or Engineering or Electronics or Mechanical checks to jury-rig the cables (and it certainly helped that one of the PCs had Jack-of-all-Trades-4). But in any event, it happened pretty smoothly.

In a recent Agon session, a NPC hurled herself into the storm-tossed ocean after another PC - her son - had been hurled into the ocean from a cliff, as a sacrifice to Zeus. One of the PCs dove into the water from the cliff to try and rescue the mother - a contest of Blood and Valour. The other PC also wanted to try a rescue, but the player wanted to frame it as a check of Craft and Reason (that being a stronger domain for him). It was already established that the town on the island in question was an industrious one, with handicraft and manufacture and market stalls and the like. So the player narrated that he (as his PC) ran through the town, grabbing a length of rope and roping himself to the pier before swimming out into the ocean to attempt the rescue. (As it happened, both PCs failed the contest and the NPC drowned: the valorous hero was washed up onto the beach bedraggled; the crafty hero had roped himself with too short a length of rope!)

Neither of these examples is OSR, and I don't know if they count as fully "skilled", but I think they both illustrate the players engaging the established fiction, and their PCs' fictional positioning, to make moves within the fictional "space". They fit a bit differently into the mechanics (Agon uses closed-scene resolution, like a 4e D&D skill challenge; Traveller typically doesn't). I don't think either involves manipulating the GM, nor any illusionistic dimension to play.

Another pair of examples, from a session of high-level 4e play, illustrates (inter alia) your idea of manipulating DCs:

The session started with the dominated Pazuzu taking his turn. The controlling PC - the invoker/wizard - commanded him to fly into the Abyssal rift. The roll needed [by the rift] to hit was 13, but +2 from combat advantage (vs a dominated target) made it 11. The player rolled, and got a 10. 1 short. Then another player argued that, because the command was for Pazuzu to "charge into the Rift" it should get a +1 to hit. Being a soft-hearted GM, and feeling that the Pazuzu plot-line had probably run its course, I acceded. So Pazuzu flew into the rift and got grappled.

This then triggered a secondary attack to suck him into the heart of the Abyss. The roll for that was 13 (with something like a 9 or 10 required) and so in Pazuzu went!

It then came to the drow sorcerer's turn. In an email a few days ago the player had told me that he had a plan to seal off the Abyssal rift created by the tearing of the Demonwebs and the killing of Lolth, that relied upon the second law of thermodynamics. Now was the time for him to explain it. It took quite a while at the table (20 minutes? Maybe more? There was a lot of interjection and discussion). Here is the summary version:

* The second law of thermodynamics tells us that time and entropy are correlated: increases in entropy from moment to moment are indicative of the arrow of time;

* Hence, when entropy reaches its maximum state - and so cannot increase - time has stopped;

* Hence, if an effect that would normally last until the end of the encounter could be turned into an effect of ultimate chaos (entropy), time would stop in respect of the effect and it would not come to an end.​

So far, so good, but how is this helping to seal off the Abyss?

* Earlier in the encounter the sorcerer had created a Cloak of Winter Storm which, using an elemental swapping item, was actually a zone of thunder (larger than normal because created while a Huge primordial) that caused shift 1 sq which, through various feat combos, was actually teleportation;

* If this could be extended in size, and converted into a zone of ultimate entropy instead of just a zone of thunder, then it would not come to an end (for the reasons given above);

* Furthermore, anyone who approached it would slow down (as time came to a stop with the increase in entropy) and, if they hit it, be teleported back 1 square;

* As to how a zone of elemental thunder might be converted into a zone of ultimate entropy, that's what a chaos sorcerer is for - especially as, at that time, the Slaad lord of Entropy, Ygorl, was trapped inside the Crystal of Ebon Flame and so control over entropy was arguably unclaimed by any other entity and hence available to be claimed by the sorcerer PC.​

But couldn't someone who wanted to pass through this entropic barrier just teleport from one side to the other?

* On his turn, the sorcerer therefore spent his move action to stand from prone (I can't now remember why he had started the session prone), and used his minor action to activate his Cloud of Darkness - through which only he can see;

* He then readied his standard action to help the invoker/wizard perform the mighty feat of Arcana that would merge the darkness and the zone into a visually and physically impenetrable entropic field, through which nothing could pass unless able to teleport without needing line of sight.​

Unfortunately, the invoker/wizard wasn't ready to help with this plan, and had doubts about its chaotic aspect. On his turn, he instead rescued the paladin and fighter PCs who had become trapped in the Abyssal rift (by casting Tide of the First Storm to wash them back up onto the top of the PCs' Thundercloud Tower).

<snip>

The drow's turn then came around. He used his move action to fly the Tower up and out of the two zones (darkness and thunder). He then used a minor action to cast Stretch Spell - as written, a range-boosting effect but it seemed fitting, in spirit, to try to extend and compress zones to create a barrier of ultimate, impenetrable entropy. And then he got ready to make his Arcana check as a standard action.

Now INT is pretty much a dump stat for everyone in the party but the invoker/wizard. In the case of the sorcerer it is 12 - so with training and level, he has an Arcana bonus of +20. So when I stated that the DC was 41, it looked a bit challenging. (It was always going to be a Hard check - if any confirmation was needed, the Rules Compendium suggests that manipulating the energies of a magical phenomenon is a Hard Arcana improvisation.)

So he started looking around for bonuses. As a chaos mage, he asked whether he could burn healing surges for a bonus on the roll - giving of his very essence. I thought that sounded reasonable, and so allowed 4 surges for +8. Unfortunately he had only 2 surges left, so the other half of the bonus had to come from taking damage equal to his bloodied value - which was OK, as he was currently unbloodied.

He scraped another +2 from somewhere (I can't remember now), brining the roll needed down to 11. The dice was rolled - and came up 18! So he succeeded in converting his zones of darkness and thunder into a compressed, extended, physically and visually impenetrable entropic barrier, in which time doesn't pass (and hence the effects don't end), sealing off the Abyss at its 66th layer.

The unfortunate side effect, as was clarified between me (as GM) and the player before the action was declared, was that - as the effects never end - so he can never recharge his Cloak of Darkness encounter power or his Cloak of the Winter Storm daily.

A modest price to pay for cementing the defeat of Lolth and sealing off the bottom of the Abyss from the rest of creation.

The first example here - successfully pleading for an extra +1 for the rift's attack roll - does have an element of playing the GM. The only skill is remembering that a charge attack gets +1 to hit.

The second example - sealing the Abyss - is (in my view) classic 4e D&D: the resolution framework is robustly mechanical, with a DC-by-level table and relatively transparent principles (derived from the DMG 2) for converting player-resources into mechanical bonuses. The player skill - "skill"? - is in coming up with the ideas that establish the fictional positioning that make the attempt possible in the first place. It's really like a more elaborate version of the Agon hero's plan with the rope. And like that, I don't think of it as "playing" or "manipulating" the GM. I see it as engaging with the fiction in a pretty fun and vibrant fashion.

This post is so long already that a final example probably won't hurt. It's also from 4e play:

The bear encounter

The scenario I ran yesterday (from the Eden Odyssesy d20 book called "Wonders Out of Time") called for a Large bear.

I wasn't sure exactly how many 10th level PCs would be facing it at once, and so in prepping I placed a single elite level 13 dire bear, rather than a lower level solo bear (a level 7 or 8 solo would be a rough XP equivalent), because I thought the slightly swingier high level elite would produce a more interesting range of outcomes across a wider range of possible PC party size. This is a case, then, of metagame considerations ("How will this play out at the table?") influencing my decisions about how to go about representing the gameworld in mechanical terms.

As it turns out, the whole party encountered the bear. I didn't want to do any re-statting on the fly, so stuck with the level 13 elite. They players decided that their PCs would try to tame and befriend the bear instead of fighting it. To keep the XP and pacing about the same as I'd planned, I decided to run this as a level 13 complexity 2 skill challenge (6 successes before 3 failures). That was another metagame-driven decision.

The ranger and the wizard made Nature checks. The ranger was adjacent, so reached out to the bear. The wizard, however, was at range, giving rise to the question - how does he actually calm the bear? Answer: he used Ghost Sound to make soothing noises and Mage Hand to stroke it. The sorcerer wanted (i) to back away so as not to get slammed in case the bear remained angry, and (ii) to try and intimidate the bear into submission. I (as GM) asked the player how, exactly, the PC was being intimidating while backing up? His answer: he is expending Spark Form (a lightning-based encounter power) to create a show of magical power arcing between his staff and his dagger, that would scare the bear. A successful Intimidate roll confirmed that the light show did indeed tend to subdue rather than enrage the bear.

Here we see that, while mechanics are important, engagment with the fiction is permeating the whole episode, and shaping the way that mechanical resources are deployed and that deployment adjudicated. In particular, it was in virtue of the fictional situation that the wizard player needed to find a mechanical means of using Nature at range, and that the sorcerer player needed to find a mechanical means of using Intimidate while backing away.

In the thread that followed my posting of this example, much of the discussion focused on (i) objections to the fictional positioning (eg how can one person calm a bear by reaching out to it while another person is subduing it by a demonstration of sparks and light?) and (ii) why should the mechanical difficulty of the encounter remain the same when the players decide to pacify rather than fight the bear?

My response to (ii) is, roughly, that deciding to pacify the bear is a story/fiction-based decision and not, in itself, an opportunity to manipulate the GM into making the encounter mechanically less challenging (and there's no other basis, in the 4e context, for making it less challenging). My response to (i) is, roughly, that what matters is table consensus on the shared fiction and fictional positioning, and the post hoc views of non-participants don't matter. And that there is good reason to be liberal rather than fussy in reaching consensus. I posted a similar thought about the door-surfing in WPM recently: of course in principle we can think of ways that might go wrong (eg a door's momentum and/or the weight distribution of the "surfers" is such that instead of gliding over a pit it topples front-first into one); but if play is not going to grind to a halt, then once the players have thought up the basic solution and explained how they're going to do it, it is probably better for the GM to err on the side of saying "yes". (I think the same principle was also at work in the heavy-duty-cable example from Traveller.)

We have very different ideas of what player skill is in 5e. To me, it's represented by pacing your spell slots and abilities. It's about manipulating the fiction to get rests when needed. It's about engaging with the play to achieve your character goals. I find it to be rather cynical to the system to categorize player skill as bonus stacking and playing the GM. To me, if those are on the table as primary modes of engagement, we're already in the weeds -- something has already gone wrong.

I think managing resources and pacing can become closer to a boardgame-like skill than an engage-the-fiction skill. (There are exceptions, and borderline cases - and gunning for rests is especially likely to get into this territory.)

I don't have a good sense of how important, in typical 5e play, engaging the fiction in the sort of way I've been describing in this post is. Reports of 3E play I would read online often gave the impression that the fiction (in the way that I'm thinking about it) tended not to matter much. One thing I appreciate about the OSR is trying to bring the fiction to the fore, even if the particular way they tend to do this isn't quite what I'm looking for in my RPGing.

 

[pemerton]

Railroading, illusionism, and participation as outlined in the OP are only relevant when the focus on pretending to be characters having adventures in a setting. FATE, Blade in Dark, and Apocalypse World have their own considerations when used for a campaign as the authors intended.

In most of them railroading is all but impossible because the campaign is built around collaboration at every step. The same with skilled play in these games. The skills prized are creative cooperation and storytelling not whether one learns the the mechanics and tactics well enough to use the various combos of abilities to win encounters.

Apocalypse World is not about "cooperative storytelling" any more than Classic Traveller, RuneQuest or Rolemaster is.

It's a RPG. The players pretend to be characters in a setting that is presented to them by the GM. (Whether the characters have adventures is more up for grabs.)

The reason railroading and illusionism aren't really apposite is because - at certain key moments (ie whenever a player's action declaration triggers a move) - AW doesn't use GM-prepared backstory as a constraint on resolution.

 

[Lyxen]

You know what, I really dislike the use of the "skilled play" thingie. Yes, it's not badwrongfun to play the game competitively whatever the objectives, technical or not, but a clear design intent of 5e is to get rid of the competitive thoughts of 3e and 4e, and come back to collaborative fun as an objective, it's obvious from in particular the introduction to the PH and the general "easy mode" of 5e combined with the fuzziness of the rules and the central role of the DM as a storyteller in addition to the referee (which was its main role in particular in 4e).

So for me, a good player is a player who does his utmost to contribute to the general fun at the table. So I dislike the "skilled play" words as it seem to say that people who don't do it are somehow inferior, and from then it's a straight road into badwrongfun if you are not skilled enough to play at "elitist (jerks) tables."

So give me a good player rather than a "skilled" one every single time I play, I'm sure I'll be much more happy with the game.

 

[Ovinomancer]

You know what, I really dislike the use of the "skilled play" thingie. Yes, it's not badwrongfun to play the game competitively whatever the objectives, technical or not, but a clear design intent of 5e is to get rid of the competitive thoughts of 3e and 4e, and come back to collaborative fun as an objective, it's obvious from in particular the introduction to the PH and the general "easy mode" of 5e combined with the fuzziness of the rules and the central role of the DM as a storyteller in addition to the referee (which was its main role in particular in 4e).

So for me, a good player is a player who does his utmost to contribute to the general fun at the table. So I dislike the "skilled play" words as it seem to say that people who don't do it are somehow inferior, and from then it's a straight road into badwrongfun if you are not skilled enough to play at "elitist (jerks) tables."

So give me a good player rather than a "skilled" one every single time I play, I'm sure I'll be much more happy with the game.

Where on Earth did you get that "skilled play" means competitive play in RPGs?

Let me give an example of skilled play from my Blades game last night. We were engaged in trying to open a spirit well that had been sealed. The well contained power linked to an entity of perfection of form, and so would be useful as the area it was located in was being overrun by a cthulian elder god of corruption. We had, via lots of play, opened the well, but suffered a desperate consequence, which means something really bad. Given the threat was 2 tiers over us, really bad turned into very, very, really bad. The ceiling began to collapse, inflicting harm from the initial shower of debris to each of us and effectively requiring us to run. I resisted the collapse though, which is a hard call because resists require you to be able to explain how you do that in the fiction, and how would a normal person resist a collapsing ceiling? (The GM split the consequence into the harm move and also a serious "run or die" soft move with the collapsing ceiling, putting instant death on the table as what would normally be an irresistible consequence.) I, instead, leveraged the very nature of the opened well as a link to perfection of form, and pointed out that a collapsing ceiling is not at all perfect in form. I made my move to channel the raw power of the newly opened well to stabilize the ceiling. In the process, I lost my final stress box and trauma'd out of the scene.

Why was this skilled play? I leveraged the fiction to do something that prevented massive damage to the structure we were in, which reduced the amount of heat we would get for the score (heat is bad, mmkay?). I also did this knowing it extremely likely I would trauma out because two of the three of us were heavily loaded and would have not been able to escape without additional harm at a minimum, and the likelihood of stressing out anyway was remarkably high. My play saved multiple harm from my crew (and me) and I ended up with the same negative state (stressing out) that would be likely otherwise. It also greatly simplified the remaining challenge of, well, getting out of where we were. Just by this leveraging of the fiction, and utilizing my character's abilities to plausibly channel it, this play did quite a lot of work. It was very much the kind of skilled play that Blades presents opportunities for.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

"Player skill" is typically invoked within the OSR-sphere to refer to what I am describing. Skilled play in 5e is all of those things (plus character building), but "player skill" traditionally refers to things like probing ahead with a 10-foot pole, meticulous descriptions of safely opening potentially-trapped chests, and averting the gaze in the presence of a medusa.

This is the definition I'm most familar with.

"Skilled play" can decribe any interaction with the game where players gain an advantage through their 'skill' at anything related to the game -- character building, using game resources efficiently, using knowledge of tactics, using knowledge of the game world fiction, etc.

"player skill" or "testing player skill" I hear most often refering to when player skill/tactics is the primary resolution mechanic. For example, some adventures had puzzles that the player had to figure out (word puzzles, cryptography, etc.) and there was no character resource to circumvent this. The player was expected to decribe how they searched for traps or searched a room -- purely player skill -- no perception to roll or find traps skill.

In general I'm not a fan of heavy "testing player skill". The bar is lower IMO for skilled play, which I think most people can develop to some degree and enhances the game.

 

[pemerton]

@Ovinomancer

Your example of BitD play reminds me of 4e skill challenge play - leveraging the fiction (both situation, and character) to open up action declarations that otherwise wouldn't be possible.