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Really? In 2025 we’re still saying this? Wow…

No it wouldn’t have, because it wasn’t a miniature combat game. It leaned more into tactical minis combat than prior editions, but it was still fundamentally a roleplaying game with a tactical minis minigame attached to it.

These kinds of things have been available from 3rd party sources for a LONG time.

Yeah, that’s the “this character is so dominant that the entire metagame is just them” definition that I thought people meant by saying “this character is the meta.” And, I’m sure at some of them probably were using it that way. Or sometimes people will describe certain weapons, builds...

Well chess, fighting games, and TF2 are all complete games in and of themselves. RPGs, despite “game” being in the name, aren’t really games. They’re game-creation engines. Adventures are games.

Huh. Kind of surprising, as there have been many hundred-plus page arguments about it here on ENWorld. It’s how I summarize my preferred method of action declaration and resolution - the player describes what they want to accomplish (goal) and what their character does to try to accomplish it...

Even within spaces like TCGs and Warhammer where this (correct) definition of “the metagame” is relevant, a lot of people don’t even know that definition. An alarming portion of people in competitive gaming communities think “META” is an acronym meaning Most Effective Tactic Available, and just...

Depends on your definition of metagaming. Is taking information you’ve learned from past adventures into account metagaming? Is considering game-mechanical functions like DCs when deciding whether or not to pursue a course of action metagaming? Because so-called “skilled play” does certainly...

In my experience, people often interpret other people advocating for their own play preferences as “other ways of playing suck.” Which tends to make people who like playing in other ways get defensive, and attack the way being advocating for, leading the conversation to escalate. In general...

Smaller portion of video gamers so far than I would have expected

“Skilled play” is a terrible name for it, for many reasons, this among them. Though, I don’t think the intent is to imply that other ways of playing don’t involve skill. The emphasis is meant to be on player, and the term is kind of a response to the adventure-writing advice from the 3e area to...

“Skilled play” is a poor term for the play patterns it’s trying to describe, yes, and for a lot more reasons than this. But, there is a lot to be appreciated about play patterns that emphasize in-the-moment player decision-making over random chance and build-planning.

I normally don’t like to poke fun at typos, but I love “the last likits” because it sounds like the title of a particularly strange 80s movie or something. Anyway, to your actual point, I think it’s easy to convince one’s self that having a list of options actually helps one come up with more...

This strikes me as a pretty uncharitable interpretation. Skilled play is not about trying to “avoid playing a game”; indeed, it is tied so strongly to dungeoneering precisely because dungeoneering is where D&D is at its most gamified. Rather, it is about using tactics (that is to say...

I mean, combat tactics is a player skill. So, I would say while player skill is not really relevant to deciding how good they hit with a sword, it is relevant to their chances of winning in a combat challenge. Again, players decide, characters act. The player chooses where to move, who to...

Yeah, I mean, I would question what the player is trying to achieve by kicking the guard in the nuts. There are certain goals to which I can imagine that approach having a chance of success and chance of failure. For example, maybe they want to kill the guard, but want plausible deniability that...

My comment was specific to social challenges. I was pointing out (admittedly in a glib way) that talking about swimming in lava was a non-sequitur.

Well, it can at least increase the players’ confidence in knowing what their character is capable of. And, certainly it’s difficult to express agency if you lack any confidence in such knowledge. On the other hand, strictly defined parameters of what your character can do tends to create...

The DM decides if a roll is needed/possible, and if so, what the parameters of the roll (difficulty, consequences for failure, etc) are. But, once a roll is determined to be called for, and the parameters laid out, the DM abides by the results of the roll according to those parameters. If the...

Well, this is where success and failure without a roll comes into play. DM discretion is baked into the mechanics, so the mechanics shouldn’t be spitting out nonsense results. If nonsense is a potential result of a roll, don’t call for a roll. I don’t imagine swimming in lava is often involved...