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I'll be honest, I've never found the games that get put into the CaS category satisfying on a strict mechanical interaction level, precisely because they tend to be relatively solvable or completely unsolvable: do you have enough time/context to understand what the enemies do and how to make...

This is most easily resolved by just making perception/knowledge defenses. Gated information can have an obscurity modifier the GM rolls against the PC's defense, and then you can just report everything they know outright.

You're basically just working around a smaller atom of actions, right? Like, "1 action" is a useful generic label, but you can express everything in minutes just fine. Sounds like potentially a lot more design work.

This is the kind of play I find most confusing. I personally don't like gambling (narratively or otherwise), but I grasp the general appeal. I struggle to understand what kind of appeal people are finding in gameplay built entirely out of meaningless decisions. My best guess is that's it's an...

I think you're totally right in identifying that as a separate category that gets rolled into "Sport," which I've always found perhaps too vague. I'm not sure the usual split between tactics/strategy is actually that significant. What's really being discussed there is usually just resource...

I think the bolded steps are the place where a well designed skill system can come in and meaningfully change gameplay. The downsides to setting the GM as a designer action to action are generally understood and doing a good job is most of what gets called "DMing technique". Basically, it's...

I'm going after calls for Perception checks/"roll History to understand this mural" but it's certainly defensible to completely remove that element of gameplay.

Knowledge checks: should be defenses; they're ultimately the same thing as perception, and allow players to shift resources from action effectiveness to action planning during character creation. Making them proactive action rolls complicates them, mostly unnecessarily. Sometimes a time cost...

What precisely are you talking about? I've made quite clearly opinion marked points about the design impacts of various choices, and primarily suggested the discourse around resource/logistical engagement doesn't turn on having/not having skills so much as a variety of other factors. I even...

Mmm, happy to leave this topic, but a point I do want to raise is that all of my positions start from a sadly unusual intolerance for badly designed rules. RPGs get too many passes for not actually meeting their design intent (or, as I pointed out in this thread, not actually having a clear...

I am really not an OSR guy, and really don't have a lot of background in their procedures. I don't know that I've ever used an encounter roll, outside of Trespasser's incredibly specific procedure for them, which I identify as coming at this gameplay direction from exactly the opposite method to...

I simply don't see a conflict. If you're using something other than the outcome prompted by the rules to draw conclusions (i.e. "scouting is useful" in a setting with weak stealth rules where players can be quickly killed) then you're wrong about how this fictional world works. Scouting might...

If you're going to flatly reject the premise, I can't engage. My point is that if you treat setting truths as encoded in the rules, and thus, conflicts between the rules as they stand and your desired setting truths as design problems requiring new rules, you can get wherever you want to go...

I think you're conflating two different things here, @Fenris-77. I would object that whatever the rules model is true, not the other way around. If the players want do something that puts them at a disadvantage mechanically, that is obviously their prerogative, but it's not a conflict. Better...

I agree with your point broadly, but I think we would call exactly the opposite things in that situation "meta-gaming." XD Knowing the rules allows you to portray a character who lives in the setting. It is actively dangerous to leave your friends if you legitimately think people might try to...

I think I disagree. I suspect it's got much more to do with how variable the costs and impacts are between the group collective total of actions available. Skill checks (without defined actions connected to them) are either free or set at whatever fixed cost taking any action at all will have...

Is this a problem if that's obvious? Like, definitely there's some issues with forced party splitting that constrain adventure design, but if it's clear that it's a bad idea, players should just learn not to do it. I'm put in mind of kinds of rules that come up in some economic board games I...

I do think this is the source of the scope problem; is the game about gambling and spinning up reactions to the results of that gambling (either emphasizing real stakes, or creating the appearance/sensation of stakes, even when low rolling doesn't really impact forward momentum) or is it about...

One factor that's relevant here, I do feel like the been a shift towards a gameplay loop that calls for individual character actions in the non-combat/exploration phases. That felt significantly more fluid to me in the past; we often collapsed into a single party level problem solving unit and...

I don't really think so. I'm my 3e days, there was a lot of stuff like making the barbarian Large and tying ourselves to them to deal with stuff like that swimming challenge. That, and I think there's lots of ways for players to do stuff (more often spells than skill checks, but that's a...