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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4130287" data-attributes="member: 42582">That depends entirely on the real-world point of playing the game. If the game is semi-adversarial (players trying to overcome the challenges the GM puts in front of them) then what you say is true. But if the point is something different, then what may matter is not so much the overcoming of the challenge, but what story is told (jointly by players and GM) to explain the way in which the challenge is overcome.If the latter were true, then the puzzle could be highly relevant even though the method of solution (ie the story told) is irrelevant to the narrow question of whether or not it gets solves.That's a big call to make about all of roleplaying. What is the puzzle in a classic game of RQ, for example? The point of that game is to explore the world of Glorantha, not to solve a puzzle.I'll happily concede, of course, that in typical D&D play the PCs spend most of their on-screen time overcoming challenges - and this could be loosely paraphrased as "solving puzzles". But it does not at all follow that the point of play in the real world, for the players, is to overcome these challenges. It may be that the ingame resolution of these situations serves quite a different creative or expressive or other aesthetic purpose for the players of the game.That's not necessarily a bad thing - it depends on what the real-world point of playing the game is. If it is not semi-adversarial players vs GM's scenario, but is rather for the players to participate in shaping a particular sort of gameworld (eg because that will express some thematic point of interest to the players and GM) then what will matter is not that I use my PC's best skill every time, but the narrative that I (together with the GM) shape to explain the relevance and use of that skill.Again, if it is up to the player to explain a particular skill's appropriateness, then (in non-adversarial play) the interest will not so much be in which skill is used, but in what sort of story the player tells that makes the use of a particular skill plausible within the ingame situation.</blockquote>

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