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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8286066" data-attributes="member: 42582">If I'm playing White Plume Mountain or Tomb of Horrors I don't care what the story is like. But there's a very good chance it will be bad; the best I could see coming out of that module is a little bit of comedy interspersed among the grim task of dealing with all the tricks and traps.As [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] has posted, in that sort of play there is no goal of story; the goal for the players is to beat the dungeon. The goal for the GM is to present and adjudicate the dungeon fairly and with real teeth.And somewhat related to that:By SP I take it you mean Gygaxian skilled play.In that case, [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] has already described it for you not far upthread; and many other posters have done so also. Look at the "fair trap" thread, linked both in this thread and the "skilled play" thread to get an example of the sorts of challenges that might feature in such play.Checks are used all the time in such play: to open doors; to climb walls; to listen at doors; to persuade ogres to take a bribe in lieu of beating you up. What they're not used for is to avoid engaging with the fiction that skilled play cares about - so they're typically not going to be used to establish if a PC knows what would make a good bribe for an ogre; or if an ogre is amenable to being bribed at all; or to disable the trap described in the "fair trap" thread; or to establish that a GM has to tell the player every detail of the room that has not been relayed in the initial description that reflects the PCs' initial cursory glances.You seem to be looking to define skilled play in terms of a criteria of mechanical techniques - eg ability checks, spell casting - that are permitted or prohibited. But that is not very profitable in my view, given that the repertoire of mechanical techniques in RPGing has not grown terribly much since having been invented by Gygax and Arneson back in the period when they were also developing "skilled play" as an agenda for RPGing.What's key to Gygaxian skilled play is that integral to overcoming the challenge is a relatively high degree of relatively granular engagement with the fiction. Given the conventions of D&D play that sometimes requires checks (eg if the engagement in question is opening a door or bending the bars of a portcullis) but sometimes does not (eg if the engagement in question is opening an unlocked chest or poking something with a stick). Sometimes the conventions are unclear and require a GM call (eg if the player's declared action is to shoot some static object with a fire arrow, does that require a "to hit" roll? the rules don't say and the GM has to make a decision).</blockquote>

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