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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8286641" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's quite traditional in RPGing for the fiction to be presented - both by players and GM - as drawings. For instance, a player might sketch out a dungeon room as s/he understands it to look based on the GM's description, and then point to where the various PCs position themselves while one pokes the floor or opens the chest or whatever else.Language is obviously not unimportant - it's the main way humans communicate after all! - but it doesn't seem terribly crucial as a focus of discussion.D&D - and hence RPGing in general - inherits its use of maps and tokens from wargames. Some wargames are sophisticated boardgames, but some are not - they allow the players to directly engage the fiction in their resolution. On any given occasion of the use of a map and tokens in RPGing, do we have a closed mechanical system like a boardgame (let's say chess is the paradigm here) or do we simply have aides-memoire for the shared fiction? This is a topic on which so much ink was spilled during the 4e era it threatened to drown the universe! But is probably a bit orthogonal to getting a handle on what Gygax means by skilled play.Do you have access to Gygax's DMG and PHB? If so, have you read the section in the PHB (beginning around p 109, I think) on Successful Adventures? And have you looked at the lists of tricks in Appendix A of the DMG (random dungeon generation) and Appendix H (tricks)? I think reading these parts of those books closely, with an open mind, and then looking through the "fair trap" thread, and then re-reading those bits of Gygax, will be much more conducive to grasping Gygaxian "skilled play" than looking for an abstract definition.And if you want to grasp the difference between a RPG which does or doesn't make room for skilled play in the other, less jargonistic, sense of its use in this thread, compare any version of D&D for which a SRD is available to Cthulhu Dark (which is a 4 page PDF you can Google up pretty easily). You will quickly see why Cthulhu Dark has basically no scope for skilled play of the sort the OP in this thread talks about. (I think at least some versions of Wuthering Heights might also still come up on a Google search, but it's about 10 pages rather than 4.)If you've considered these various examples and illustrations but are still unsure what various posters are getting at when they talk about skilled play, it would be helpful for you to say so explicitly. As we could then hone in on what it is that you're unclear about.</blockquote>

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