NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8287076" data-attributes="member: 71699">It might be a bad idea to put multiple large subjects in one post, but I will go ahead and put three <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />1. One puzzling element relates to which mechanical moves (use of 10' pole, unseen servant, fireball, Charisma (Persuasion) are in or out? It has been said a few times that the filter isn't the mechanic itself, but - perhaps - some principle agreed among the players. It seems important, and yet I haven't yet found anything by Gygax about it. He seems more on the side that players should employ every resource at their disposal to mitigate danger - that the rules are there to be used.Based on what others have said, it feels like the principle is - do not skip grains of engagement with the fiction or imagined space through use of game mechanics. Some mechanics are disliked when the player doesn't need to explain how they work - I persuade the Queen. I reach a conclusion similar to one you discuss - that combat cannot be "skilled play" - on those terms. Yet I doubt Gygax felt combat could not be conducted skillfully, so something is up.2. A secondary puzzle is the curated versus emergent story debate (or however you want to label those putative poles). Gygax writes that a DM should override anything that doesn't serve their ends. That seems at odds with a story being strictly emergent. For instance, in the OP, the emergent story is anticipated to trivialise the BBEG while the curated story seeks to preserve danger. From what Gygax writes it sounds like he would have allowed the rest AND preserved the danger... curation, effectively. I suspect the difference is in choice of imperatives. Is that right, or are there expected to be no such imperatives in "skilled play"?3. Lastly (for this post) if Moldvay Basic is thought to support "skilled play" more effectively than 5e, will a game like Descent support it even more so? Seeing as it codifies campaign phases and such in even more detail?</blockquote>

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