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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8287084" data-attributes="member: 42582">3. I don't know Descent.2. You can see that in his DMG Gygax is struggling with the limits of his own methods. At two points (in the Introduction, and in (I think) Conducting the Game), he talks about modulating dice rolls to ensure that results correlate to skilled play: so perhaps ignoring an affirmative wandering monster check; and perhaps treating PC death as maiming or unconsciousness instead. He does also say that the GM should not let the PCs win an encounter by fudging as that would be contrary to the precepts of the game; and that the GM should always give monsters an even break. So the overall posture is one of (i) recognising that random rolls can break the correlation of playing skilfully with doing well; and (ii) maintaining that victory must be the result of successful play, but that the GM can accommodate (i) by modulating content introduction and blunting the consequences for failure where that is purely the result of bad luck (ie GM dice rolls).In the discussion of Conducting the Game he also talks about a different way of fudging rolls to modulate content introduction: eg if there is a part of the dungeon the GM thinks the players will enjoy, that is behind a secret door, the GM might declare the door automatically discovered. This is a move from contingent/emergent to more deliberate framing: I think it sits a bit uncomfortably with the basic logic of his approach, but shows that he was realising that GM control over framing can produce more interesting play. But I don't think he reconciled this with skilled play - eg by fudging the secret door check the GM gives the players "unearned" access to the treasures (= XP) in the special area.1. I have responded to this multiple times in multiple threads. The key is making moves in the fiction. For reasons that are not explicable beyond convention, some of these require checks - eg opening doors - and some do not - eg poking things with poles. I even pointed to a cast that has no canonical approach - shooting a fire arrow at a nearby static object.The contrast with, say, Passwall is clear. A STR check to open a door is part of the process of granular extrapolation of the fiction. Passwall allows the players to bypass granular engagement with some chunk of the fiction. Using Passwall well might be clever, but it's not a manifestation of skillfully engaging the fiction. That's one reason it's high level - there an implicit assumption that the player of a 9th level MU has already proven his/her mettle and is entitled to abilities like this spell that allow cutting to the chase rather than having to earn one's way into some particular area of the dungeon.</blockquote>

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