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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TiQuinn" data-source="post: 9466302" data-attributes="member: 4871">And as I have already posted, the game was always this. The very fact that the GM creates the dungeon, selects the monsters, chooses the treasure, places traps, and sets NPC motivations means that the “GM decides” how the game is going to be engaged with to a large degree. The players still decide how they actually engage with all of that, just as they do in a story based game where they choose which goals to pursue and which not to.The only point we agree upon is that 1e’s game is driven by gold for experience and that has a fundamental difference in how players approach the game. The game changed as it switched from site based adventures to story based adventures, but not along the lines you are describing. As I’ve said, players motivations shifted but they still remained in control of whether they snuck into dungeons vs charged in, and whether they engaged with an encounter or avoided it. There were elements of class and race abilities that were phased out: it became less important to detect slopes as an ability or determine your depth underground. Encumbrance became more common to be handwaved at some tables. So yes, there were changes.However, all the talk of skilled play, successful play, “GM decides” - these are distinctions that I’m not seeing as very important, if they really exist as distinctions at all - players are driven by multiple goals: having a good role playing experience, killing monsters, creating powerful characters, leveling up. It’s a very antiquated notion that the game needs to tell the players what constitutes successful and particularly “skilled” play, as if that’s something the author is authoritatively able to say, and feels ripped from the pages of one person, who has we’ve said, was a pretty unreliable source of information about the game to start with. You can phrase successful play another way - when your character’s hit points reach zero, you’ve lost. I don’t see any of this as particularly earthshaking. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png" title="Man shrugging    :man_shrugging:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /></blockquote>

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