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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9382447" data-attributes="member: 6801228">IF you mean better people morally, that wasn't my claim. And what you are saying is exactly my claim, that the players must do "fairly specific focused things to get exact information" to find things. Well, if they fail to do that? Then next time they will do it "better", still failed? They will do it "better" Where this falls apart though, is how unevenly it is applied. You never ask a fighter to describe the angle of their arms as they use the Jaka School style to slip their sword past an enemies shield. You never ask a mage to describe the precise speed they cycle their mana while reciting the Formula of Elaine to summon light. But if they want to search a room, you basically have them do it all as themselves. Of they want to talk to someone, it is all about precisely what they say. These instances of "skilled play" only appear to take the place of... skills. Which did not exist at the beginning of the game. They never apply to anything else, heck they don't even apply to all skills, only the physical actions like searching. I've never heard of a DM requiring us to state what gauge of thread is used when we stitch up a wound with the medicine skill. But whether or not you stated that you took apart the curtain rod and looked inside? Utterly VITAL to whether or not you find the items hidden there. Yeah, if people actually acted that way, it would be one thing. But they don't. And frankly, your description is kind of false. Oh sure, actually code breaking a real cypher is a lot harder than rolling dice... but it also means that if I don't have a head for cyphers then my hyper-intelligent wizard with a cypher breaking skill will always fail, because I can't break a cypher, I don't have the bandwidth or expertise to do it. But if we are playing a game where the players are caught up in a civil war, and they have multiple sides they could pick, and they need to navigate their own concious versus the tactics of their allies... how is your style of game any harder than mine at that point? Are my battles easier? Not really. Are my moral quandries easier? Hardly, they might even be harder. Yet the assumption is, that I am playing and running an easier game than you, because I let the character's skills solve a puzzle, instead of insisting the players spend real life hours solving it themselves.And here those assumptions raise their head again. Old School players play smart and carefully... which by the unspoken comparison of "unlike New School players" implies that new school players play stupidly and recklessly. You don't come out and say it directly, but since you make sure that your words imply that this is a unique feature of Old School players, you have the same result while staying polite about it.</blockquote>

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