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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7754046" data-attributes="member: 42582">As I've repeatedly posted, this focus on rules is a red herring.Classic D&D has relatively few rules. There are combat rules, rules for interacting with doors, and spell descriptions. There's not much beyond that. So if a player, for instance, wants his/her PC to jump across a chasm, the GM has to make something up. Gygax's DMG doesn't give much advice on how to do this, but Moldvay Basic has quite a bit.But the issue of changing the rules, or coming up with a resolution procedure where the game doesn't specify one, has little in common with fudging/cheating. For instance, a GM who takes the Moldvay approach of assigning a percentage possibility to an outcome is making up a new resolution procedure. But that is not the same thing as ignoring the outcome of the percentile dice once they've been rolled!I don't see how this relates to the issue of fudging either, to be honest.Classic D&D doesn't fit your description - it has no basic resolution mechanic - but plenty of more modern RPGs do (eg Burning Wheel, HeroWars/Quest, 5e D&D if you ignore the combat rules). But I don't see how that bears upon chnging or ignoring dice rolls once they have been made.Your second approach I don't follow as you describe it - you don't say what contribution the players are expected to make to the shared fiction of the game, but presumably they are meant to contribute something!I don't agree with your characterisation of classic D&D and the old tournaments. Mechanical mastery is part of what those games test, but only a part of it. The main thing they are meant to test is the ability of the players to skilfully engage the fiction.I can tell you what Gygax's AD&D rulebooks present as skilled play, because he describes it in some detail, especially in the PHB: it means sensible preparation (spell load outs; equipment, including magic items; party composition, which of course factors into the preceding considerations); having a goal in the dungeon (generally, either scouting or raiding); mapping well; sticking to the goal and not getting distracted/sidetracked; etc. The fact that XP are awarded for taking gold out of the dungeon, and also that those XP can be modified downwards if there was less than full-fledged challenge in getting that gold (see PHB p 106 and DMG p 85), reinforces this element of skilled play - because these skills are precisely those that will lead to treasures being recovered!In the PHB (pp 18, 106) Gygax also explains the core functions of each class, and the latter of those pages, plus the discussion of training in the XP section of the DMG (p 86), indicate that an element of player skill also includes playing in accordance with ones' chosen class. Playing in accordance with one's chosen alignment is a further element of skill, emphasised more in the DMG than the PHB.To reiterate what I have already posted upthread: I don't play Gygaxian D&D. I am not very good at it and don't especially enjoy it. (Those two things may be related!, although I don't think the second is just a consequence of the first.) But I think his AD&D rulebooks spell out a pretty clear picture of how to play the game. It's a type of wargaming, but in which (i) the player controls and in some sense inhabits a single protagonist, rather than controlling a whole force at a more abstracted level of engagement; and (ii) the player can play the fiction directly without mechanical mediation.If someone is playing AD&D differently from this - eg they don't care about the supposed functions of character classes, and so eg disagree with Gygax that "Clerics who refuse to help and heal . . . are all clear examples of a POOR rating" (DMG p 86) - then they shold just ignore all Gygax's stuff that suggest PC progression should be connected to how well you play your character class. If someone thinks that alignment fidelity doesn't matter, then it would be silly to follow Gygax's advice that breaking or changing alignment can lead to level loss.Or supose you have players who don't care about XP. In Gygaxian D&D, that is like a chess player who doesn't care about being checkmated - it makes the game break. If you have players who don't care about XP, then it makes no sense for the game to have an XP system where XP are a reward for playing well. (4e is an edition of D&D which exemplifies this - XP in 4e aren't a reward for playing well, but are earned simply by playing - at the rate of about a level's worth every 10 to 12 hours of play - and hence are simply a pacing device to manage PC progression.)The weirdness of AD&D 2nd ed is that it preserves nearly all the Gygaxian system, yet clearly is written to be used for something very different from skilled play as his rulebooks define it. It's notionally a game of stories of epic herosim, yet it has all these stupid rules about opening doors and fighting to the death. That's why it needs a fudging option - to compensate for the mismatch between system and intended play experience.</blockquote>

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