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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9745623" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Perhaps. I personally think it is a good and healthy recognition that what is often passed off as "skilled play" is actually itself simply another form of deeply flawed play, and that the hyperfocus on solely bad-faith-players, while ignoring bad-faith-GMs, is a common error that leads to mistakes in reasoning.I have done precisely this (and spoken of it more than once). My players know, if they legitimately outwit me, I let it stand. I would never take that from them--though there might be complications later on, if there are reasonable, warranted ways that those complications could arise. (In the specific case I'm thinking of, where the party defeated a molten-obsidian golem by drawing it into a water-filled pit trap, no such complications could ever arise, so it ended up being a pure one-off.)Interesting. A goodly amount of "Nintendo hard" just came from system limitations and/or making things brutally difficult in order to stretch out very minimal content into a longer experience. In a sense, one could argue that "Nintendo hard" was often (not always, but often) the 8-bit-era equivalent of "THOUSANDS OF HOURS OF CONTENT" in modern open-world games: sure, you have a zillion places you can visit, but they're padding, not rich and meaningful experiences. And one of the reasons why BG3 did very well, for example, is that it didn't do that, very little of the game is padding.As most game things will (and probably should) be.That said, I appreciate the up-front admission that this is very game-y. I find a lot of people who speak of "skilled play" seem to think that it is inherently not game-y at all, which is....something I have difficulty understanding.Hmm. I find this difficult to square. Because if the GM is inherently engaging in bad faith--if they are, in a certain limited sense, "not playing fair"--then the answer to that question would seem to be objectively no. You cannot outsmart an adjudicator who is determined to never be outsmarted. That would seem to fly in the face of the in-principle idea that skilled play should consistently reward real, exercised player skill with better results (up to a certain small amount of randomness because dice got involved).</blockquote>

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