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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8393840" data-attributes="member: 6801252">Yeah, my goal is to reconcile it (for me, not anyone else in particular, I don't have any 'OSR folks' in my group, its me trying to actualize my playstyle) so that the process of exploring the space of the adventure (lets say a dungeon, for the sake of argument) is one player decision making, but where skills provide information and execution in interacting with that environment. One way I've been doing this, is by following up on the dungeon designs and puzzles of Zelda titles through Gamemaker Toolkit's Boss Key videos-- they usually require the player to understand the layout of the dungeon or the puzzle in order to solve, in other words if traditionally Gygaxian Skilled Play revolved around the means by which we executed 'tasks' (simple challenges) as problem solving and modern skill systems threaten that by automating it, then it makes sense to me that kind of problem solving needs to move to a different level-- managing resources and information, deciding what tasks are worth the risk, and grappling with larger problem solving structures within the space. [SPOILER="New School Skilled Play Example"]So for an example, you might be wandering through an ancient and abandoned temple in my Pathfinder 2e game, I've taken the sandbox ethos from OSR sources so rather than a mission, you decided to follow rumors and leads here to try and find a secret room full of sacred relics and other treasures. Your perception checks from the 'search activity' might or might not tell you about the hollow beneath the durable stone floor of the main hall, but it hasn't found a way to open it. Your investigation checks might or might not tell you about how the skylight window is for letting the moon in, which was sacred to the builders of the temple and their works of art use it to create gorgeous images of stonework and light, a critical success might make this hint obvious, describing  it as a common trigger to their magic. As you discover each room, you might find the series of massive murals on the walls which depict sacred events, and your perception checks may or may not pick up on the covered skylights. Whether or not they do, you find a series of seemingly modern art sculptures shaped like orbs with an intricate series of rings around them-- your checks might tell you that these are apparatuses that control some mechanism, or you might figure that out by interacting with them and then checking one of the mural rooms. Your skill at finding and disabling traps will see much wear and tear you take from that, perhaps conventional traps, or activations for the golems standing in each room, and perhaps the apparatus can stop them too with a high dc skill check (since it requires an intricate handling of the apparatus), or not, the players won't know until they try. By this point the players might crawl the rest, operating the apparatus's to shine the light on the murals, but there are monsters patrolling the hallways, difficult and time consuming, so maybe they find the secret passages that network the temple bypassing enemy patrols... or not, dunno, depends on their skillset and what they try to interact with. Ideally thetemple is jaquayed, so navigating it is an interesting challenge with real decisions that reward good decision making. They're probably finding smaller treasures as they travel the temple too, so if they leave without solving the overarching puzzle, it wasn't a total waste, and maybe somewhere in the game world there's a hidden manual for operating the temple, or they might come back in a couple of levels when the hallways are less dangerous to take their time working it out. [/SPOILER]That was a little long in the tooth, but I think it gets what I'm going for across.</blockquote>

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