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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8277075" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I guess I don't understand what entirely rules-independent "player skill" means then, other than moving into some degenerate cases ("mother-may-I" or "learn to second-guess your DM," each of which has been implicitly or explicitly rejected in this thread.)I can only go off what impressions I've gotten from others. As for the "players on board" thing, I find that that is quite a bit more slippery than a simple binary. It's entirely possible to actually dislike the system you use, but be completely oblivious to that fact because you don't know about alternative methods. (I should know. That's what happened to me with 3e.)This is just the innately-biased "Quick Primer for Old School Gaming" re-applied. Yes, you CAN just resort to "make a skill check"....just as, in the less-cruchy system with no search mechanics, you can just answer the question without asking for more. You are complaining about a way the rules are used, which isn't actually in the rules themselves in EITHER case, giving one side credit and denying it to the other.In a degenerate usage-case, sure. But the degenerate usage-case for the less-crunchy system is that the IRL shy players (raises hand) defer to the IRL charismatic players, becoming disengaged from play because they know they'll never be as eloquent or dynamic as that player is.Let's compare apples to apples, rather than apples to slightly dried-out oranges.Absolutely! It's notorious for having been almost immediately become misunderstood as soon as the books started being read by people who never met or played with Gary or Dave or their gaming "lineages." But those misunderstandings are a really big part of D&D's history, and they heavily shaped the experience of play for many people under the auspices of what is called "skilled play" here and elsewhere. It's fine to argue that the thing can be done wrong or misunderstood. Yet when misunderstandings threaten to be comparable to, or (as I think applies here) even more common than, the correct understandings, it behooves us to consider both the "proper" or "intended" way and the way(s) that show up so frequently in practice.And that's where tournament modules like Tomb of Horrors come in. People explicitly weren't supposed to use it in ordinary play. It explicitly wasn't supposed to be a "skilled play" challenge except in a very narrow, very context-specific sense. It was never intended for wide consumption and, realistically, should have faded from memory as that  one weird killer tourney module Gary wrote. Instead, it was used in ordinary play. It was considered a demonstration of the need for skilled play in the generic. It was widely consumed, and is still frequently spoken of today, becoming emblematic of its era.That dichotomy between what it is supposed to be and what it actually is, is fascinating! At least to me. It shows how--as I alluded to above--degenerate cases can happen even for well-designed things that explicitly tell you how to use them and why. Likewise, 3e skills aren't supposed to be used in the "roll perception"/"...I got a 4"/"you don't see anything," no-fiction kind of way; but the rules were very bad at communicating this, and as others have mentioned, if the results are equivalent or better when you disengage from the fiction compared to engaging with it, people will usually disengage because it's easier to do. This, too, is a dichotomy between how the game is supposed to work or intended to work, and how it works in practice--much like how 3e was supposed to be pretty balanced, but ended up being horrendously imbalanced, and  giving players perverse incentives (like the aforementioned "it's better to solve a problem yourself" thing, or "always ruthlessly optimize your own personal performance" type stuff.)Most importantly, these gaps between intent (or even explicitly-described function) and use-in-practice are the best place to look for how to improve a system. They tell you the places where things need attention, where your intent isn't panning out correctly or where two different goals are clashing. Every system will have these points of internal divergence, and such points are almost always where degenerate behavior and perverse incentives will arise.</blockquote>

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