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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8279535" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I am still quite a few pages back, but I thought this was where I put in my plug <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> You cannot really HAVE 'skilled play' in the sense of what Gygax claimed of it. There are too many unspecified 'free' variables in play in the environment. How slick are the walls at this point where the thief wants to climb? 1e DMG simply makes a blanket statement that "all dungeon walls are damp unless otherwise specified" (paraphrasing, I don't recall the exact words, but that is the gist of it). What DM actually knows if the walls of any given part of the dungeon are dry, damp, wet, slimy, etc? Sure you can go with that default, but what REALLY is happening is a choice. The GM has to decide to allow or disallow a good chance of success on this climb. This is fundamentally story control. I'm only using a single SMALL example, but imagine how many similar choices the GM makes as the party marches down a corridor poking with their 10' poles as they go. My point is that the 'fiction' in terms of what is written down is ALWAYS TOO WEAK to be determinate of the action. How far does the sound of that poking go? Conveniently it might wake up the next room, or conveniently not, all at the whim of the GM, and there's not really a subsystem for most of these things.This is why so many people talk about 'playing the GM', but in essence everything is that, or else it is simply obeying genre convention, D&D game convention, or table convention. When you add 'crunchiness' in the way most classic D&D 'skilled play' aficionados mean (3.x style or 5e style) what you get is kind of a mess. Greyhawk has already taken D&D as far, in raw conceptual terms, in that direction as it is ever capable of going, which is just painting dice rolls over top of the mess that is "the GM is just telling you what is in the dungeon key, its all objective."  Whether this crunch stifles creativity or not is kind of moot, the fundamental equation remains, you apply whatever tools you have to either the existing fiction or the source of the fiction and play the DM.The point is, you can only really fundamentally change things by altering the roles at the table. Actually I think that where Gygax kind of 'went wrong' was not in how he ran his D&D game, but in how he EXPLAINED it. The game he was running, IMHO, was a lot more like Story Now, any fiction was honored, but its creation was on the basis of some principles that included a LOT MORE gamism than is given credit. There was no 'simulating' anything, nor objectively 'testing' anything. It was all about putting pressure on the players. He was playing to keep them on the edges of their seats and thwacking them on the back of the hand, metaphorically, if they didn't pay close attention at every second. Sure, a lot of the puzzles were thought out ahead of time and written in his notes, but that was simply efficiency and organization, so that he could prep ahead, not some creation of sacrosanct 'puzzle reality' to test against, because that 'reality' is far too thin to really stand up to clever players. It is just a framework to build the fiction on during play, and the real principles of play are thus the unspoken ones that AD&D 1e never reveals except now and then when it lifts the veil on what the DM's motives are.So, I would submit that a game like Dungeon World is not as different from what Gygax did at his table as some people would like to think. Much closer in fact, it is just explicit about it and makes it transparent. Obviously it also in the process codifies it in rules/agenda/etc. so that it is pretty reproduceable and you can systematically build on it. This is a direction where we can build. Doing things the 'Greyhawk Way' won't really produce conceptually more sound games.</blockquote>

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