Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8279668" data-attributes="member: 82106">Keep at it! I think you and [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] (as usual) have the clearest definition. Skilled Play is "application of the rules which does not elide potentially explicit fiction." The whole word 'skilled' is really very misleading. I mean, who's to say what is or is not 'clever'. It is entirely situational and subjective! The core qualitative thing is the elision of fiction. So a game which is not classic Skilled Play is one in which you don't play out every cognizable detail, but instead abstract some of them. Combat ala AD&D is a a bit of an edge case. Clearly there is a considerable abstraction. OTOH players wouldn't really be able to delve down into the minutia of how they wield their swords, move their feet, etc. because they have no actual understanding of how to sword fight. The abstraction of attacking and being attacked, while possibly moving around, etc. seems good enough to me. It allows for critical decision points that are relevant and thematic, etc. PERSONALLY I think this points the way towards something closer to modern Story Now kind of play, where fiction (and possibly mechanics) decide what is relevant and when or if it constitutes a decision point, and then you leverage some process to move to another decision point, potentially eliding things (just describing them, or maybe not even that in all cases) that aren't relevant to the agenda. Thus DW can pass up on how the orc swings its sword, or the player can describe how he blocked a blow and ran the orc through, or whatever. I don't really see how deploying elision in that sense is really conceptually that different from what Gary was trying to do. He's frustrated at his players for pixel bitching every door. He just never reached the point of reconceptualizing the elision process to be directly servicing the agenda. In one sense it is a small step, and in another a giant leap. Even 5e doesn't make that leap. It may not be classic Skilled Play to use its Diplomacy skill, but it is fundamentally doing the same job that OD&D does.</blockquote>

Verification