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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8280539" data-attributes="member: 6790260">"You aren't asking if you can do anything, but instead telling the DM what it is that you are doing" sounds like a distinction without a difference. If you just tell the DM "I maneuver around stealthily, catch the orc by surprise, and cut off her head!" you aren't actually going to have it happen, because the DM is almost certainly not going to just let you have that. Every single one of these "telling the DM what it is you are doing" is, implicitly, asking for permission--by your own way of viewing things, I might add, since you have been so strident in declaring the absolute power of the DM.Moreover? I don't see any way in which this doesn't equate to, "Know what kinds of questions your DM will answer usefully." Which, yes, is a more nuanced version of "learn to second-guess your DM," but I'm not seeing much daylight between the two things.I'll grant it's clean, but that's sort of a problem from the other direction: actual play IS messy, and it's the messiness that makes the question difficult (and interesting). It also gives us a perfect example of a flaw even in non-degenerate SP: the problem when no one at the table comes up with a solution, and thus play grinds to a halt. This is particularly apt in an equally-clean example: "Persuade the king to help you." If that's based purely on player skill, it may quite literally be the case that no one at the table is bold and charismatic enough to convince the king, even though convincing the king is fantastically important. Such cases are not uncommon; they may not happen constantly, but if you have a group of very shy people (e.g., mine) they'll crop up a lot more often than is acceptable.All fair, but even in-context there are concerns. I still don't see the salient difference between a 10' pole, or some other piece of equipment the party happens to have available, and an unseen servant spell, or some other bit of mojo the party happens to have available, yet multiple people have drawn a clear line in the sand between them (and multiple others have rejected or questioned it).You are likely already familiar with the underlying concept, even if the term is new. A degenerate use case, like a degenerate strategy, is one that technically uses the rules/structures/paradigm as presented, but in a way that violates the intent or spirit of play. A common example of a degenerate strategy is finding the easiest-to-execute, nearly-impossible-to-block attack in a fighting game, and then spamming that attack and no others. It won't succeed against a skilled player, but the vast majority of players aren't that skilled, and will fall before it. Magic: the Gathering added the 4-card limit for non-basic lands for a similar reason--people kept loading decks with tons of identical gimmick cards, which is counter to the spirit of play even if it was, technically, abiding by the rules.Degenerate use cases, on the other hand, aren't "strategies" but rather the way you go about using a thing. The degeneracy here doesn't arise from one (or more) players exploiting some legal but boring loophole. Instead, it arises from the process of play itself becoming degenerate. A theoretical example could be (say) a dice-pool skill system that features explosion, but which permits expanding the explosion threshold until it is too big, thus making nearly every roll explode repeatedly. Such an outcome isn't, strictly, a strategy in and of itself, but is rather an approach or procedure that produces divergent (and, generally, overall-undesirable) results.Stripping every roll of its narrative precedent and weight is something you can totally do, in that the rules don't force you to give rolls narrative precedent or weight. But doing so is using the tool in a way it specifically wasn't designed to be used, and therefore one that inherently produces undesirable results, even if it is technically a "valid" use.(This use of "degenerate" generally comes from the way "degenerate" is used in logic: that is, a degenerate or vacuous truth is one that is true by some technicality, without actually revealing anything interesting or meaningful. "If the present King of France is bald, then the moon is made of green cheese" is, properly speaking, a completely true statement, because there is no situation where the antecedent is true and the consequent is false. But this is only because the antecedent is always false, because there IS no present King of France to be bald or coiffured. Conditionals like this that have false antecedents are vacuously true, only really showing us that conditionals are only useful when they have true antecedents. It is, technically speaking, a valid use of logic to talk about such things...but it is not a productive or desirable use of logic to have that be the ONLY way you use logic.)Right. This demonstrates a degenerate, but unfortunately difficult to manage, use-case for "pure" SP-like play: that the players may simply lack the necessary skill(s), and feel unable to learn them, or have an understandable aversion to doing so.So a 10' pole has no mechanical attributes whatsoever? That would seem to belie its literal name, which specifies its numerical length of ten feet. And that's where my sticking point is. I don't understand how "10 ft pole," which has a length, a purchase cost, sometimes a weight, and various other potential values within the ruleset (even, to get incredibly barebones, the raw number of them you have on hand). Those are mechanics. Yes, they're mechanics attached to something with narrative weight, but that's literally everything in D&D; we don't play Scores & Spreadsheets, despite some aspersions cast to the contrary.Which unfortunately makes it really hard to discuss in any meaningful way. When the borderland isn't just fuzzy, but literally differs depending on who you ask about it, what can you really say? (I said more or less the same thing earlier to Snarf Zagyg.)Yeah, that's...basically my position as well. Which is why it's hard for me to view it much as "skill," because it feels far too much like "know the right code-words to induce the DM to rule favorably rather than unfavorably."I am generally not a cynical person; I just find that the cases people gush about look, from the outside, rather a lot like "manipulating" rather than "strategizing."</blockquote>

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