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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8280877" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with all this. Especially what you say about convention, which (together with the idea of an "ecology" or "evolution" of the dimensions and subject-matter of "skilled play") is what I have been saying for most of this thread!We all agree - by convention - that sword-fighting does not involve the player extrapolating from the fiction and coming up with a series of feints and manoeuvres that the GM can't but concede kill the Orc! And we all agree about bending bars and lifting gates. And the fact that searching a dungeon room falls on one rather than the other side of the line, as does tapping the floor for pit traps; but persuading a hungry ogre to sit down and have a beer with you rather than eating you either (i) falls on the other side (roll reaction dice) or (ii) depends on solving the puzzle of the ogre (back at the tavern we picked up a rumour that the ogre in this dungeon really likes beer); is all just convention.Like most conventions it's not arbitrary. In the context of D&D, the domain of skilled play is closely correlated with what is easily and effectively able to be noted on, and then adjudicated by reference to, a map and key.And like most conventions it's liable to edge cases and complaints of violation of the spirit if not the letter of it. You can see this back in the tournament report about Tomb of Horrors - the author complains that the use of plaster over walls to stop an elf from getting a check to detect concealed doors is unfair. And you can see the point - if the players have to not only map the dungeon but track the composition of its walls, what else do they have to do? Track the colour of everything? (ToH has more than its fair share of this too, though at least there's a poem to give the players a heads-up.) Track the style of fashion worn by every NPC? Track the relative dampness of surfaces? Temperatures? Mineral composition of rocks? Etc, etc. This quickly becomes infeasible for all the reasons you've given.</blockquote>

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