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Message: <blockquote data-quote="darkbard" data-source="post: 8290345" data-attributes="member: 1282">Well, summoned as I am, answer I shall!I've been reading the recent SP threads with great interest though with no particular desire to weigh in directly, largely because I think the very term "skilled play" is fraught, elusive, and context dependent. Like so many of the discussions here, we participants get needlessly bogged down in intractable definitional arguments rather than the more salient points of analysis. But anyway. I have virtually no interest in Gygaxian skilled play as it is usually described, often focusing on plodding procedural simulationism as means of exploring a fictional environment. (I acknowledge the other aspects of GSP identified in this thread, but for me the above epitomizes the style.) Such play demands thorough and precise preplanned GM notes to be fair to players, and that is a style of play I have moved further and further from in recent years, enthusiastically. Dungeon World, by contrast, has SP of another sort. I would say its greatest strength is facilitating skilled play of thematic material important to PCs. Some examples of this are open to any character, completely outside of mechanical build, like the Basic Moves Spout Lore and Discern Realities. These are moves by which a player can choose to emphasize or introduce fiction when they believe it is important (though the roll of dice rather than fiat determines the nature of that fiction, beneficial or otherwise). Other moves are entirely build dependent, in the sense of optimizing characters, like the Paladin's choice of Smite as an advanced move (additional damage inflicted when on a quest). What is so very compelling to me about both these types of moves is their capacity for the player, through their deployment, to exhibit SP by creating the fiction they want now ("Story Now" play), or at least make the attempt to do so, rather than test the player's skill in anticipating/navigating preset GM notes (traps, riddles, and the like). The timing of when to put things to the mechanical test in DW in this way can absolutely be a gauge of SP.Further, SP is evident in resource management in the game as another instance, resource here being broadly defined as the collective rules for encumbrance, Coin, gear and ration management (when both are resources that ablate; sure, you don't need to "purchase 10 pitons" when gearing out, but every time you make use of a piece of equipment, that's one less use of your abstracted Adventuring Gear available to you), and Cohorts/Hirelings. [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] has written extensively in these various threads about the current climb up an Everest-like peak that our PCs are now finishing. That climb has necessitated difficult decision making about how to allocate various resources every step of the way: from how many hirelings to bring (factoring in our desire to keep them safe, their vulnerability to hazards, their cost, their increase to our capacity for adding bonuses to specific action checks and encumbrance, etc) to choosing how much Coin to allocate for provisioning versus reserving it for use in Rituals or magic item creation and so on to spell load out and other build considerations by our PCs (do we prepare spells specific to managing environmental hazards or for combat against our expected foes or for magical travel that may obviate obstacles or ...). All of this falls within the purview of SP, I would say, in the sense that we, as players, make these decisions in an attempt to steer the fiction towards our desired outcome, by making difficult decisions between an array of appealing but mutually exclusive choices, each of which carries its attendant risk.There are other components of Dungeon World that are open to SP, I think, but those should provide a good starting point for further discussion.EDIT: I should have tagged you from the beginning, [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER], since Manbearcat responds directly to your inquiry by summoning me and my take on the matter.</blockquote>

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