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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8290479" data-attributes="member: 82106">As [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] said, I find this interesting. Obviously there are a lot of ways to slice and dice SP. I mean, I agree with you and others that there is a lot of player skill in a lot of areas, even in classic D&D. I felt bound by the OP in terms of engaging with HIS definition (though he then kind of held my input up as a model of what he didn't want to see, lol, oh well...). Anyway, there were a lot of areas where you could exercise skill in classic D&D. It could be in terms of what items you had/got, character 'build' in other areas (not a lot of options, but there are some), equipment, spell selection, party composition, selection of henchmen/hirelings, as well as selection of what sorts of objectives to go after when adventuring. I mean, the MOST BASIC skill of all, AFAIK, was knowing when to call it quits and bug out for town! All of these involve an understanding of the 'environment', the GM, the rules, and 'being clever', as well as just basic planning skills.In terms of 'good at some things, bad at others'... Hmmmm, I think some players maybe were more interested in playing a certain class, for example, so maybe they had a more detailed knowledge of some related tricks. I mean, I played mostly wizards, I was well-versed in certain spell-casting techniques. I also had a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of useful magic items, the rules around scrolls and potions, spell books, etc. Still, if I played a fighter none of that was useless, nor is there really a whole lot of 'special knowledge' WRT given classes. Outside of class, all I can say is maybe someone knows a particular field better. If a player was a civil engineer (one of ours was back in the day) well he'd surely be ready to explain things like roads, walls, sewers, etc. in realistic terms. I am not sure this was necessarily an advantage though...4e. We ran it in extremely different ways. I mean, I get what you are saying here too. I just pretty quickly found it to be a story game and didn't make an attempt to shoe horn in much in the way of 'dungeon delve' type stuff, normally. I mean, 4e has a usable encumbrance rule. OTOH light, and usually other supplies, are rather readily procured (IE know the correct rituals, which are cheap and effective). You COULD certainly run things in a more skill-oriented way, but there are just not a lot of rules really developed for that. There's no exploration movement/time rules for example. Traps are modeled in terms of combat encounters, though you can obviously make up SCs and whatnot as alternatives. The Skill system can handle checks for searches, hidden things, etc. but there isn't really room for "tell me how you did it" classic skill play. And as Manbearcat also mentioned, random encounters are not a really useful thing in most situations.Now, I don't think skilled play or lack of skilled play was a factor with 4e either. If people rejected it, it was because it wasn't like 2e, which is NOT a skilled play game! It was because of changes to the way the milieu was translated into mechanics (fireball is a 'power' not a 'spell' and the rules for that are a bit different in ways that bothered people). I'm not sure about any of the 'MMO part'. Maybe people were turned off by roles and power sources, I can't really say. I don't think they really introduced anything NEW to the game, just made things explicit. This was definitely a theme of 4e, making stuff explicit. IME players were definitely happy with the keywording and the way you could generally apply many powers even out of combat (the Fey Step example is pretty spot on). Obviously it seems there were a lot of very literal-minded people who didn't feel empowered by that... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /></blockquote>

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