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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8291664" data-attributes="member: 42582">Perhaps I'm focusing too much on myself as a single data point?Here's the biographical context:* By ordinary standards I'm not a bad game play. My five hundred and backgammon are near-impeccable, but both have a maximum limit of applicable skill because of the random element. My chess is, by any club standard (as opposed to walk-in-off-the-street standard) terrible; and my bridge not a lot better, though I could improve it more easily than my chess just by working on my card counting. * When I play in boardgames with my RPG group, I am at the weaker end (the spreadsheet optimiser who is also my BW GM is the best) - this is not a walk-in-off-the-street group by any means (former group members have included two Australasian MtG champions) and so perhaps I'm setting the threshold for "skill" at the wrong level, but given where I've set it I consider myself a mediocre "skilled player. * Part of what limits my skill in all these contexts is a lack of patience and a corresponding unwillingness to tolerate "boredom" - a lack of game action - in the interests of developing a position that will win down the track (one reason I prefer bridge to chess is that the former doesn't have such a strong contrast between "developing" moves and "crunchy" moves). * The same thing would be my death in a serious playthrough of ToH, WPM etc. * Yet I very much enjoy playing BW, and suspect I would enjoy extended play of DW, and in neither case would I anticipate the game grinding to a halt and my play experience basically sucking due to a lack of skill.Hence I think that, whatever label is appropriate to describe BW or DW play, "skilled play" isn't it.A similar sort of thing - involving the spreadsheeter and the player who developed his PC to improve his relationship with a NPC - happened in our RM game. The spreadsheeter's technical optimisation clearly paid off in the context of winning fights. But when that campaign finished, and we narrated out the endgame situation, it was the other player who had better positioned his PC in the fiction, because the wooing of the PC gave him the grounds for proposing that they would found a dynasty, and this fed into the game's established theme/conflict of the "lone defender" who is driven mad by stress and isolation and hence can no longer defend; a dynasty permits renewal (another theme of the game) and hence overcomes that problem.The previous paragraph is a bit abbreviated but I hope not too much: the idea is that in that RM game, as in my BW play, technical skill is not irrelevant but does not ultimately determine the orientation of the player (via the PC) towards theme and fiction. This is coming from other places - action declaration, the way particular thematic elements are introduced and built upon, etc.This relates closely to my literature vs engineering contrast not far upthread.</blockquote>

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