NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6962386" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't remember exactly what [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s origingal claim was.I am agreeing with the OP. I think that what Gygax and others called "skilled play" was emphasised in the classic rulebooks and was once a widespread approach to playing the game. Certainly from 2nd ed AD&D on it has received almost no attention in the rulebooks, and I don't think it is very widespread anymore except among some OSRers.To that extent I agree with the OP.Gygax thought roleplaying was incredibly important. It's just that he though of RPing in different terms from how it is mostly used today. As is shown by pp 107-9 of his RPG, he thought of RPing as imaginatively engaging the ingame fictional situation. Not primarily as cultivating and expressing a pesonality for one's PC.I'm pointing to the actual advice on play given by the author of the book at pages 107 (RHS)-109. These are the only pages I have pointed to (and p 108 is a full colour illustration, and there is an illustration at the bottom of the RHS of p 109 - so a bit less than 1.5 pages). These are headed "Successful Adventures". They open with the words "Few players are so skillful at fantasy role plauing games as to not benefit from advice," and they conclude with the words "If you believe that Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a game worth playing, you will certainly find it doubly so if you play well."I therefore think it's fair to say that this is what Gygax thought was important to playing the game. And that advice doesn't say anything about character personality. It talks about buying equipment and preparing a party as a completely metagame affair, not something that would be roleplayed through at the table. (Quite different from the assumption at every 2nd ed table I ever played at.) It emphasises a proper mix of classes, spells etc, but doesn't say anything about ensuring PC personalities are compatible.Thespianism is not mentioned once.I think the thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of posts on this and other forums, and the letters to Dragon magazine and other magazines before that, debating how to integrate "lets pretend" with rules-governed RPGing actually shows that some instructions, or at least advice, might be helpful.Here's a very simple example: a player decides that his/her PC has a phobia of kobolds. The GM decides to run B2. When the PCs see  kobolds, that player has his/her PC run screaming - with the result that the phobic PC is caught and killed by kobolds, and the presence and location of the other PCs is betrayed and the kobolds kill some and drive the others off.How is this meant to be handled? Is the player of the phobic PC playing the game wrong? Did the GM do something wrong? Is this an example of the game working properly?And in case anyone thinks that it's impossible to write RPG rules or advice that answers these questions, well, it's not, and if you're interested I'm happy to point you to some examples.And I never said you did. But you did get XP for killing monsters. Why? Because they were a major obstacle to extracing treasure from dungeons.Why was there no XP for defeating traps? No good reason that I know of, and Don Turnbull in a very early number of White Dwarf (c 1977) indicates that he awards XP for surviving traps, though he doesn't tell us how much.Awarding XP for killing monsters makes relatively little sense if the main goal of play is to create and evince a unique personality. That's why RPGs were invented which didn't give XP for killing monsters (the first two I know of are Traveller and Runequest; I'm not sure about C&S).</blockquote>

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