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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9505682" data-attributes="member: 6690965">You're mixing up "resolution" and "gameplay" here. Gameplay is leveraging the stuff you have to get the thing you want. The gameplay in liar's dice, for example, is in gauging the likely distribution, considering the space lost by each raised bet, trying to raise your opponent to an untenable state and so on. It's not the actual act of saying "4 2s" and it's certainly not the bit where everyone shakes their cups, it's the choices players make around those things.It's not about what the characters are doing, it's why the players selected a specific action. A very limited skill system can fail that process in two different ways:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Players cannot meaningfully declare actions that influence resolution at all. Whatever you do, you're rolling a check you have +2 to against a Hard DC.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The lesser but still not great version of this is that players can only marginally influence their odds, say by describing a clever plan to get a medium DC, providing a solid +10% chance of success.</li> </ol></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">No action is better than any other action, so there is no player agency in action declaration. This is the skill challenge pacing problem, where you have unlimited agency in providing color to your actions, but no real agency to force the resolution you want, get your 3 successes before your 3 failures.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The lesser version here is basically the same as above, providing +/-10% to success for either declaring easier actions, or persuading the GM to take your best skill, if there's sufficient skill variance.</li> </ol></li> </ol>I want skills to provide players with lines of play, sets of actions they put together to try and get the outcome they want, tactical responses to failure, and so on. It's simply not interesting to roll a 65% chance of success repeatedly, and while all the narrative discussion of how to make something out of failure on that roll are fine, I'd rather have players who are empowered to try not to fail.</blockquote>

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