This looks like a story about teaching. To me it seems to live in the same space as, say, a parent who holds back when teaching a child to play a competitive game.
I alluded earlier to handicapping, coaching, tutorials, tests: these are all constructed around an assumption that skill can be explained, evoked, and increased. We know for instance that neurological plasticity is greatest when confronted with challenges on the edge of capability. Too easy, and the brain takes it easy (players have measurably lower brain activity when dealing with challenges they have mastered, compared with those who haven't yet mastered them.) Too difficult, and the brain won't engage. We run the risk here of counting work that is done to evoke and develop skill as not eliciting or resulting in "genuine" skill.
There is a general issue for us in this conversation. We speak about skill as if we know what it is, when really only the vaguest skill-constructs have been put forward. We have not formally defined the dimensions or factors of skill. We haven't identified canonical sets of tasks and found their predictive strength. We haven't discussed expressed skill versus latent skill versus mastery. We haven't established any scales. Unless tasks are formalised and presented uniformly to an entire cohort, its near futile to rank them. We can't even be sure what skills our tasks are stressing until we have subjected large cohorts of players to them.
Earlier I put forward that in each context there would be a skill-construct. I can go further and say that what counts as skillful for each cohort can only be a statement about the ranking within that cohort, and that will suffer confounds around practice effects, subjective difficulty, access and fatigue, entangling of factors, and performances across cohorts. A fairly unskillful player might seem quite skillful, in the right cohort.
For RPGs with strong character mechanics, such as 5e, we have the peculiar problem that the more skill a player has in one area of the game, the less they will likely need in another. For RPGs with strong in-the-moment mechanics, like DW, we will likely have the problem that the more skillful the DM is, the more skill the players can express, and conversely the less skillful the DM is, the less skill the players can express. There may be a group component where a skillful group elevate one another. If we think about the thread presenting a possible dilemma between allowing a rest
and reducing the skill needed for the final encounter or disallowing it
and amplifying the skill needed for that encounter then we can picture how moment by moment DM and player decisions are moving the locus of skill.
To use Gygaxian language, did the player earn their success? Also, out of curiosity, did you tell the player you'd changed the die roll?
Does Carlsen
earn his success when he defeats a low Elo player? If he doesn't earn his success, then does that mean even if he plays a perfect game, he is not being skillful? Might confronting him with greater challenge evoke more skill?
As we are speaking about a child, no I did not tell them anything about the die rolls. We can have an interesting debate about whether children can be skillful (I mean interesting in the British sense). However, I have other examples where I changed rolls for encounters, overwrote map-and-key, all those badwrongfun force moves... that lead to my (adult) players feeling more excited and skillful. Didn't your Traveller quote show Miller suggesting force for system generation rolls?
EDIT And I should add that the most memorable and exciting moments for our groups have undeniably been when no force was used. I very rarely use force, but when I do I use it skillfully, and to elevate skill
More often though, I manage by good DM-decisioning... and recollect that I count force and decisioning as points on a spectrum, not in character different from one another.
Kevin Crawford is talking about player, not GM, decision-making, in a context which presupposes a strong player/GM divide.
Beyond that, he is articulating the same idea of
engaging the fiction that I,
@Campbell and others have posted about multiple times in this and related threads.
Indeed he is talking about engaging the fiction, and he lucidly explains that relying on the number on your character sheet is perhaps one sort of skill, but the skill he is interested in is not on your character sheet. It is not situated in the written game mechanics, but compelled by them. By the weakness of the modifiers (often only +1) and fragility of the characters, and in the guidance he gives as to how to orient to and use the written game mechanics.
In many of your posts you seem to be saying that when a DM is guided to decide a certain way (obliged, you sometimes term this) then this is in character the same as upholding a formal written game mechanic (hard crunch) and doing exactly what that mechanic concretely directs. (Say doing 5 damage to the foe because the written mechanic says roll damage now and you roll a 5, so you do exactly 5 to the foe.) I believe that these two things are in character different, and that the former allows scope for essentially any decision (your group may not recognise some decisions as valid, but another very well might). However, I also say that the former can be skillful. Perhaps not in the same way that the latter can be used skillfully, but this reflects the skill-construct to context mapping thesis that I endorse.
