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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8298125" data-attributes="member: 16814">No.  Making a decision is not at all on the "gradient of force."  Force is about enforcing outcomes, not about making a call.  A GM's call may be Force, but not all calls are some kind of Force.  In your example, you have the GM making a call based on what they think a preferred outcome would be.  This is Force -- the nature of the decision is not based on the inputs but the outputs; you are choosing a desired output of the process.  This is Force.  On the other hand, if the GM is following the fiction and looking at the inputs and adjudicating those to the best of their ability, this is not Force, because the outcome is not part of the decision process.You're smearing Force into any call the GM makes.  This is not what it means at all.Oh, for sure, there's a skill in telling stories.  This isn't what's meant by skilled play, and, if you stop a moment and consider it, you might think that having the GM tell you a story well is not at all the same thing as playing a game.  The GM can exhibit great skill at their storytelling, but this, necessarily, removes the ability of the players to make skilled play choices -- because the actual input to the GM decision making process is not the players' actions, but rather the GM's story.Now, a GM can be quite skilled at set dressing and evocative description, but that doesn't go to outcomes, and so isn't really part of skilled play.  Recall that skilled play is the leveraging of the system to achieve player goals within the scope of the game.  "The GM tells me a good story" is none of this.No, and any such distinction is trying to create a special case where none exists.  What skilled play means doesn't really change across games -- it's the leveraging of the system to achieve player goals within the scope of the game.  What that looks like will, of course, be different in every game, because the system and scope of the game changes with each.  There's no need to set aside OSR has having quoted skilled play, because saying skilled play in OSR does that already.  The quotes just confuse issues and support a false idea of specialness.Yes, people have odd ideas and tend to define things to protect their own play rather than in a useful analytic way.  It's a large part of why a number of people become angry with me when I discuss 5e -- I don't sugercoat my analysis of the game.  The fact I still very much enjoy and play it seems of little import when I say things like, "5e isn't actually all that flexible in genre."  Of course it isn't.  But acknowledging this doesn't mean that it's not usually consistent, or often consistent, or that there are reasonable expectations.  I'm not perfect at spotting forks in Chess (my elo is just north of 1200, which is nothing at all to brag about -- I'm solidly an intermediate skill player), but that doesn't mean you should expect to hang one when playing me because I will likely spot it.  You're making the perfect the enemy of the good.</blockquote>

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