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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 9345781" data-attributes="member: 86653">I started in 1984 with B/X and the group quickly switched to AD&D. We played that up to 4E, and have been "current" with the editions until recently. We switched to DCC RPG and are running a campaign of that. We've always played in the player-skill style. I started later, but I've always played in that style and I'm a big fan of the non-racist aspects of the OSR.The thing people who don't play in this style seem to always get wrong is that it's not player vs referee. There's no antagonistic relationship between the two. It's like Justin Alexander has said at times, the referee presents situations, challenges, and obstacles for the players to overcome. The referee does not prep plots or scripts to be followed, nor does the referee in any way "try to win."It's nonsensical to think the referee is out to win because, if they were, they could simply declare victory. They could bust out the old "rocks fall, everyone dies" or present the PCs with infinite dragons or drop in a riddle with no solution. The referee has the power to do whatever they want. So an antagonistic referee is a pointless waste of time. The game ends the moment the referee decides it will. The referee "wins" the moment they want to.It's not about winning. It's about challenging the players and to a much lesser extent, the PCs. The referee in this style thinks about what would be fun. What would make for an interesting encounter. Maybe even what makes sense in the world. This is all in service of fun, challenges, drama, and conflict.If the players simply and easily win all the time, that's boring. There's no conflict or drama. No fun. For there to be any fun at all, there has to be challenges and obstacles. Those generate conflict and drama. It's very much in the mode of action-adventure stories. Indiana Jones without the obstacles and challenges isn't an interesting story. He walks into that South American temple, walks down the hall, grabs the golden idol, and nonchalantly walks back to the waiting sea plane. Yawn.Likewise, simply having numbers on a character sheet you can use to overcome all those obstacles is boring as it reduces during-the-game play to an exercise in pressing the right button at the right time and rolling well. The player becomes effectively meaningless. Putting all the important decisions before play happens, i.e. character building. You're pre-solving the puzzles and the game becomes pressing the right button at the right time and hoping the dice fall your way. It also reduces the entire game to a math problem that can be solved. That's a video game. And incredibly boring at the table.In my experience, what's far more engaging for everyone involved is if the players themselves have to think in the moment to solve the puzzle. Puzzle here being all the various styles of challenges, whether they're literally puzzles or traps, or obstacles or whatever. From the outside this can very much look like a battle of wits between the players and the referee where the referee is trying to win. But that's absolutely not the case. The referee is simply trying to provide a fun and interesting game experience by creating obstacles for the players to overcome with an eye towards actually challenging the players.</blockquote>

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