Player Skill and Character Skill

Most likely inspired by this recent editorial on Gamasutra, Jay ‘Rampant Coyote’ Barnson of Frayed Knights’ fame blogs on the topic of player and character’s skill in role-playing titles, and exemplifies why he thinks that “a good RPG does not favor character skill over player skill”. Here’s a snip:

It’s all about interaction and choice. I’ll go back to Dungeons & Dragons, a game many readers will be familiar with at least by its computer analog. By my understanding, the lowly fighter (or (fighting-man)) was originally conceived as a beginner’s option in earlier versions of the game. Lacking spells, the fighter had fewer options than the other base classes (in original D&D, there was no thief class it was just fighter, cleric, and magic-user).

But what options did a fighter have?

#1 Decisions when and how to engage an enemy: While many fighters (and every other class) used Charisma as a dump stat, in theory they could parley (or bribe) as well as anybody else. They could avoid combat.

#2 Tactics: There was an emphasis once upon a time (somewhat lost in the art today, sadly) on using your noggin to cleverly defeat monsters at minimal risk to yourself using surprise, the environment, or tools (quite open-endedly, requiring (Dungeon Master) referee adjudication) to provide an advantage. Unfortunately, some DMs got annoyed when players decided to bury a hydra in a landslide or engage a fire-breathing dragon from an underground lake to reduce fire damage, and would award reduced XP for cleverness.

#3 Movement and positioning: This could also be treated as tactics, but was more universal. There’s a reason kicking the door open to fight monsters was so popular the doorway provided a convenient bottleneck, especially when the party was outnumbered. Skilled players would maneuver to maximize their advantage, encourage the enemy to get into a convenient grouping, and so forth. A lot of games didn’t use miniatures and relied on more abstract, verbal descriptions of positioning, which limited this activity, but most DMs still allowed players to describe particular maneuvers so this could remain a skill factor.

#4 Target selection: While this only rarely requires much rocket-science to make a good choice, skilled players combined this with #3 to make the most of the probabilities of the system. In the early days, enemy morale was another factor, and triggering a morale check at the right time could be just as critical to success as keeping the enemy away from your fragile magic-users. So sometimes it was better to knock down the weakest enemies first, and other times the stronger opponents were better targets. It was all in how you played the odds.

#5 Magic item usage: For fighters, magic item usage generally meant (potions,) and more often than not (healing potions.) Knowing how and when to sacrifice an attack to drink a potion or change weapons, or use some other magic device was another differentiator for skilled and unskilled players.