One story I heard about a Spycraft group is that they named their standard approach "burrito plans" (quiet going in, loud coming out) because, in their experience, no matter how well planned the mission, something would go wrong and break stealth before it was over - so it was better to just plan for that from the start and set themselves up for a noisy, chaotic getaway.
I agree that skilled play is about leveraging the environment and stuff the PCs have.
That makes no sense and does not track with my experience at all. Tracking gear in detail is one of the things that makes skilled play possible.
I’m not familiar with sheet play as a term. From context, I would assume it means something like the oft-cited "pushing buttons on a character sheet", but could someone maybe define the term or confirm if my intuition is correct?
I don't get the difference. Who is doing the assuming here if it's not the player?
I'm not sure if these are meant to be presented as such, but they are not mutually exclusive options. My preference is for the player to decide what their PC knows and for the dice to decide whether it's a good idea or not.
I agree with Voadam here. To take a concrete example: I and some of my friends have recently started playing Rime of the Frostmaiden, an adventure that takes place in an arctic landscape cursed with eternal winter. I, as a player, am not particularly familiar with arctic survival, particularly not with medieval/renaissance technology. I'm pretty sure the DM isn't either. But we do have a ranger in the party who is, and on his advice we have bought "winter survival stuff." This would be things that I assume are sufficient, at least unless we run into something extraordinary.
No, I'm not saying you can't handwave gear, clearly you can. I'm saying that doing so prevents the players from ever needing to search through their equipment lists and trying to find a bizarre combination of items that can be used in a novel way that is one of the defining features of skilled play.
To me, it's more of an anti-gotcha thing. So the DM doesn't get to say "It's a bright sunny day out on the ice, so you need to roll a Con save to resist snow blindness." That's the kind of thing our ranger would know about and pack blinders for (though those might have other effects like disadvantage on Perception checks). It won't help us if, say, someone falls through the snow into a crevasse. At that point, it's equipment list time.
I don't see not sweating the small equipment stuff as meaning you always have the right tool for the job.
Maybe don't start from the assumption that the referee is a jerk who's out to get you.
Unless you need a trebuchet, most of the gear PCs are carrying around is all "the small stuff."
Really? That's the example you're going with.
Right. And not having any of them prevents using them to start a fire. If you handwave gear, in most non-absurd example, then you're always going to have something to start the fire. That's the point. That explicitly prevents skilled play. Skilled play is not "we get to do the thing regardless but get to describe it happening in different ways based on what we wrote down." Skilled play is thinking ahead and spending limited resources (gold, carrying capacity, etc) to decide what you have ahead of time, then having to improvise in the moment with what's already on your sheet. Having a "anything you need" set of ambiguous gear short circuits that.
Yes, exactly. Ambiguous "have anything you need" items in your equipment explicitly prevent that. The players don't need to check their gear, come up with a creative solution, and try to solve the problem when they can just point to an "anything gear" button on the character sheet. Unless, of course, you as the referee go wildly out of your way to orchestrate bizarre scenarios where they have no relevant equipment at all. Far, far easier to simply have the players track their actual gear and learn to use it creatively.
