Where are you “more likely to meet genies or pixies”? In the desert or forest that you explicitly don’t want to interact in any way because it’s booooooooring setting wank?
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But if the entire campaign never leaves the Sultan’s palace, or all travel is by flying carpet so we never see the sand, it makes no difference that we are surrounded by a desert.
Maybe I'm unusual, but I can enjoy colour that doesn't figure as an immediate object of exploration.
In my 4e game, the existence of a fallen minotaur empire has been a recurring motif - minotaur ruins, minotaur statues, mintotaur tombs, etc. This also relates to the backstory of the dwarf PC, because the dwarves, after gaining their freedom from the giants, were tutored by the minotaurs. This is important in the game although it has not been an immediate object of exploration in play.
If I was playing a game with a Sultan, I would certainly expect the area to contain deserts and palm trees rather than snowfields and oak fore
How does moving the party, through space or through time, invalidate intra-party RP? Aren’t all the PC’s still there? Either the setting was important to this RP (in which case changing the setting has an impact) or it was not (in which case that RP is not invalidated by the fast forward).
The intraparty roleplay was in a context, and framed against story elements other than the PCs - feuds, loyalties, hopes, enemies etc. It was contextually embedded.
Part of the problem is that the battle against the grell really isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things.
I don't think this is Hussar's view of it.
My general view is that the players' judgement of what's important is the determinative one.
This assumes the recruits’ personalities, backstories, hiring stories and interaction is “nothing interesting”.
Again, I think this is something where the players' views are determinative.
The onus is on the GM to make it “not minutia”. If it is minutia, then it’s like buying gear in most games – shell out the gold, write down the gear and move on.
No disagreement with that! This is exactly how the desert and the hiring should have been handled, it seems to me.
So several were pretty much unimportant Redshirts, killed for illustration and colour and one was a guest star who had an actual impact on the action.
No. The ones who died fighting hobgolbins died fighting, and made a difference to the resolution - they both delivered damage and took it.
As a player, I want an enjoyable, challenging game.
I think everyone wants that.
But not everyone enjoys the same things. For some players, exploring the GM's setting is enjoyable in its own right. (On the current "new world for 5e?" thread, one poster said that his/her main enjoyment in an RPG is exploring the gameworld.) For others, they enjoy different things, like formulating and pursing PC goals. They want something more player driven.
What counts as a good game, or good GMing, for one sort of player might be a bad game, or bad GMing, for another. I know that when I was starting out as a GM, and tried to follow advice in Gygax's DMG and in old White Dwarf magazines - roughly, Gygaxian "skilled play" (and Lewis Pulsipher was the main White Dwarf advocate for that form of play) - my game was pretty ordinary.
Conversely, the more I've shifted towards a scene-framing approach that downplays exploration and emphasises player-cued situations, the better my game has become.
“Introducing complications” seems to include “to get to the city, you need to cross the desert – man versus nature” and “do you want to take the first six spearcarriers who come along, or do you want to interview them in more detail?” are both valid complications in the game, at least as I see them.
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A lot of reference to backstory (setting) influencing the game, rather than just providing colour, I think.
Introducing complications is a key GM role, in my preferred approach to play. The idea is to introduce complications that riff off the players, push them hard, respond to their cues, keep the game moving.
On my preferred approach, it's sufficient evidence that I've done a bad job, and failed to keep the game moving, when there are 90 minute sequences that the players are complaining about!
Though I don't use random generation in the way [MENTION=89537]Jacob Marley[/MENTION] described, the examples he gives - like closed gates or a city under siege - are closer to the sorts of complications I would use. They introduce tension and challenge into the situation the players' care about, rather than try to shift the focus of the game to something else that the players haven't signalled any interest in.
I don’t see where the GM has been advised to always tell the players up front exactly how each scene ties in.
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no trust, game fails.
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I think the deeper problem is that Hussar was unwilling or unable to extend that necessary trust at the outset
I guess I see the situation a bit differently. A GM who wants to cultivate trust should send clear signals. And a GM who frames scenes without clear signals runs the risk that they will fall flat.
Part of the measure of a GM, for me, is how they handle that sort of situation, and how they resond to it. [MENTION=53286]Lwaxy[/MENTION] gave a nice example upthread of how he dealt with it.
). It's our clue that we need to stop and reevaluate things. So all in all, it was helpful as it helps prevent sessions to go downhill now.
Oops. 
