The PCs' goal is in the city. The players' goal is to have a fun game engaging with their PCs' goal. That means interacting with the city in various ways to realise the goal.
I think what many of us don’t get (I know I don’t get it) is this seeming “proximity to the city” link. The only difference, fundamentally, between the desert and the siege is that we are closer to the goal.
Let’s add some detail to the example. We want to secure the blessings of, for purposes of an analogy, the Pope of our D&D world. We know that the Pope is in a city which lies within a desert which is across the ocean from us. In order to meet our goal (secure the blessing of the Pope), we need to:
- Travel to a port;
- Hire or obtain passage on a ship;
- Travel on said ship to the other side of the ocean;
- Travel through the desert to the city;
- Travel within the city to the “Vatican”
- Secure an audience with the Pope;
- Persuade the Pope to give his blessing
Quick & dirty summary. The last is clearly the encounter we are focused on to achieve our goal, so that one is clearly relevant. The rest can be as relevant or cut scene as we want to make it. Travel to the port, across the ocean, through the desert and through the city can all include challenges between us and our destination. Hiring a ship and securing an audience may be a challenge equal to, or even greater than, securing a blessing once we have gained that audience. However, it seems like you and Hussar consider (a) through (d) worthwhile, and (e) through (g) relevant.
I can make (b) include the life story of the ship’s captain, and (f) include the life story of the secretary to the Pope, and it seems the latter would be relevant and the former not so. I can include encounters on the way to the port, over the ocean, through the desert and within the city, yet for some reason the last will be deemed “relevant” and the others not so. If I place a siege around the Vatican City, this is very relevant. Yet the exact same scene around the port, I expect, would be perceived negatively.
You classify the desert as “just geography”, but so are all the other buildings and occupants of the city – if I made the Pope a hermit on a remote mountain peak, you would not have to go through those distractions to secure your goal. All of these challenges can relate to the securing of the Pope’s blessing as much, or as little, as the GM designs them to be (and/or as player cleverness and creativity leverages them to be).
The context is this: a siege, per se, is a (relational) property of the city, and hence a resource that the players, via their PCs with, can interact with and leverage to affect the city.
If the GM chooses to make it so. It could just as easily be designed to be an obstacle between the PC’s and the city, just like the desert before it, and nothing more. Get past the desert or you cannot get to the city. Get past the besieging force or you cannot get to the city. Both are part of the environment, or scenery, or backdrop, or whatever you choose to call it. Both have initial relevance only because getting to our goal requires getting past them. The scenes making up our efforts to get past them can be as relevant, or as irrelevant, as we design them to be.
Maybe the players, back at that port city, decide that securing that blessing would be easier if there are hundreds of believers at their backs, so they organize a pilgrimage of hundreds to take with them – they have made the port more directly useful in attaining their goals. Maybe the port is simply a backdrop dismissed with “you arrive at the port and hire a ship – mark off X gold”. But just as easily, the siege could be dismissed with “you arrive at the guard post and bribe the guard to let you pass to the city – mark off X gold”. Neither enjoys the intrinsic
prima facie relevance you attribute to one but not the other.
I guess both a pit trap at the start of a dungeon, and the armour on the black knight in the centre of the dungeon, are obstacles to defeating the black knight, but for a group whose goal is to engage the black knight it's pretty clear to me why the pit trap might be an annoying distractin but the armour not. There's a reason that DM advice books spend more ink cautioning against more-or-less random traps than they do against armouring the black knight.
The flaws in this analogy are addressed by JC. I see the siege more like a locked door at the chamber of the Black Knight, or just moving the pit trap to the hallway outside his door from the entry hall. It is closer geographically and nearer the desired encounter, but it is no more thematically linked, neither is it any more relevant to defeating the black knight. That scroll of Heat Metal we found three levels ago carried by a random monster, which our spellcaster reads off at the start of combat, is far more relevant to achieving our goal, despite the fact that the GM had not even created the Quest to Defeat the Black Knight when he randomly rolled up that scroll, and everyone at the table had forgotten it until half an hour ago when the player read down his character sheet looking for whether he had a silk or a hemp rope, and stumbled on it.
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N'raac, this is the answer to your question.
OK, let us proceed with the assertion that nothing is relevant until the players make it relevant. We will skip all that fails this definition of “relevant”, as you wish. Do we assume all the PC’s are relevant, or skip the ones Hussar is not acquainted with? He does not know about them, so I doubt he will ask question, expend resources or state that he wants to speak with them. But let’s assume he asks each player in turn about their character, so they pop into existence, fully formed, in game.
Now we have a handful of PC’s standing in nothingness, because the players have expressed no interest in any aspect of their surroundings. What next?
You can tell the players aren't invested in the desert crossing because they're doing their best to make it take as little time and effort at the table as possible.
I find that, when engaging in combat, the players try to take the opponent down using their abilities to resolve the combat with as little time and effort (and resource consumption) as possible. I do not take that to mean they aren’t invested in, or interested in, the combat. I take that as playing the characters as they would logically act. The PC’s, I suspect, have no desire to encounter a Kraken on their shipboard voyage, scorpions in the desert or an annoying functionary denying them access to the Pope. Yet, if they look up and say “Hey, we should seek the blessing of the Pope in our quest”, and the GM responds with “OK, you travel to a port, hire a ship, sail across the ocean, travel through the desert, secure an audience with the leader of your religion, persuade him of the merits of your Quest and he blesses it. Mark off 3,500 gp for all the travel costs and add 3 years to your ages”, the players are unlikely to see that as having been a great game session.
Yet they stated a goal, and they achieved it, with none of those distractions in between to bore them. As John Lennon said, though, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. My preference is a game with some life.
This has now morphed to "only a desert" instead of an engaging and relevant nomad encounter. Please, can we try to make them both relevant? That's what you suggest GMs do, I believe. Let's at least use the hypotheticals that way.
Exactly. It is “only a desert” exactly as the siege is “only a siege” and the city “only a bunch of streets, buildings and people”.
But, I don't see how this relates to Hussar wanting to skip the desert for being irrelevant before he knew what the desert might hold (or if it was relevant). You can tell me the desert is "only sand" all you want, but it's not what I've been using as a comparison, and the "nomad" example has been being used for pages and pages now. I'm not going to change the parameters to accept your generalization when my example shows that it doesn't need to be that way. As always, play what you like
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