What he's clearly not interested in is "exploration" (of deserts, of NPCs, etc) which carries in itself no story or thematic heft.
Again, I understand that. What you continually ignore is that Hussar is never in any position to judge whether the exploration of the desert or the NPCs has story and thematic heft. In order for Hussar to make that judgment, he has to be able to read the DM's mind and accurately see the future - both of which are beyond his ability. He has no idea what ties to the story and game theme the exploration will have, and by refusing it he may very well be refusing the most interesting parts of the story. Indeed, this is true even if we are playing BW. And the problem I have is by having this opt out stance where he signals the DM at the meta level, he's implicitly forcing the DM to defend his decisions on the meta-level. In other words, he's demanding that the DM provide spoilers, which isn't fair to the DM (since reveals are a big part of what makes DMing fun), spoils the story (surprise being a huge part of what makes stories interesting), and is in fact a type of munchkiny power gaming.
But wanting time spent RPGing to deal with stuff that matters to the players strikes me as emintently reasonable. As I said upthread, there is no inherent virtue to the exploration-oriendted play of RPGs.
Maybe, but there is no way of knowing whether or not the thing he wants to skip doesn't in fact address whatever the players points of engagement are. How does he _know_ that what happens isn't related to the quest? Again, in the case of a B2 game, the process of recruiting henchmen immediately addresses the larger quest, 'Defeat the temple of chaos', because of the presence of the spy in the Keep. Even arguing about the skip OOC will almost certainly reveal to a savvy player the presence of a spy, spoiling the reveal and potential surprises in the story.
Subject to provisos about keeping everyone at thet able engaged, why not? That's what "say yes or roll the dice" means.
That is great in theory, but this is a lousy lousy way of approaching the game in practice. How do we know what keeps everyone at the table engaged? If we take a vote on what everyone wants, there are immediate huge issues. First of all, we are potentially pitting players against each other at an OOC level. We are risking table conflict. But even more likely, we are actually not getting honest results from the poll. If a player wants to explore the desert, but sees that the majority isn't interested, he's likely to just keep quiet to avoid putting pressure on his friends. Personality is going to become a big issue too. Often at the table you have different degrees of force of personality among the players. One player may have an agressive forceful personality, even to the point of bullying players (intentionally or unintentionally). Other players may be shy, have self-esteem issues, or simply be the sort that always lets other people have their way out of a misguided sense of honor. If we leave up to player concensus what happens, we are almost certainly not actually going to make everyone happy. What we will instead see is a certain percentage of players always getting their way and a certain percentage never having their gaming needs satisfied. It's often a much better and fairer approach to always have a 'buffet', where noone gets their preferred engagement all the time, but everyones needs are met in the long run.
In some systems, with formal flags, you can tell. In 4e, for instance, the player might ask if they can make killing the Grell a Quest, for which they would then earn XP.
BS. That's a table convention. Fourth edition doesn't play that way by default. In other contexts I've seen plenty of complaints about 4e's quest XP as a tool to disempower players and force them to do what the DM wants them to do. To the extent that you can treat players requests for quest XP as a formalism of 4e, you could say the same thing about every game system.
And he is saying that spending time resolving something that does not, in and via its resolution, speak meaningfully to the players, is not (for him) a worthwhile act of roleplaying. It's a waste of time. And for my part, I agree.
Again, this ignores the fundamental issue. Hussar cannot know prior to engaging what is actually engaging. Hussar is working on assumptions. I can raise plenty of counter examples to anything you might claim. We simply cannot dismiss the recruitment of NPCs or the exploration of the desert as being irrelevant to, as BW would describe them, the characters Instincts and Beliefs. Whatever the player and character goals are, we can make the exploration relevant to them. And it could be that for reasons the player cannot yet know, they are exceptionally relevant. I'm stating that Hussar's opt out behavior is fundamentally contrary to that. It could be he has a lousy DM, and that is what is motivating his desire to be both player and DM, to both set the goals and how we address those goals, and that's a different topic. But to claim that a player can know whether a scene addresses this goals without playing it, is just BS.
Are you aware that there are major RPG systems, like Burning Wheel, that have mechanics for dealing with precisely this issue? For instance, in BW the GM can suggest to a player that it is time to change a Belief because the current Belief has been worked out as far as it will go; also the group as a whole can vote to add or remove traits from a PC.
Again, BS. That's not a mechanic, and to extent that it is a mechanic we can do that in every gaming system. The only differences between BW and say D&D on this matter is that BW formal 'blesses' such OOC negotiation, but we can do that OOC negotiation without the discussion in the game books blessing it. For example, in D&D what you describe in practice occurs a lot, with DM's suggesting to the player that perhaps their alignment doesn't really reflect how they are wanting to play their character. A table in D&D can vote as to whether to allow a player to change the allocation of skill points or feats or known spells, and at many tables DMs allow this if the player is disatisfied with his previous selections. At my own table, the player failed to realize that 'Craft' required a speciality. At one point in the game when it would have been useful, he successfully argued that he should have Craft (Butchering). Nothing you describe is a rule. Guidelines and methodologies aren't the same as rules.
Because it's boring. If you like, he's objecting to the methodology, and expressing a preference for "say yes or role the dice". But in fact what he's decribed - playing out the hiring via real time interviews - is not the received methodology for recruting hirelings in D&D. It depends a bit on edition, but in classic D&D at least it is completely within the text and spirit of the rules to hve the recruitment of mercenaries consist in a reaction roll followed by the deduction of the appropriate amount of gold from the character sheet.
Yes and no. Classic D&D has extended mechanisms for determining what hirelings and henchmen are available to hire and mechanisms for relating gold expenditure to the number and type of henchmen available. But such henchmen are also described through a random process which generates for them different abilities and different alignments. It would be perfectly possible once the DM responds to the desription of what the player does to recruit henchmen and how much he spends to roll forward without indicident eight days (the time required to get the maximum number of respondents) and have the DM say, "Ok, 10 persons show up looking for employment.", and have the player conduct the interview by saying, "Ok, I'll just take the lot.", but in doing so the PC is expressedly taking on the risk of not having conducted a more thurough interview. If the player wanted to take on that risk, I too would be perfectly fine with it. However, he now has 10 persons of unknown disposition along for the ride and that likely will have consequences, and he has by his propositions blessed that outcome so he cannot reasonably argue about it. It won't stop a typical 'disguise outcomes as proposition' dysfunctional gamer from arguing for a retcon when 4 turn out to be Chaotic Evil with their own agenda, but it will at least give me a defense against that garbage.
In D&D there is a clear response to this, though - if your CHA is low pay more gp! (Just as, if your Smithing skill is low, you have to pay gp to get your weapons.)
In D&D, there is a limit to what gold gets you. It's not a pure replacement for charisma. For example, in AD&D charisma limited maximum henchmen loyalty.
I can't get behind the idea that, because a PC has low CHA, this would be a reason to drag the player through extended recruitment scenes.
No, again, no one gets 'dragged' through extended recruitment scenes. No one has to engage with a scene even if it is extremely relevant. As I said, "Ok, whatever, we take the lot.", is a valid IC proposition. However, there is a consequence to 'opting out', and everyone does get 'dragged' to every scene which is potentially relevant to the ultimate outcome.
Because one is exciting and the other is boring. The purpose of leisure time is leisure. The prupose of engaging in an entertaining pursuit is entertainment. In a good RPG experience, time is spent doing entertaining things (like, perhaps, wrecking havoc on the hated grell with your newly-hired muscle) and not on boring things (like, perhaps, interviewing 12 NPCs in real time for a mercenary job; or spelling out and resolving in intimate detail the crossing of a desert on a giant arthropod; or resolving in detail, down to how scrubbing takes place witout inducing blisters, the way in which the PCs keep their clothes laundered and relatively free of mites and fleas).
Those things aren't remotely comparable. If PCs acquire mites and fleas (perhaps searching the Ogres bedding for treasure), we dont' have to RP out every minute of how they scrub their clothes, bathe, and wring them out. However, we might in fact declare that they at some point _do_ launder their clothes, and that this potentially has consequences both good (no more skin parasites, reduced chances of getting a disease) and bad (wandering monster check while on the stream bank carrying for their gear). However, this scene rarely played out in any games I've ever been in, isn't remotely comparable to playing out the details of crossing the desert on the back of a giant arthropod. One task is mundane and the details of which are of little consequence (at most they involve a skill check, a wandering monster check, and a sentence or two of narration involving 30 seconds of play). Those other is heroic, adventurous, and has details that are likely to be of great consequence. If the DM knows that there are no details of consequence, he is perfectly free to resolve this as at most a skill check, a wandering monster check, and as sentence or two of narration involving 30 seconds of play. But the player cannot reasonably demand that of a DM because the player cannot know whether the complications the DM foresees are ultimately going to be relevant and engaging. A good DM is always going to make the details of any scene he frames relevant and engaging. Sometimes he may fail in that. Sometimes novice DMs are bewildered when something unexpected happens and can't figure out how to reframe things in an interesting way. Sometimes the players may fail to engage for faults that lie with them rather than the DM. I have quite often seen this sort of 'outcome as proposition' player that Hussar has described used to bully novice DMs in a way that destroys rather than enhances interest and engagement. But under no theory of RPGs that you have proposed can I see justification for this unilateral 'opt out' behavior. It's not skillful play from a player even under the terms of BW, much less D&D.
Take the example of the henchmen recruitment. Hussar describes this as the DM 'insisting we play out the interviews'. I'm almost willing to bet that's inaccurate or at least a half-truth. It's pretty much impossible to force players to have IC conversations. Sometimes I wish I could, but you can't. What I gather the DM was insisting on was the players choose which of the perspective hirelings that they take with them and that they meet whatever hurdles are involved in hiring the hireling (the hirelings terms). If the players ICly blessed the hiring of each henchmen by simply beginning the interview with, "Ok, you'll do. How much do you want?", the whole affair probably would have concluded in 5 minutes with all the hirelings hired. The real truth of the matter was that Hussar didn't want to do that because he understood the stakes that the DM was putting up. The fact that the DM had narrated interviews meant that the NPCs were varied had motivations and weren't stock, and he or at least some of the other players weren't willing to assume the risk without full interviews. In other words, the DM had tried to make the hiring process meaningful and Hussar was upset by this because he basically wanted to dictate to the DM what the abilities and personalities of the henchmen were - for obvious reasons. Hussar almost certainly would have chosen to have reasonably capable utterly loyal henchmen eager to fight to the death for the sake of party scraps. That he in fact did play through the interviews indicates he was motivated to obtain that result sufficiently that he wasn't willing to assume the risk of any other result. I may fault the DM for failing to make that interesting, which suggests that the NPC's weren't as well realized as they could have been, but I can't fault the DM for doing it. Frankly, I'd like to hear the DM's take on the session. Even if they were playing BW, maybe especially if they were playing BW, the playing out of the interviews could have been a very important complication that plays on the characters beliefs, instincts, faith and so forth. In BW, I might for example have had a candidate show up visibly pregnent and tell the players she needed the money in order to support her baby. Or if that didn't engage the players chosen beliefs, I'd pick something else equally provocative. Ok, scene framed, deal with it.
