Umm, a grell isn't exactly that big of a monster that having half a dozen spear carriers wouldn't be helpful. Grell are CR 3. Six guys with longspears would make about as much difference as a decent Summon Monster 4 spell granting me 5 Celestial Giant Bees. Is it going to make the fight a cakewalk? Nope, but it's certainly going to help.
OK, then there is another substantive difference between your six hirelings and your scroll (which you previously indicated were functionally identical). You don't have to worry about spending a full round to cast your spell and having it fail, since you're obviously not at a level where a L4 spell is in your repertoire if the CR3 Grell is giving you grief.
And I come back to Celebrim's point - if they are significant to the plot, then cardboard cutouts seem a disservice to the game. You clearly disagree. You want easily hired, easily disposed of combat muscle. I'd rather have those fully realized NPC's - and maybe the one(s) that catch on should be recurring NPC's, and not one shot cannon fodder.
Which is the point of getting half a dozen hirelings in the first place. Yup, the GM wanted all this persona and stuff. I simply did not care. I certainly did not care enough to spend about an hour and a half of game time screwing around getting these guys, which is about what it took to roleplay through the ten or so interviews, knocking off about four of them, and then taking the best 6 of the lot.
I keep hearing what you want and what the GM wants, which appear to be in opposition to each other. What I'm not hearing is what the other players wanted. Again, if they were on the same page as you, I find it hard to see how 90 minutes of game time was used up, but if they weren't, then you were the odd man out, not the GM.
My point is that it should have taken about 6 minutes.
You keep saying this, and similar things, as though they are objectively true rather than matters of opinion. Were the other players choking back yawns of boredom, or engaged in the process of evaluating these potential hires? Maybe they had no desire to have half a dozen faceless hirelings backing up the team and adding hiring processes and personalities to your faceless drones made this something they had an interest in, rather than some tangent one player wanted to pursue, for them. I don't know where between the two extremes reality falls but, again, I find it hard to believe 90 minutes went by with no player involvement.
And my point has always been the same. What difference does it make. I DID NOT WANT TO PLAY THAT OUT Can I say that any clearer. Is there some part of that you don't understand? What difference does it make why I didn't want to screw around detailing how we make saddles, making skill checks to ride the creatures, etc. etc.?
It obviously makes a difference to at least some of us, as the question of why Hussar (player, character, group or whatever) was in such a hurry to get to the city keeps coming up. You summoned a creature to use as a mount. It hardly seems unrealistic that rules for using a creature as a mount would then come up. I assume the hirelings had hit points, rolled to attack, and had rolls made against them when they were hired for combat.
Now, if this turned into a "roll ride checks every 40 feet - failure means the game stops" then I would agree that I don't want to play that out either. However, I think Celebrim already said, pages back, that this would not be his approach, as the checks should be pretty easy (at least with a few simple precautions) until and unless something was happening in story. Your response was that the centipede should be able to easily outrun pretty much anything in the desert, so there should be no encounters. If you were trying to say "skip to the relevant encounters", rather than "fast forward past the desert in its entirety; I want to be in the city NOW and I don't care what waits between", then that's not how you came Across.
And if you are indeed so convinced that the only worthwhile activity is in the city, the rest of us have asked why that is repeatedly, so you've had every invitation to share that with us.
You are taking the position that no matter what, I should play whatever it is that the DM has put in front of me. I should be grateful that he has put anything at all in front of me and play it out to his satisfaction.
Screw that.
You are once again taking what is said well past what I am saying. I am saying that simple dismissal of the scene without giving it a chance is assuming the GM wants to run a stupid, minutia focused campaign of no interest to the players, and I question why a player would make that assumption. You want a game that gets to and through the campaign quickly? Get rid of die rolls entirely and the GM can just narrate what happens. That will be a lot faster. No "90 minutes interviewing hirelings", but no "tactical combat between Grell and PC's with 6 longspearmen" to play out either. That probably occupies no more than 5 or 10 minutes in a movie, less if the Grell is not a key encounter, so taking longer than that in game fails your standards, does it not? The GM should just narrate the slaying of the Grell (or that it left - both would be equally engaging at this point) and we can move on and get to the "good stuff", which always seems to be at least a scene further on.
Which has been my point all the way along. GET TO THE POINT. Escape from the Imperial Star Destroyer, Land in Desert, Spend half an hour of game time trying to explain how you are keeping sand out of your circuits, Get Captured By Jawas. Which of those do you think I would want to play through? Some people want to play through all of them, and that's fantastic. I don't.
I don't see anyone but yoou arguing that we're going to devote half an hour to minutia. You don't seem to see how some elements you consider minutia (like the other characters, even NPC's, actually having a personality) may be considered relevant, even important and satisfying, to other players. You keep making this "Hussar vs the DM" - despite repeated questions on whether you were simply saying what all the players were clearly experiencing, or whether you were interrupting the game every few minutes to ask "Are we there yet?"
For a story as simplistic as the New Hope story, there isn't really any reason you couldn't finish it in ~12 hours of game play.
Given Hussar wanted under 2 hours, we're still a long way off. Those space battles are a lot easier to show than roll.
I'm not sure what is going to address your need for epiphinany, closure, etc. in a game. My sense is that you need to stop playing campaigns or lengthy adventure paths and settle on a more episodic format - television rather than movies. A television series like 'Babylon 5' or 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' with this fully concieved multiseason grand story arcs aren't going to work for you. Intead, you need to be looking to a campaign done more like 'Star Trek' - 45 pages of script and then wrap up the story. Repeat as long as you can keep interest in the format. You can't rush the telling of a story and expect it to work. You need that time to develop the story. I'd be seriously worried that by going 'full thortle' through stories you wrap up campaigns without actually achieving the emotional satisfaction you were searching for at the destination.
I think your examples show well how games tend to be more like TV shows than movies, in that they appear in smaller chunks, resolved more slowly over time. Blockbuster action episodes are interspersed with more character-driven and highlighting episodes. Or we can go to the old Star Trek "Alien of the Week; wrap it up; everything is the same next week" format. Two valid choices.
But did you think about the DM and what he wanted to play out or is he just the screen monkey to dance for your tune. You've been posting a lot about how he should follow your clues. Where's your consideration for him?
Add to this the other players, and I think yo have the counterargument summed up quite succinctly. The game is supposed to be an enjoyable leisure activity for everyone at the table.
As I noted upthread in relation to "Big Bads" and "MacGuffins", it seems to me that you may be making certain assumptions about RPG play which are not universally shared.
I am forced to use generic examples as I have been refused any specific details. I also find "here's the big wide world - go see what your characters discover" a poor approach to game play. Wandering aimlessly for several hours of game time hoping to come across something of interest seems much more akin to Hussar's "playing out of irrelevant minutia" concerns than a solution for them.
I don't really see how this relates to my example, which was of reading a different story before finishing the current one.
So do you read every novel cover to cover in one sitting or do you, perhaps, look at the clock and say "Oh, time to leave for the game", take a break from this story and go to the game? When a chapter of the book ends with Character A in a cliffhanger, do you read the next chapter, dealing with Character B's separate activities, or skip ahead to the chapter that deals with Character A's dilemma? Not everything in life or in game needs to move in linear fashion, nor should it.
I don't understand how this relates to the BW example scenario "The Sword", which does not have any randomly generated personalities. The PCs presented for play have been written for very clear and obvious purposes.
I'm not trying to relate anything to a scenario, but to your description of discovering the personality of the character by playing it. If that does not analogize well to the scenario you use as an example, perhaps you should revisit your description of how it plays.
