I'm sorry, not seeing much of a difference here. "I'll play what I want to play and screw everyone else at the table" is the extreme of what you're talking about. Same as, "I'll play what I want to play and everyone else should skip to what I want" is the extreme of my position.
Agreed - we end up discussing extremes.
And that's where we differ. No, I do not believe that that's the GM's job. That is the table's job. It is certainly something I expect from all of my players. I am not a babysitter. I am not standing on top of the pyramid doling out enjoyment packets to the masses. I believe in a much, much more democratic table.
"Democratic" and "we must scene shift when I demand a scene shift" strike me as dissimilar. Your examples focus on yourself and the GM, and despite repeated hints that we should scene shift to the views of the other players, I still have no insights in that regard. Were they engaged? Were they asleep? Despite claiming you prioritize their fun, you have not provided any indication you were aware of their enjoyment of th scenes you demanded to skip.
But, rolling this back to player creativity, I see this type of authoritative GMing as stifling creativity. The players know that the GM will take any creative idea and force a number of restrictions on it, forcing the table to spend considerable time resolving a creative idea. Players quickly learn not to bother because they aren't interested in wasting that much table time. The cost/benefit ratio is not high enough to justify the attempt.
Where I would see "OK, it happens, now what?" as a dismissal of a creative suggestion. If I say "we kill the Grell", the GM does not respond "OK, the Grell is dead. What now?" We roll for initiative, we roll to hit and damage, the Grell actively opposes us and eventually, we either succeed or fail in killing the Grell. We play it out. Again, I suspect you would not be happy if, after recruiting your hirelings, the GM said "OK, you return to the Grell's location and slay it. What now?" I rather suspect you wanted to play out the combat. Even if it "wasted" table time.
If I know that the DM is going to spend an hour or more when I try to hire hirelings, I'm not going to try to hire hirelings. If I know that the DM is going to drop in stuff that we will need later then I will not try to bypass his breadcrumb trail because doing so will simply result in failure. Players will take the path of least resistance. They'll explore the desert, not because they are particularly engaged in the desert, but because they know that if they don't, the DM will simply punish them later by making tasks much more difficult/impossible and they'll just have to backtrack any way.
Once again, you are assuming that the GM wanted to run hours of boring, irrelevant desert exploration, and there will be something useful, relevant and/or engaging in the desert only if you choose to skip the desert. Is it unfair of the GM to make it harder to assassinate the Duke if you decide on a frontal assault on his stronghold rather than investigating to determine a means to get inside the stronghold without facing its defenses full on?
The point is not that it doesn't happen in the fiction. The point is that it dones't need to be played out at the table.
To me, a lot of the reason we game is enjoyment of, and desire to emulate, the fiction. We want our characters to do cool things, like they do in the movies or in the novels.
I want to know a bit more, but as a player this would tend to irritate me, yes. If the players have made it pretty clear that they're not interested in desert shenanigans, why is the GM bringing things back to the desert?
Why have the desert there at all? As a player, I want it to be gentle rolling hills with the occasional peaceful stream. Change it - there's no magic that says a desert must be there.
The worst example of the sort of GMing you're describing (and apparently endorsing) that I have personally experienced involved a 2nd ed AD&D game 15 or so years ago. The group was fairly large (6 or 7 players) and had well-established characters with a lot of intraparty relationships based on various forms of connection to the gameworld, including a prophecy that the GM was in control of and that seemed to be the focus of the game.
Around 8th or 9th level the GM, without any foreshadowing within the fiction, nor any out-of-game discussion, moved the whole game 100 years into the future, via some sort of temporal teleport. Suddenly all the relationships that the players had built up between their PCs and the gameworld, and all the work we had done trying to make sense of the prophecy in relation to our PCs and the gameworld and those relationships, was invalidated.
I left the game not long after, and I don't believe that it lasted much longer after that. In effect, the GM killed it off. My impression is that he had lost his sense of control over his own backstory, but wasn't prepared to follow the players' leads, and so in effect "rebooted" things so he could start with a blank slate.
That sounds a lot more like changing the desert to a rolling field than proceeding with the implications of the desert's existence, to me. The biggest difference is that you liked the current setting, rather than detesting it, when the GM pulled the rug out from underneath you.
Does the player with the Horse Lord Ranger have to spend more time at the table doing horse-y stuff to get the benefits? Or is one benefit of being a Horse Lord Ranger that you get good horses without having to spend time at the table? I think different groups have different views.
It comes down to verisimilitude. The Horse Lord has abilities and background that make it far less likely he would select that lame horse. Having it fobbed off on a character who has made it clear he just wants to get a horse ASAP and isn’t spending a lot of time seems far more reasonable.
However, I come back to which approach you prefer – the players get the choice of putting some effort into locating good horses, or they each scratch off 25 gold and the GM rolls to see which one of them got the lame horse? This assumes none of the characters have any special horse-related abilities – again, I can’t see that Horse Lord being so readily fooled.
Hussar has been prettly clear that, by summoning the centipede, he's trying to get the benefits of a desert crossing (ie being in City B) with less rather than more table time. I say, in those circumstances, give it to him! It's not as if there are no complications to throw at the players that they are interested in, such that we have to fill our play time resolving situations that they're not interested in!
Again, I see two issues. The first is the broader table – do all the players want to skip the desert, or does just Hussar want to skip the desert? In the former case, there is a disconnect between what the GM wants to run and what the players want to play. In the latter, there is a disconnect between what Hussar wants and what the rest of the table wants. Who mentioned a preference for a “more democratic table”?
Second is whether the means selected actually resolves the challenge. If I tell you I want to sneak into the Duke’s stronghold, and I will use a Potion of Invisibility to slip past anything and everything to get to the Duke’s chambers, will that get me through a locked portcullis, past bloodhounds in the courtyard and let me find the Duke’s specific chamber, with a guarantee he waits helplessly within, or does the fact that Invisibility may not override every challenge to get to the Duke, and has a time limit, get considered? Hey, I’m not engaged by this infiltration scene – I want to cut to the chase and assassinate the Duke.
And, this, right there, in a nutshell is exactly what I mean by punishing the players for not jumping through the DM's hoops. The DM automatically takes the worst possible interpretation and punishes the players by having his horse be lame. It's not even a die roll, where you could at least argue for impartiality. No, instead, the player is automatically cheated by the horse trader.
You assume that the horse becomes lame because the players decided to fast track the horse purchase, and don’t even consider the possibility there was a lame horse for sale from the outset. You keep telling us that the cut scene option you favour is reasonable as long as we don’t assume the players are dicks, but every comment you make on a GM’s action presumes he’s a dick. Weren’t you mentioning double standards a while back?
If the player did check the horse, and succeeded, would it still be lame? I doubt it. If the player played through the DM's checks, the horse would be perfectly fine. The only reason that the horse is lame is because the DM wants to force the player to play through whatever the DM wants him to play through.
Why is it impossible a check would have revealed a lame horse? Again, you are assuming not only an adversarial GM, but one happily cheating on even the most mundane matters. Why would anyone continue to play with such a GM?
Why is there no chance that the hurried player gets lucky and buys a really great horse? N'raac, would you ever give a better than average horse to a player who skipped over your checks?
Where did I say there is no chance the player gets lucky? That said, I find it a lot more likely that the typical merchant fobs off inferior goods on the unknowing and hasty purchaser than that he sells him a premium product without obtaining a premium price, so I doubt the odds of “lame horse” and “amazing horse” are equal.
This is why I get "shirty" about this sort of thing. The DM will always choose the most punishing interpretation whenever the player doesn't jump through the DM forced hoops. "Oh, you didn't check out the desert, so now you fail at the city despite having no knowledge that what you needed was in the desert in the first place. I guess next time you'll play the way I want to play won't you?" says this style of DMing.
So, again, all the players are assumed to act in the utmost good faith, but the GM is a jerk looking for any excuse to screw over the players. Is that how you GM? It’s not how you tell us you GM, but I find it hard to believe that your own style is unique amongst the gaming world.
The only person I see choosing the most punishing interpretation of everything is you.
Yup.
N'raac's example is a bit strained, because he proposes a ludricrously extreme example of a player initiating the purchase of a horse but then demanding no IC time resource be spent on it and deliberately forgoing his skill check to appraise a horse. But even then, N'raac doesn't suggest that the player automatically gets a lame horse, only that in this case a lame horse might be a reasonable result.
I’d play that scene out as a player in some instances. I’m in a rush to get out of town (for whatever reason), my character is trying to get that horse ASAP, and I may even say “so he’s not being too careful about what horse he gets”. I would expect characters who are not rushed for some reason would be less time-sensitive and more careful checking the quality of the product, but if you're telling me "I just want to get a new horse ASAP so we don't waste any time before we go back and get revenge on that Grell", it sounds to me like you're not focused on assessing the quality of the horse.
But then, I’m the guy who, in the first session running a new berserker warrior, when asked “How are you facing down the Umber Hulk” responded “Looking it square in the eye, as any proper warrior would”. I’m still amazed he gave me the saving throw (and somewhat satisfied it came up ‘1’).
D&D play gets plenty of scene trunction and cut to the action, and plenty of just proposition and resolution without fortune. 
