You're doing what? Surprising the DM

[pemerton]

If we simply say "He buys a horse" with no chance of any issue - alll horses are identical - then that takes no time. If we say that the player gets a roll to see whether he avoids a nag or picks a winner, that's a roll, so we add some time at the table. If there is a chance of something going wrong, or a prospect of something going right, I suspect the players want some control over that destiny.

But there are a range of ways of giving the player control over that destiny. There are also a range of techniques for introducing complications. [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] had a much-discussed example on a thread last year - a failed Ride check results in the GM narrating the presence of a gorge blocking the PC's path. Similarly, a failed check might result in narrating a thrown shoe, or lameness, or something similar.

In those sorts of cases, the players' control over their destiny isn't determined by making them roleplay through the purchase of the horse - it's determined by the chioces they make, and the rolls they make, in the course of resolving a conflict.

NPC loyalty can be done soemwhat similarly. You don't play through the interviews - rather, you work out whether or not the NPCs are reliable via their morale checks at crunch-time (if you can find a way to make Sense Motive enhance those morale checks - not straightforward with D&D's "aid another" rules, but not hopeless either - then so much the better).

Generalising from the examples, there is a viable approach to play in which complications are narrated which presuppose prior events in the fiction with the PCs might have, but in fact didn't, interfere with. And that is legitimate GMing even though the players didn't play through that prior bit of ingame time. It requires judicious GMing, and (I think ) ample use of "fail forward", but it's far from impossible.

If you want to tell me they are unimportant, fine, but they will have no significant role in a battle if they are unimportant, will they?

This makes no sense to me. In classic D&D a 9th level fighter gets 100+ mercenary followers. These followers may play important roles in battle, but there is no assumption that the player will roleplay through the recruitment of any of them.

Hussar's hireling are hugely important to victory against the grell. But the details of their personalities, their backstories, the hiring process itself - those things are of no interest. They're almost certainly just colour - something the GM can use to enliven a bit of otherwise boring narration. The dwarf PC in my game had some NPC followers for a while, and while several got killed by hogboblins and their pet behemoth one of them - Gutboy Barrelhouse - became his herald. There was a bit of fun colour around Gutboy and his various predelictions and pretensions, but there was no illusion that it was serious stuff - but that the PC had a herald was serious stuff, and on multiple occasions game him a bonus to Diplomacy checks.

And again, if the GM wants to put the hirelings' loyalty into play there are many more interseting ways to do that than via job interviews. Maybe as the group approaches the grell's lair the PCs get a Sense Motive check to notice that one of their mercenaries is shaking with fear, thus creating an opportunity for a St Crispin's Day-style speech, or some corporal discipline, or whatever else the PCs want to do to shore up morale. There's certainly no need to take up 90 minutes of play before anything interesting happens!

If there are encounters where this will be relevant, then let's get the details up front - don't tell me when you need to make a Ride check that "Oh, I was tied to the centipede - how can I fall off" but be riding loosely on its back if a creature attacks. Just as Hussar assumes the GM will twist the circumstances, why should the GM assume the players will not try to retcon their actions to their advantage?

There are probably dozens of ways to handle this particular isue without requiring playing out the minutiae. BW Instincts are one way. Random "luck" die rolls are another that I often use at my table. In this particular scenario, a variant on a luck roll would be a Riding check - roll well and you're loosely on its back, roll poorly and your friends tied you down to stop you being a liability!

while I see a lot of potential for the characters to fall off the centipede, what will the consequences be? If they are limited to "get up, brush off dust, maybe summon new centipede, get back on and carry on", I see no point playing it out.

In what way then are you disagreeing with me or Hussar - playing it out is pointless.

If you wanted to entirely ignore the desert, that was definitely not the best choice because there are rules attached that everyone is obligated to play through regardless of whether they fail or succeed. He wasn't doing it because he wanted you to fail. He was doing it because the game demanded those checks based on the situation.

Or did it? I agree that the checks could have been handwaved by simply asking what everyone's Ride modifiers were then saying "Despite falling off the centipede several times and even having to tie someone to the centipede to keep them on, you make it to the city without much problem. You can roleplay the falls if you want." You had complete control of the centipede so it's not like falling off would have been a serious thing to worry about much less enough to keep wasting time on the checks.

I think you more-or-less answer your own question here.

The question of whether or not we are obliged to play those checks regardless of their interest to anyone at the table is itself a playstyle thing, and also a system thing. A system like Rolemaster, with rules for special successes and for critical failures, puts pressure on the group to use the resolution rules even when somewhat tedious, because otherwise you're not getting the full simulation experience that is one of the main points of using that system. Or to put it another way, Rolemaster as a system assumes that those who are using it enjoy engaging with the system itself, independent of the actual stakes of that engagement.

A system like BW is quite different - it is overtly "Say yes or roll the dice", so contemplates that much non-contentious stuff will be resolved by free rolepalying, but exactly the same sort of stuff might be resolved via dice rolls when something important to the players is at stake.

4e is a bit unsure in this respect - the PHB rules for skills tend to lean the Rolemaster way, but the DMG treatment and the Essentials treatment of skills, plus the frequent invocations of "say yes" in the DMG and DMG2, lean the BW way. The system certainly lends itself to the BW approach, because there are no mechancial features that push in favour of simulation via engaging the system as an end in itself.

I don't have enought experience with or knowledge of 3E to know which way it inclines on this matter.

If all you are interested is the action in City B, what difference does it make whether there is a desert or a pastoral setting to pass through, with no difficulties, challenges or time devoted, to get there?

Because it matters whether City B is Baghdad or Salisbury? Because I want to know whether I'm more likely to meet genies or pixies? Because I care about the diffrence between broadsowrds and scimitars, and between longbowmen on foot and mounted archers?

The colour of the backdrop is pretty fundamental to any RPGing, and perhaps especially so for fantasy RPGing. I'm really surprised that you even feel the need to ask this question.

If there is a difference between the two, then that difference should impact play. Otherwise, it's not a setting - it's just a backdrop with no substance at all, and it may as well be blank white space with a line every 10 feet.

Why? My PC being a man or a woman is, at least in my experience, almost never gong to affect play, at least mechanically. Does that make it irrelevant? Whether my PC is black or white, or (say) an elf of Rivendell or an elf of Lindon is almost never gonig to afffect play, at least mechanically. Does that make it irrelevant?

Upthread I (and Hussar) exaplained in some detail, particularly in reply to [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION], what we meant by saying that we are not particularly interested in setting as a focus of play. And you response to that seems to be to say, therefore you may as well not have any colour either! The gulf between colour - which is huge in fantasy RPGing - and setting as a focus of play in itself, is vast, and it's completely coherent to want one but not th other.

That the players interacted with the setting does not change it into something other than a setting. You seem to perceive "setting" as "useless flavour text".

What was lost in the game I described was a whole network of fictional relationships to that setting by and among the PCs, established by the players through play. If you want to call that "setting" be my guest, but you're still goint go have to recognise that that network of player-authored relationships is nothing like Hussar's desert as a setting, in which the players have no investment or stake at all.

What is important - what he did or why he did it?

Both. What he did I've now described three times (once originally, once in reply to Celebrim, once in reply to you). Why he did it I've also described, and that is very important. It tells me that, in his game, there is no point building up player-authored plot and story elements, because when they get to a certain point of actually mattering to and driving the game the GM will pull the plug on them. Hence there is no point in me playing his game.

Would it be all better if he did it because one of the players said "This whole Prophecy thing is getting stale, and I'm tired of wasting time interacting with all these NPC's - can't we cut scene to something else?" I hope a 100 year fast forward would meet the criteria of "once in a campaign, at most".

I don't know where the NPC thing came from - I emphasised in my description intra-party RP.

But would it make it better if a player had said "I'm sick of this player driven game - can we go back to some goo old-fashioned railroading?" No, it wouldn't, because I'm not interested in playing a railroad.

I know you're trying to draw an anaology to Hussar's case here, but I'm missing what it is. I don't see how fast-forarding through the GM''s desert at all resembles nuking the player-created elements of the story.

Out of curiosity, however, is it your view that the GM should have no control over the game/authority over the fiction, or that it should be equal to that of any other player, or the combined weight of all the players, or what? The GM is also there for leisure, and if it's no fun for the GM, there's no reason for him to stick around either, is there?

I've explained above my view of the GM's role, plus linked to a blog by Eero Tuovinen that explains it better than I can:

One of the players is a gamemaster whose job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications. . .

[The GM] needs to be able to reference the backstory, determine complications to introduce into the game, and figure out consequences. Much of the rules systems in these games address these challenges, and in addition the GM might have methodical tools outside the rules, such as pre-prepared relationship maps (helps with backstory), bangs (helps with provoking thematic choice) and pure experience (helps with determining consequences). . .

The most important common trait these games share is the GM authority over backstory and dramatic coordination . . . which powers the GM uses to put the player characters into pertinent choice situations.​

So yes, the GM has some - in fact, extensive - authority over the fiction. The GM also has an obligation to follow the players' leads in framing scenes according to dramatic needs, to have regard to player cues in introducing complications. If the GM wants to run a desert exploration, then, the GM shold frame it by reference to dramatic needs.

And if the GM's judgeent of the dramatic needs, and reading of the players' cues, misfires, then that is bad GMing, a mistake. Do it often and reliably enough and perhaps you're a bad GM.

In this thread at The Forge in 2006, a poster expressed worries about the relationship between GM authority over the fiction, players' desires to avoid or reframe scenes, and railroading. After a bit of to and fro, Ron Edwards reached this conclusion:

I think it has nothing at all to do with distributed authority, but rather with the group members' shared trust that situational authority is going to get exerted for maximal enjoyment among everyone. If, for example, we are playing a game in which I, alone, have full situational authority, and if everyone is confident that I will use that authority to get to stuff they want (for example, taking suggestions), then all is well. Or if we are playing a game in which we do "next person to the left frames each scene," and if that confidence is just as shared, around the table, that each of us will get to the stuff that others want (again, suggestions are accepted), then all is well.

It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the S[hared] I[maginary] S[pace] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.​

Hussar's complaint, as I read it and reframed in Edwards' terms, is that his GMs were not framing scenes that were worth anyone's time. And when efforts (like out-of-character suggestions, in character veneers of verismilitude, etc) were made to let the GM know where the good stuff was, the GM disregarded them. Hence, lacking trust in that respect, Hussar (perfectly reasonably in my view) left the game.

 

[JamesonCourage]

Just as a point about choosing the most punishing interpretation, let's recap shall we?

Well, later on in this, you ask if you made a mistake in your post, so I'll reply to your post. I doubt I'll get a reply on my feedback, but at least you'll know what I think.

In the centipede example, Celebrim would force several skill checks that the PC's are virtually guaranteed to fail.

Yes; this is "following the rules of the game", in my mind. If you can't feasibly mount the critter in time to get use of it, make the Ride checks to stay on it, hold onto it, if it's not actually fast enough to outrun everything (it's significantly slower than horses), etc., then using it without those checks is fine, but so is following the rules. Expecting your plan to bypass the rules isn't reasonable to expect at every table, while it's okay at some.

N'raac would have elements in the desert that are key to achieving our goals at the city, but without any reason for the players to actually try to search for those keys. After all, there is no way for the players to have known about the desert nomads, nor any prisoners they had beforehand. I'm still rather confused what N'raac would have done with a group with access to teleport or Overland Flight.

I'm not sure either. He might've been saying that he'd make things relevant if they came up, in the desert. If that's the case, then there'd be no problem with a Teleport spell.

In the Grell example, Celebrim would cause the group to fail off screen by having the grell just leave, even though the group is also forced to spend significant table time recruiting assistance in order to defeat the grell.

I thought Celebrim explicitly said that it's valid to roll skills to get the best result with the recruitment process? If so, there'd be no amount of significant table time recruiting them.

In the horse buying scenario, the player is forced to spend table time shopping for horses. If the player does not, there is a "chance" that the horse will be lame. I put that in scare quotes, because, IME, any DM who thinks this way is automatically going to have the horse be lame with an aha-gotcha moment.

I think others have mentioned your tendency to frame things as "players always have great intentions and skill, and GMs always have terrible intentions and skill", and this makes me want to agree -again- with that assessment.

Have I somehow made a mistake here? Are these not the rulings that Celebrim and N'raac are advocating?

I think you're looking at this from a Bill O'Reilly "yes or no" point of view, rather than looking at it as the fairly complex issue that it is. It's not terribly complicated, but there are nuances in the discussion.

@Jameson Courage - you brought up the idea of players skipping over other player's interesting scenes. IMO, this is not a very high chance, since most players are pretty willing to sit back and let other people have the spotlight. But, in every example in this thread, it's the spotlighted player who wants to skip forward, but the DM who is blocking that. Despite all of Celebrim's and N'raac's protestations, they have not put forward a single reason why another player at the table would want to play through these scenes. We've seen many, many examples of why the DM might want to play through things, but, the other players? Pretty much silence.

I've said why I, as a player, like playing out scenes I'm not invested in yet (like the desert), though I've explicitly said that's just a play style thing. If you've missed that, sorry.

But, you've also said that you should be able to skip scenes, if honestly and truly that bored. That's cool, but that will include scenes that other players are enjoying, right? That's what I brought up, and asked how you reconciled that with your "I don't put my fun ahead of theirs" statement. Because, if you do think you should be able to skip those scenes, it seems like you explicitly do.

But, that's not really what you asked for. You want an example, I guess? If that's the case, let me know. I've given one already that I can alter slightly, and it'll fit. I assume your objection will fade as soon as an example is given? As always, play what you like

 

[Lwaxy]

So what to do when players aren't happy with the scene, yet when you try to skip forward they don't really want to do that either? That's happened to me once and got me really surprised.

 

[pemerton]

So what to do when players aren't happy with the scene, yet when you try to skip forward they don't really want to do that either?

Like everything else it probably depends on context and details. But maybe the game has misfired and it's time to recalibrate, going into out-of-character discussion of what's working and what's not?

Or maybe you can you pick up on something that's unequivocally engaging to the players and just run with that, worrying about continuity and retcons later? The famous example from Chandler is a bunch of thugs kicking in the door and opening fire, but in D&D there are other options, like the PCs main nemesis suddenly flying in to attack them riding on a dragon's back.

Or even just tell the players that as their PCs walk down the street they see their nemesis across the road, ducking down an alley. How do the players respond? Follow their cues to try to reestablish their interest.

That's happened to me once and got me really surprised.

What did you do?

 

[Lwaxy]

In this situation, the PCs were in a remote mountain area after a plane shift. The players knew that there was something in these mountains they should eventually investigate - but decided that now was not the time. Made sense because 2 key PCs weren't there. So they started trekking down to the village they needed to get to, which was some distance away. Originally, I had planned for them to find and follow a bear which was to be a mysterious druid's companion (they instead managed to kill the bear), or alternatively come across a pack of wolves carrying backpacks for someone (they completely ignored the wolves because they wanted to hurry on with their current mission). And for one of the PCs who was due for a divine gift, I had several opportunities for him to find a special item, including a fall into a river upon crossing a damaged rope bridge. All he had to do was drag himself into the underwater cave but nooo... the flying mage rescued him. It went on like that. Then I had them come across the tracks of a major military force marching towards a keep that was somewhat important to the story. No interest because it would slow them down.

When I noticed the players getting bored, I skipped 2 nights ahead, which got them grumpy because "you never know what can happen in the mountains" and "the surroundings could hold some surprises." So I told them that they should just assume they had ignored or missed about 5 other leads and shoved them towards the brigand attack - which was supposed to be only a minor interlude but I just doubled their numbers and added a witch to the attackers. That got them interested again and after that they were fine with just assuming they arrived later that evening.

I was told afterwards that they thought they were supposed to be focused on the mission they wanted to be done with. Of course, this was after they had requested a bit of a shake up to the current story line (which had been spotlighting missing PCS). Well, you can lead a PC to the clues... lol

Luckily this was the only time that happened. Until now, anyway.

 

[Celebrim]

In this situation, the PCs were in a remote mountain area after a plane shift.

I'm beginning to see a pattern here. All these scenes falling apart after plane shifting are making me think that the spell is extremely disruptive to a campaign because it puts the DM in a position that he can't prep for well, and running a wilderness adventure well is hard.

It sounds to me like there was a lack of clarity regarding what the players wanted. On the other hand, I think that probably some of the hooks you offered were weak, and you made the mistake of depending on player behavior some of which seems to me a bit of a stretch. But I do find it interesting that the players got interested again simply because you offered up a random combat. Players come in all types. It's hard to tell from this removed of a distance what the players really wanted, if they even could have clearly communicated it. If they got interested in what was more or less a wandering monster encounter, then it sorta suggests that they would have been perfectly happy with 'big game hunting safari in the mountains' and part of the problem with your hooks is that things like bears, wolves, and soldiers aren't the sort of fantastic opponents that they were interested in. I wonder what might have happened had been a Treant that was the companion of the Druid (also, can talk, it's good to have talking NPCs), ice drakes carrying backpacks, and the army marching to the keep had been mounted on mammoths and accompanied by frost giants? It could be you just needed to engage their sense of wonder more. Hard to say. Players can be really fickle sometimes.

 

[Umbran]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Not naming any names, but some folks here have pretty obviously failed to recognize that disengaging from a discussion is a viable alternative. You don't lose points from some grand scorecard, or something, for choosing to let it drop, and not respond to a particular person.

Nobody makes you read posts. Nobody makes you respond. We even give you an Ignore List* as a tool to help you not get into discussions with people who regularly irk you. Given this, if you continue forward and get nastily personal, you will be held responsible for your own actions. What the other person did is unlikely to be taken as a mitigating factor. We also recognize that there are other forms of annoying behavior that sits "under the radar" normally - do remember that if you keep it up long enough, it does reach a point where we'll call you on it, and you might not like the results.

In general, we expect you to apply Wheaton's Rule - don't be a jerk. Understood? Excellent! Not understood? PM a moderator to discuss.

Thanks, all! Carry on!



*Can't find the Ignore List? Go to the upper right corner of the screen and click on "Settings". Scroll down until you see the "My Account" section in the left navbar. Click on "Edit Ignore List".

 

[N'raac]

I wouldn't say that the hirelings are so important that they require a lot of exposition, especially if they only show up once. In a more roleplay-centric game the players might perhaps have the expectation that they should get to know them, but in a more action-oriented game like what was presumed to be, there's little expectation to fully flesh them out because there are bigger fish to fry. There's actually expectation to get on with hiring without the RP so they can move on to more interesting bits such as combat and saving face/getting revenge. An analogy I can think of is red shirts in Star Trek. Yeah, they exist and do help the main characters here and there, but they're throwaway. They're not expected to have much, if any, exposition, especially when the episode is leaning towards action.

When have those faceless Redshirts been important to success in resolving a challenge? They’re background scenery. Celebrim made this point quite a bit earlier in the thread. If the NPC’s are faceless redshirts, they get introduced without fuss or fanfare, but they get killed off in the same way, and aren’t really integral to success. If they are integral to success, they are more important, they get establishing scenes and they have “he/she is cool” moments. Of course, it’s hard to tell which ones are PC’s and which are NPC’s on screen. Much easier for the redshirts.

What happens to Redshirts? The Grell picks them off one by one in a leadup (too late for that now) or casually incapacitates/kills them to establish/reinforce itself as a badass villain. More important NPC’s actually fight back effectively and enhance the team’s success against the grell.

So in the grell situation one can assume that at least Hussar found the hireling situation tedious and unnecessary whereas the DM thought it might be interesting. Still no idea about whether the other players thought it was too, but it would be nice to know what they thought

Emphasis added – this has been alluded to innumerable times, and asked point blank at least once or twice, and we have no reply from Hussar on this specific issue, which seems inconsistent with his assertion that he is focused on everyone having fun at the table.

since clearly not everyone has the same expectations and tolerances as Hussar and we haven't been given the info on whether the other players were or were not. Aside from the other players though, clearly the DM either didn't give enough information beforehand to get at least Hussar interested in interacting more with the potential hirelings, and/or there was a gross miscalculation if the DM thought he had given enough reason for all the players to at least be alright with the roleplaying and maybe enjoy it once they got into it. As has been said numerous times in the thread, it's a definite miscommunication.

I suspect the GM’s miscalculation was the belief the players would have some investment in vetting mercenaries they were about to trust with their lives in combat. Hussar wanted the setting to provide disposable combat aides who appear as needed (for the appropriate cash investment), possess the skills and gear desired, fight for the PC’s and then disappear when dismissed. The GM presumably felt such NPC’s had lives of their own, and came with their own motivations and goals, so the PC’s would want the opportunity to assess their compatibility with the PCs’ agenda.

So, how prone does each of us think he is to have a miscommunication? And how would each of us deal with it once it happened? If I had been the DM for Hussar that time, I would hope I would have stopped and asked the entire group "I had hoped you'd interact with these characters a bit more. Clearly at least one of you doesn't want to do that, and because the one that doesn't has been put in charge of doing the hiring, we either need to skip this entirely or have someone else take over the hiring process while that one person is allowed to do something else." And of course if everyone says "It was his idea, he should do it!" and then the guy goes "If I had known it'd be a slog then I wouldn't have made the suggestion." "Is it just this time that you want to pass the roleplay, or should I expect you'll never want to bother with hirelings again?" "Why do you feel that way?" and so on and so forth until a resolution comes up.

One further question to be asked – what is the other players’ view on hiring these guys in the first place? Maybe the matter was one the other players didn’t want to pursue at all (WE want revenge on the Grell – we don’t want to send hirelings in to do the work. We want to feel that WE won!), but they acquiesced on the proviso that they’re “your hirelings – your problem”. I previously suggested the possibility they were fully engaged, and that’s what kept the interviews going for 90 minutes, but that seems not to be the case.

There will need to be compromise, and there will need to be communication. And both need to be done calmly and coolly to get anything decently resolved. To that end I don't think anyone should say "You will do this" kind of things, but then again I have an aunt who thinks that she's "asking" when she says "I need you to do something for me" so I suppose I'm quite biased. I would say that going the nuclear option isn't calm or cool though since it pretty much is "blowing up."

I think the underlying requirement here is trust that everyone is acting in good faith. Hussar’s repeated assertions the GM will pick the worst possible results to better screw over the PC’s clearly indicates that trust isn’t present, and this will cloud any effort at communications.

I’ve never really understood that attitude on either side of the screen. If the GM wants to screw over the players, it’s pretty easy. There wouldn’t be a group of survivors making their way back to civilization to hire mercenaries, there would be a pile of bones picked clean by one or more grells powerful enough to overwhelm the entire party. A friend once put it something like “There’s no challenge killing off all the PC’s. The challenge is making the players believe the PC’s are in real danger of being killed off, so there’s a feeling of triumph for the players when the PC’s emerge victorious”

 

[N'raac]

But, important to who? To the DM? How can it be important to the other players at the table? They have no reason for interacting with anything in the desert. The desert is being crossed because it happens to be in the way. It doesn't matter to the players if it was a desert, grassland or forest. It's simply space between A and B.

OK, this whole thing gets back to “players” versus “characters”. As a character, I want to get to the other side. As a player, I want an enjoyable, challenging game. Those challenges can certainly be in the desert. Elric the character would love to get rid of Stormbringer. Try taking it away and see what the player thinks of that!

If I want to travel from Chicago to Las Vegas, I must cross a desert. I have no choice. That doesn't mean I have any interest in the desert. It doesn't follow that I want to spend significant time in the desert. I just want to get to Las Vegas. And the other people in my car want to get to Vegas as well.

Are there interesting things in that desert? Oh, sure. I know that. But, I don't care. I want to go to Las Vegas. Why am I being forced to stop every thirty miles to look at something else? The only person who is making us stop is the DM.

I can set a premise of modern day characters on a road trip to Vegas. If I set all the action in Vegas, we won’t spend game time on the trip. If the real scenario is a zombie apocalypse, or an alien invasion, it may very well happen, or start happening, in the desert. Watch TV or movies – how often does the action really begin because the transport breaks down somewhere between where the characters started and where they thought they were going? In many, I suspect the characters never get to Vegas (or they finally arrive as the credits roll) – and as the viewer, I’m good with that.

 

[N'raac]

Just as a point about choosing the most punishing interpretation, let's recap shall we?

In the centipede example, Celebrim would force several skill checks that the PC's are virtually guaranteed to fail.

Actually, he’s been very clear and repeatedly noted he expects the players can structure matters so they succeed. But if your party has precisely zero riding skills, why would you think beast-mounted travel is a recipe for success? Would you let the character with an 8 DEX and no ranks in riding or animal handling buy a warhorse and find it a highly useful animal because that is what the player envisions, or is there a requirement to invest the character resources to actually be good at something – that is, assist the player in buiilding the character who can benefit from that warhorse?

N'raac would have elements in the desert that are key to achieving our goals at the city, but without any reason for the players to actually try to search for those keys. After all, there is no way for the players to have known about the desert nomads, nor any prisoners they had beforehand. I'm still rather confused what N'raac would have done with a group with access to teleport or Overland Flight.

Without, perhaps, an immediate reason to search for those keys. I would hope players are alert and astute enough to pay attention to what is going on around them, and assess whether there may be a broader picture. “The livery on those bodies is the same as the Duke’s – should we dig a bit deeper”?

I would know what resources the group has access to, and plan the scenario around that. Just as, if there were an encounter I want your group to face, it would not likely be easily circumvented by riding on the centipede (which, as celebrim has repeatedly pointed out, isn’t as fast as you seem to believe, and is not a guaranteed “avoid all encounters” card. Or I’ll put hooks in the city, just as I would if the players somehow missed something because they found a way around that I did not expect.

In the Grell example, Celebrim would cause the group to fail off screen by having the grell just leave, even though the group is also forced to spend significant table time recruiting assistance in order to defeat the grell.

Both he and I mentioned it as one possibility. Will the mercenaries disappear if you encounter something on the way to the Grell, and vanish before you can open the door beyond the Grell’s former lair, or is it possible they will be useful in some manner other than the one you specifically anticipated? Wasn’t your goal to get past the grell since he occupied a choke point, or is that another aspect which has changed since your earlier posts? I know you had decided you also wanted revenge.

I still have heard no response to the possibility the group succeeds off screen. What if, after describing your plans, the GM simply states “You recruit your powerful mercenary band, and head off for Vengeance on the Grell. Your travel is easy as no one dares accost such a well-armed powerful band. You arrive at the choke point and the Grell is easily defeated by your superior numbers. Huzzah for Hussar and the Hirelings!” You got your hirelings and your vengeance – NOW are you happy? All resolved in almost no time at all and you didn’t even have to roll a single die.

In the horse buying scenario, the player is forced to spend table time shopping for horses. If the player does not, there is a "chance" that the horse will be lame. I put that in scare quotes, because, IME, any DM who thinks this way is automatically going to have the horse be lame with an aha-gotcha moment.

Once again, your assumption the GM is out to screw over the players/characters rises to the surface. I find most people who have such views are projecting their own approach on others. Maybe that’s not the case here – I’ve never seen you GM – but your attitude that every other GM is either incompetent or a jerk is the reason I’ve commented on my own surprise you’re still gaming. Many gamers have quit because of GM’s who exist to screw over the players, as that kind of game is typically not fun.

Who says there is no chance the horse is lame if the player does do some work? Only you.

I think the reason this rarely comes up in play is that it would be tedious to play out every shopping expedition, and the possibility every merchant has “screw the PC’s out of their gold for defective product” at the top of their agenda is both unrealistic and something that will get very old very fast. If you “just happen” to buy a lame horse, there’s a definite issue of fairness (“why did I not get a chance to detect that?”, and if suddenly, for this one purchase, the GM starts focusing extra attention, the players are immediately aware that something is up.

So when would it happen? Probably where buying the horse has ceased to be a mundane issue. Perhaps the character has to get out of town in a hurry, and needs to get the horse without the watch noticing him, so he has to choose a less than reputable source and/or doesn’t really have the time to shop around. That might merit playing out the horse purchase, and maybe the player misses the roll to identify the horse’s lameness and gets a poor animal fobbed off on him, making his escape even more difficult. Or maybe those skill ranks invested in animal handling pay off, he picks up on the deception and leverages it to intimidate the seller into a good deal on a great horse.

Have I somehow made a mistake here? Are these not the rulings that Celebrim and N'raac are advocating?

I think you know that either they are not, or that even if we are horrible GM’s out to screw the players at every turn (we must be, after all, as we are not Hussar) we will still deny it.

@Jameson Courage - you brought up the idea of players skipping over other player's interesting scenes. IMO, this is not a very high chance, since most players are pretty willing to sit back and let other people have the spotlight. But, in every example in this thread, it's the spotlighted player who wants to skip forward, but the DM who is blocking that.

In what way were you spotlighted by desert travel? You grabbed the spotlight with the centipede solution, but I don’t see how the desert travel would spotlight you. And I still have not heard how the other characters reacted to either the summoning or the desert crossing.

Despite all of Celebrim's and N'raac's protestations, they have not put forward a single reason why another player at the table would want to play through these scenes. We've seen many, many examples of why the DM might want to play through things, but, the other players? Pretty much silence.

OK, since you are now asking for another straw man you could shoot down, maybe I look down at your Plane Shift roll and think “*#@% - 500 miles off. I wanted them to get to the city, but now I need to figure out what to put between them and it to avoid a boring 500 mile travel scene, and make their failure fun, not just a slog. Hey, the Ranger’s favoured terrain is ‘Desert’, and he has all those survival ranks, and those desert creatures would be in his favoured enemy slots. Let’s spotlight the Ranger for a while - he’s been pretty overshadowed for the last few levels, with none of his special abilities really being all that relevant.” Seems like a good reason for at least one player to want to play through the desert trek. Most players, I find, want an exciting scenario, and aren’t too fussed over which comes first. But then, my players are also used to multiple plotlines overlapping, so the possibility there’s a break in one storyline as another gets foreshadowed, moved forward or a short snapper gets dropped in the middle isn’t something they get shirty about.