In my 4e game, the existence of a fallen minotaur empire has been a recurring motif - minotaur ruins, minotaur statues, mintotaur tombs, etc. This also relates to the backstory of the dwarf PC, because the dwarves, after gaining their freedom from the giants, were tutored by the minotaurs. This is important in the game although it has not been an immediate object of exploration in play.
My litmus test is what would happen if I pulled it or changed it. If we removed it entirely, the dwarf backstory gets pulled. So it's used in that regard. If I change it from Minotaur to Ettins, would anything of substance change? If so, it is unimportant that these are minotaurs.
If I was playing a game with a Sultan, I would certainly expect the area to contain deserts and palm trees rather than snowfields and oak fore
Would you expect that water is cheap and easy to come by, and not an issue to consider if travelling through the area? I would expect that this will not be the case, because this is a desert. In game ramification of the setting is what makes the setting real.
The intraparty roleplay was in a context, and framed against story elements other than the PCs - feuds, loyalties, hopes, enemies etc. It was contextually embedded.
Then the party is interacting with the setting - it is not simply a backdrop.
I don't think this is Hussar's view of it.
I don't think Hussar is asserting the grell was a major campaign issue. I think he is advocating that the PC's invested importance in vengeance against the Grell. The two are not the same thing. With that player-invested importance, I think the GM can reasonably play on that importance (link the grell to the overall plot; make the grell a recurring villain; and yes, invest importance and game time in the tools used to bring the grell down). I think he could also decide that the grell isn't really all that important, so let's just provide faceless cardboard mercs and get on with it.
Now, could he reasonably go one step further, and indicate that this GrellQuest just isn't working for him, so can we just cut scene vengeance against the grell? Maybe he's the one that's bored to tears. Does he get equal rights with the players to decide he doesn't want to play out a specific scene?
No disagreement with that! This is exactly how the desert and the hiring should have been handled, it seems to me.
If it is minutia, that is how it should be handled. If it is not minutia, and numerous examples of why it may not be minutia have been presented, then this is not how it should be handled. If taking 10 on ride checks gets everyone through the desert, then the skill checks are minutia. If the worst case result is "you fell down and have sand in your boots and we have to stop so you can dust yourself off and get back on the centipede", this is also minutia. If three huge trapdoor spiders snap up from concealed locations to assault the centipede, then needing a 9+Ride check to avoid falling off, and being tied to the centipede means you can't join the attack, it is no longer minutia.
No. The ones who died fighting hobgolbins died fighting, and made a difference to the resolution - they both delivered damage and took it.
I can write that off as minutia just as easily. 12 extra hobgoblins vs 6 NPC followers can be resolved as easily as “each round, 2 hobgoblins and 1 NPC are laid low. They are not the story focus, so scene cut them and move on”.
But not everyone enjoys the same things. For some players, exploring the GM's setting is enjoyable in its own right. (On the current "new world for 5e?" thread, one poster said that his/her main enjoyment in an RPG is exploring the gameworld.) For others, they enjoy different things, like formulating and pursing PC goals. They want something more player driven.
So place one player of each stripe at the table. Do we skip all setting exploration and all PC planning sessions, because each will be boring for one player? Should one of the two leave so we don’t have this conflict? Or does each player compromise for the other’s enjoyment, and we have both kinds of scene in the game?
Introducing complications is a key GM role, in my preferred approach to play. The idea is to introduce complications that riff off the players,
Like “your Plane Shift left you 500 miles out – that complicates matters” or “your hiring is complicated by a large number of applicants, some of whom may be more or less suitable”.
push them hard, respond to their cues
Like evaluating their plan to mitigate the difficulties of desert travel with a giant centipede or their continuing to dialogue with the potential hires one on one rather than just yell “ALL OF YOU SHUT UP – OK, you, you, you, you, you and you – hired. The rest of you – GO HOME”?
I think Hussar’s issue was where the game was moving, at least as much as whether the game was moving.
On my preferred approach, it's sufficient evidence that I've done a bad job, and failed to keep the game moving, when there are 90 minute sequences that the players are complaining about!
The only player we know is complaining is Hussar. For all I know, there’s a DM and half a dozen players out there somewhere who tell the tale of “That jerk player who wanted to waste time hiring spearcarriers rather than just taking care of business ourselves.”
Though I don't use random generation in the way @
Jacob Marleydescribed, the examples he gives - like closed gates or a city under siege - are closer to the sorts of complications I would use. They introduce tension and challenge into the situation the players' care about, rather than try to shift the focus of the game to something else that the players haven't signalled any interest in.
Both of those, I agree, are great complications. But they also delay the players’ access to the city, and thus their ability to do whatever it was they were so fired up to do in the city. As such, I think a player who was totally focused on those activities would probably be just as unhappy finding themselves unable to get past the gates as finding themselves slogging through the desert. In fact, I could see someone getting shirty because the GM just made up these locked gates and besieging forces because we refused to play out his desert excursion scenario. The gates would be open wide, if they existed at all, had we slogged through his boring desert scenes.
Well, yes, skipped entirely because I, the player in the spotlight, was totally uninterested in the scene. And, no, it's not that hard to drag out. The DM starts by initiating conversations and then keeps the conversation going. The player, not allowed to push the eject button on the scene, since that is seen as bad play and would get the player ejected from some games, plays along. And along. And along...
“I stand up and whistle loudly and shrilly. If that fails, to get the attention of all the potential recruits, I yell ‘LISTEN UP IF YOU WANT TO GET PAID!!’ Do I have their attention now? Good. Starting from the left, I point at random to every second guy. ‘You, you, you, you, you and you – pack your gear up – you are hired and we head out in 10 minutes. The rest of you, thanks for coming out but we’ve filled our hiring quota. BYE!”
You now have six hirelings with no idea of who they are, with limited or no time spent in the hiring process. Done. And, if you unfortunately selected a few sub-optimal candidates and dismissed Sir Stephen the Spear Saint, well that’s the price you pay for being in a hurry when you hire.
In hindsight, he probably should have just killed the prisoner in the first place. And, because of this scene, we never took prisoners again, because we knew that taking prisoners with this DM was pointless. IOW, the DM's actions have long term consequences. Players are typically smart enough to be able to read DM's and know that certain actions just aren't going to go anywhere and they stop trying those actions.
Which has been precisely my point all the way along. The DM drags out a scene, refuses to let the scene go and the players react by never trying that again.
OK, let’s summarize. Because one scene with a prisoner was unsatisfactory to the players, they will never, ever take a prisoner again, because if they do, they will just play out that same unsatisfactory scene. Hold that thought for a moment.
I think the problem here is you're still trying to draw larger conclusions from what's happened. The player skips talking to this NPC, so the player will skip talking to all NPC's. The player skips this scene, so he'll skip every scene. That's not it at all. It's, the player skipped this one scene, for whatever reason, but the player is also typically engaged, so it's not a problem.
OK, let’s summarize this. Just because you want to skip this one scene of NPC interaction, that should not be taken as a sign that you will want to skip talking to all NPC’s. This one scene should be taken as just that – only one scene – and in no way an indication of how future scenes will play out.
So let’s recap: If the GM makes one scene with a prisoner unsatisfactory, all scenes with prisoners will be unsatisfactory, so never go there again. But if a player makes one scene with NPC interaction unsatisfactory, that’s not in any way indicative that the player would make similar scenes in the future unsatisfactory.
You know what? It seems like lot of your discussion from your first post on this thread can be distilled down to “assume the players will not be dicks, but assume all GM’s will be dicks”. Why is that?
I'm sorry, I don't see how those two follow. The spearmen's only function is to stab the grell with their pointy sticks. That's their purpose. That's what they're there for. Why do I need fully fleshed out NPC's with backgrounds and motivations for that? If I was hiring henchmen, with the expectation that they would be with the group for an extended period of time, then fine. That's different. But, these guys were just a posse.
How many times do you see, in a movie, the sheriff come in, gather a posse and then spend ninety minutes on exposition on every member of the posse?
I see the NPC’s be cardboard back figures about as often as they have negligible impact on resolution of the issues in the movie.
But the rematch, in this instance was not contrived. We knew where the grell was living. That was its lair. It had no real reason for leaving - after all it just had a nice tasty snack and chased away the invaders. Could it have left? Sure. Be totally anticlimactic but it could have.
It was completely uninjured in your attack and had no reason to believe (it has human intelligence, I believe) that someone might come back seeking vengeance? And that assumes it had no goal other than to sit here at a choke point until it dies!
I ask this, because if you answered this earlier, I seemed to have missed it in the mass of posts.
How did you *know* there's nothing relevant to your overall goals in the desert? We presume you're going to the city for some reason. How do you know ahead of time that the GM didn't put anything relevant to those reasons in the desert?
We don't honestly. But, considering we DO want to go to the city, and all our goals are at the city, why would we assume that there is something we need at those goals to be found in the desert?
For my taste, this style of play is far too linear. We are at A, and are going to B. We have to follow the DM's trail of breadcrumbs on the way to B because, if we don't, we won't have important things when we get to B.
But, from an in character POV, there is absolutely no reason to not go straight to B. Again, if I'm traveling from Chicago to Las Vegas, why would I think to go wandering about the Painted Desert looking for a horse with no name? Why would I not just go straight to Las Vegas?
If there was something relevant to our overall goals in the desert, it is pretty incumbent on the DM to provide some clues to that before hand and let us choose whether or not its important. Simply presuming that the players are going to hex crawl every single scene just because it might be important is not a style of game I prefer.
In my view, the reasoning is similar to why I don't like trap dungeons. Having traps in a dungeon slows down play so much. Despite the fact that you only find traps a small percentage of the time, you have to treat each situation as if it is, in fact, a trap. So, you send the scout ahead, search for traps, hope you roll well enough to find them, on and on and on. And play slows to a glacial crawl.
Not a style of game I like anymore.
Another “player knowledge” versus “character knowledge” moment. In my world, the PC’s may bemoan this stupid desert in the way, but the players trust the GM enough to allow the possibility the desert encounters will be fun and interesting. Maybe directly relevant to the city, or maybe not and the city goes on the back burner for a while.
Basically, yeah, I get where you're coming from. I don't think you should advocate it for everyone, and I can't tell if you are, since you said "My entire point through this thread is to cut out the Tom Bombadil scenes from your campaigns." But, as a certain play style (and even a well-liked and not insignificant one), I totally get it. But, my group will continue to prod Biff the Warrior for more information, and even stop to Tom Bombadil from time to time. And they'll do it without prodding, and positively react to it when it's offered. It's just play style, obviously. As always, play what you like
Perhaps the point might better be “either cut the Tom Bombadil scenes or tell me you won’t so I can find another group to game with”.
AFAIC, LotR is essentially a travelogue and vehicle for Tolkien to show off his poetry. All the stuff that is really interesting to me in the story is pretty much there accidentally. I enjoyed the Hobbit far, far more. 
But, the basic gist is, "Can we just get going?" To which, I have pretty much no problem.
