You're doing what? Surprising the DM

[JamesonCourage]

No. Upthread I suggested that you were conflating ingame and metagame. You rejected that suggestion, but I feel that in the bit I've quoted you are doing the same thing again.

And I don't feel that way, considering that the goals of Hussar was "skip the desert" because it "wasn't relevant" to his goal inside the city (unless it was "contrived"), and the goals of the PCs are "deal with the goal (in the city in the desert)." The goals align rather well, save for the fact that players might have fun with complications where the PCs may not.

The PCs' goal is to interact with something in the city (the so-called MacGuffin).

Right.

The players goal is to have a fun session while engaging with their PCs' goal.

Correct. The city and the desert are not part of the players' goals, other than the "have fun with complications" bit, which could be through a fun, interesting, and relevant complication, regardless of location.

From the point of view of the PCs, the siege is simply an annoying obstacle, as you say no different from the desert.

But from the point of view of the players, the siege is an interesting avenue to their goal of having a fun session while engaging with their PCs' goal. It's a player resource. Just to give another example that I don't recall seeing yet in the thread, it gives them the opportunity to pass off their acquisition of the MacGuffin (assuming that's what's going on here) as a piece of random wartime looting.

Well, yes, the siege can have different implications from the desert (whether it's a wandering nomad tribe, sand storm, or whatever), but there's nothing more inherently "fun" or "interesting" or "relevant" with the siege than the desert. That depends on the context of the complication (siege, city, desert, etc.), and what the groups feels is fun. My point is that is that there's nothing inherently more "interesting" or "relevant" or even "fun" in a siege than in engaging the desert, city, random NPCs, or whatever. It depends entirely on context (complication specifics and player preferences).

If your point, and/or @N'raac's, is that it can sometimes require deft GM judgement and real-time adjustments to properly deploy the distinction between "irrelevant distraction" and "interesting complication which the players can leverage as a resource", then yes, it can. That's why Eero Tuovinen, in describing the standard model of narrativist RPGing, talks about sheer GMing experience as being something which helps with determining what complications to put in the way of the players.

I've laid out my point several times, and now again. And up to this point, I've been disagreed with fairly consistently, which makes "getting into your head" pretty hard, since I don't understand the reasoning thus far.

Sometimes I don't know if a complication is going to work until I try it in play. But if it's clear that it's falling flat, I don't stick to my guns come-what-may. I certainly don't wait for the players to activate the so-called "nuclear option", or hope that if I persist the players will come to see that it really is worthwhile after all! I take proactive steps to get things back on track. That's what Hussar's GM didn't do, in either case.

Okay. Cool. Not what I'm touching on, but okay, good to note, for conversation's sake. As always, play what you like

 

[Manbearcat]

I'm personally a big fan of making these niche-protection decisions on a contextual, party specific basis rather than trying to capture all of them in the rules. (And if known tendencies and preferences trigger build choices downstream, as in your lurker-ganker example, c'est la vie. No single RPG table can be all things to all people!)

Yup. I agree with this in degree, but I think you'll agree that there is a breakpoint whereby when the designers offload too much responsibility for balance (dealing with Generalist Wizard and Druid niche invasion and extreme power disparity), pacing (top-down, adventuring day encounter math or all over the place resource duration scribed under the varying auspices of 10 minutes/level and 1 hour/level rather than 1 scene/action) and fundamental game functionality (figuring out what the designers intended when two important rules or two sub-systems violently butt heads) to the individual table, it is time to play a different system.

This is why I prefer unified resource schemes and a unified, conflict resolution framework as closed-system. Everyone has the same abilities to affect ends and plays the same tactical mini-games (step down Sorcery d8 for a plot point or step-up Acrobatics to d10 by handing in a plot point) for the right to impose their vision upon the narrative. Balance, pacing and fundamental game functionality exist in a persistent state and narrative dynamism is implicit because the system demands that you invoke the amplitude, effect and 2nd order interactions of your resource deployment or "nothing happens"; the abilities themselves have thematic guidelines but they are not prescriptive.

Some people hate this, however. You see this complaint with Skill Challenges: Why do we have to play out this conflict resolution mini-game to resolve complex matters within the fiction? I expect to press my "but magic" button and win the <investigation, parlay, chase scene, lost in the frozen tundra without resources> conflict. Stepping up Sorcerey from d8 to d10 or using Arcana in a single "panel" amongst many "panels" to drive the ultimate conclusion within the conflict resolution framework is gamist rubbish. This tactical mini-gaming doesn't make sense from a causal-logic perspective (from my character's actor point of view) and it is dissonant with respect to my expectation of strategic power-play (typically underwritten by "but magic") as conflict resolution.

As you know, that argument doesn't ressonate with me or my table. They won't like my game so I shouldn't have those people at my table (for my regular game...I can please them in one-offs no problem) and I shouldn't be at theirs. Neither of us is right or wrong but its not bridgable by social accord; its "system matters" and technique that will color play from start to finish. And its why I'm more likely to continue playing 4e or hacking a Cortex Plus version of D&D as my default system for a long-term campaign rather than play 5e.

 

[N'raac]

If I was the GM in question, and knew that @Hussarhad no interest in the desert crossing, there are at least two options I can think of: have the NPC turn up, wandering prophet-style out of the desert, as the PCs are mounting their centipede; or have the NPC meet them in the city.

How is this any less contrived than meeting the NPC in the desert?

I think this is the sort of responsiveness to manifested player preferences that Hussar is advocating. It's certainly the sort of responsiveness that I prefer.

Part of Hussar's point is that, if the only upshot of the riding will be a few falls dealing a bit of subdual damage or minor scrapes that can all be trivially healed by the PCs' daily allotment of cure spells, why go through the details?

I have not seen anyone disagree with that. But I think the issue posed has been where those riding rolls indicate his plan is untenable, or at least poses a non-trivial risk to the characters, Hussar feels they should still be waived – but only this one time – so that his desired scene of riding across the desert on this bizarre beast plays out exactly as he intends it.

So what happens when another player suggests “hey, since it’s been established that riding this thing through the shattered waster, up and down sheer vertical inclines, at top speed is trivially easy, why are we dismounting to sneak past the siege into the city? Full speed ahead! We can slash at any troops close enough to threaten us from higher ground, sped through their lines, up the city wall and down the other side”. And now the GM has to say “No”. But if it was trivially easy to ride this beast, full speed, through the wasteland, this new plan also seems trivially easy to implement. And maybe that’s just Player 2 saying “skip the siege scene”.

Maybe they can. My point is only that there's no reason at all to think that D&D PCs of about 3rd level and up can't sneak through a siege that, from the point of view of a city's NPC population, is a serious thing.

That being the case, why are we engaging in mechanical resolution of this trivially easy task?

But only the siege, as an obstacle, is also itself about the goal - on topic, as it were. And the desert can't be a means to achieving the PC goals in and of itself (unless the PCs have some very powerful Animate Desert magic).

And not remotely relevant. The players aren't interested in the details of the city's urban geography.

That which you wish to dismiss is deemed irrelevant and that which you wish to maintain is deemed as relevant. So far, the only definition I am seeing you apply to “relevant” is “that which Pemerton thinks would be a good thing to include”. Relevant can still be dull and uninteresting. Irrelevant can still be entertaining and engaging.

Of course relevant! If the players are doing it with enthusiasm, that's overwhelmingly sufficient evidence that it's relevant to their goals for play.

So now we are interested because it is relevant and it is relevant because we are interested in it. Assessment of what is relevant seems quite subjective by your measure.

And what happens when one of five players is bored and the other four are highly engaged? What if it’s 2 and 3 players? Where is the line drawn? [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] stresses that one bored player means skip the scene, but ignores that the other four’s fun is diminished for the benefit of that one player. Of course, those four aren’t on the internet complaining about the bad GM who kowtows to one demanding player who has “scene veto approval”. Sure, he claims it works for all the players, but the other players wanted to play out all the scenes, not just a select few. And what if one player says “screw the city” or “I’m bored with the Grell”, or “a siege doesn’t do it for me – can’t we be greeted by hot chicks handing out leis instead?”? Do we skip those scenes, that the rest of the group are so focused on, as well?

And on a point related to differences of playstyle, rather than telling those with different preferences from yours what they should or shouldn't, or will or won't, enjoy, wouldn't it make more sense to try and get inside their heads?

I think that is what many of us have been trying to do. Over 80 pages in, we seem to have “what I find interesting is pretty much random and subjective, so predict my whims and focus on what I will find relevant”. We even have Hussar’s repeated statement that, under other circumstances or at other times, similar scenes would hold interest for him. Predicting what strikes the fancy of a group of players like that seems quite the challenge to set.

Also, as a side note, and alluding back to an earlier, semi-rhetorical question from @CHaocou, PCs in BW don't have "story arcs".

Balderdash! The belief that “I am rightful King of all the Land” sums up that character’s story arc – his pursuit of evidence, persuasion of others and campaign to ascend to his rightful throne is the character’s story arc. Perhaps it succeeds, or perhaps it fails miserably. One step along this arc, when the two PC’s with incompatible goals face off and

Then the two of your roll dice against one another! That's the whole point!

Will resolve (with failure) one character’s story arc while highlighting and advancing the other’s.

In one of the RM campaigns I GMed, one of the players had the (informally flagged) goal for his PC "I will rule the wizards by Vecna's side". Another player's goal for his PC was "Vecna will never conquer the empire". How were these resolved? The first PC stood by while allies of Vecna sacrificed the second PC to their dark gods - then struck a deal with those same Vecna-ites in which he sold out his home city in exchange for political privilege.

There's no predetermined story arc here. There are PCs with goals, and players advocating for those PCs, and play. After play has happened, we know what the story of each PC was.

There is a clear predetermined story arc for each character. For one, it is "I will rule the wizards by Vecna's side" and for the other "Vecna will never conquer the empire". One arc concluded in failure when “allies of Vecna sacrificed the second PC to their dark gods” while the second advanced as “The first PC stood by - then struck a deal with those same Vecna-ites in which he sold out his home city in exchange for political privilege”

I'm puzzled by the fact that some posters seem to find this puzzling!

Should there be some small satisfaction in knowing you are also puzzled?

That may be true or it may not. The PCs would never know about the desert and certainly never encounter it save for the city. Does the desert exist except as a danger zone surrounding the PC goal? I suggest in narrative style play the answer is no.

As many , yourself I believe included, have said all along, the desert (or the siege) can be trivial colour mandating minimal game time, or can be a danger zone, entertaining an exciting to the players while frustrating delays to their characters.

Neither is inherently relevant, nor inherently irrelevant (nor inherently interesting or boring) by default. Making it interesting is the GM’s job – if it won’t be, the GM’s job is to relegate it to backdrop.

What puzzles me is that the siege does not relate to the PC goal inside the city. It affects the city, but the goal of the players is not "interact with the city", it's "interact with the goal." The siege is a complication on the way to that goal in the same respect that the desert is one, the difference is proximity (what I've called "backdrop).

Exactly. Both are obstacles standing between the PC and their nebulous and undefined goal in the city. Both may contain potential to be leveraged by the PC’s in pursuit of their goals (make it look like siege looting; make it look like the thieves perished in the desert – both very simple examples) and both can be made interesting, engaging and highly relevant to PC goals, or interesting, engaging and utterly irrelevant to their goals, or mind numbingly dull and boring whether or not relevant to the PC goals. You say the same thing a bit further below, so I’ll clip that area I fully agree with.

In your last couple posts, it looks like you've rather subtly changed the goal to "interact with the city" as compared to "interact with the goal inside the city (inside the desert)" (the goal being a temple, or whatever). The temple can certainly exist without the city; the city can exist without the siege, or without the desert.

Area of disagreement emphasized. Animate Goalposts has seen liberal use throughout this thread, probably not consciously – 80+ pages tends to have some drifting.

I'm not confused or puzzled about how the siege is connected to the city. That's very obvious to me. I'm confused as to how it's inherently more relevant or interesting than any other complication. And proximity is about all I'm getting here, and even that leads me to question "if the temple being in the city makes a siege an interesting and relevant complication, why is it when the temple is in the desert it's not also an interesting and relevant complication?"

But, you say it's not proximity, and I believe you. I just can't parse the difference, still. And I think that between me, Celebrim, Nagol, and N'raac, we've got some decent mental firepower on our side. I'm not telling you that I think you should play differently, I'm telling you that I can't "get inside your head", or see what logic you're using. And that's why I'm still engaging in this conversation. As always, play what you like

Exactly – and if I can’t fathom what makes one of these complications welcome and engaging, and the other so mind-numbingly boring it must be dismissed before it can begin, selecting another complication becomes a coin toss for which category it falls into.

This I completely agree with and characterizes my point nicely. I KNOW it's a cheat code. I KNOW the characters don't have the in-game resources. And, normally, I would play through things. But, in this one case, I don't want to because it's freaking boring to me. So, can I please use a cheat code right now and move on?

Once again, I ask the same two questions:

• How often is too often for use of the cheat code?
• How many players in the group does it take to activate the cheat code?

Set the number of players you are comfortable, tell me how frequently the cheat code comes out and what happens when there is disagreement over whether its use is appropriate. Indicate where the GM’s say differs from that of the other players.

The PC's are the only ones to answer the call? Really? There are no competing adventuring groups in your world? Sorry, I don't play that way. I play with a group template where the group has a reason for adventuring together at the outset and have goals which, while they might compete for time, are never contradictory. Like I said, I like a much more focused game. There's a reason I have no problems running evil campaigns - when you have group templates, evil campaigns work fine.

So it’s not in any way contrived that all the PC’s have these mutually compatible goals, but pretty much anything else that might engage the players/characters in the game and make occurrences more relevant to them is so very contrived as to be poor GMing.

I think the PC’s need to be designed to have common ground without having a hive mind. I suspect that your group template would favour the former (eg. “all characters should be money-motivated mercenaries who are presently imprisoned with just cause) rather than the latter (eg. All characters should be devoted to the worship of Hecate above all other goals, share her alignment and live only to serve the purposes of the church and the goddess, willing to sacrifice everything up to and including their very souls in her service).

 

[pemerton]

I think you'll agree that there is a breakpoint whereby when the designers offload too much responsibility for balance (dealing with Generalist Wizard and Druid niche invasion and extreme power disparity), pacing (top-down, adventuring day encounter math or all over the place resource duration scribed under the varying auspices of 10 minutes/level and 1 hour/level rather than 1 scene/action) and fundamental game functionality (figuring out what the designers intended when two important rules or two sub-systems violently butt heads) to the individual table, it is time to play a different system.

Yes. That goes for guard-ganking, too - if that was meant to be a major element of play (eg in a certain sort of thief or assassin game) then I wouldn't recommend 4e, because it requires too many work-arounds or unusual PC and/or encounter builds to pull off.

My point is more that whether guard-ganking needs niche protection (like it sounds as if it does at your table) or not (which is the case at my table - two defenders, an invoker, and two ranged strikers) is variable across tables, and as long as it's not too central to play the balance can be implemented on a contextual basis HQrev-style.

Linking it back to the [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]-whipping, nothing that I've heard about his desert scenario suggests there was some PC whose niche (i) needed protecting, and (ii) would have been stomped on, by letting the summoned centipede serve as a sufficient versimilitude-preserving, desert hand-waving device.

 

[D'karr]

Yes. That goes for guard-ganking, too - if that was meant to be a major element of play (eg in a certain sort of thief or assassin game) then I wouldn't recommend 4e, because it requires too many work-arounds or unusual PC and/or encounter builds to pull off.

Sideways of the entire discussion I've used a skill challenge structure to run an assassination style scenario. So using 4e does not necessarily require too many work-arounds to pull off. The thief/assassin would have an advantage in that structure, and everyone else would just be adequate (average relevant skills) to lousy (below average relevant skills).

 

[Celebrim]

OK, though I'm not sure what to make of your use of the word "villain".

I mean it in the sense of "the antagonist of the PCs". But I also mean it in the sense that I'm perfectly prepared to play this out like a Miyasaki movie, with the apparant antagonist proving not to be a villain and becoming an ally, and conversely allies becoming villains. I don't want to discuss to much about exactly what the conflict and stakes are just in case my players stumble on the discussion.

That being said, it is very hard for me as the GM, not to have my own (secret, hidden) judgment on the actions and beliefs of both NPCs and PCs alike. I don't actually think what is evil is up for grabs. I think that the problem of evil can lead to disagreements over the best way to confront the problem and that there can often be thorny problems with no perfect solution, and I think people can end up doing evil with otherwise noble motives. But I don't think that there is really much interesting in the question of what is evil. While the villains in my story don't think of themselves as the villians, but rather as the heroes and consider the PCs to be the villains and have perfectly reasonable reasons for thinking that (the PCs are hardly pure as driven snow themselves), still from my vantage as GM it is impossible for me to not make certain judgments about how both protagonist and antagonist depart from what I'd consider 'righteous', 'just', and 'good' behavior. All that being said, I frequently have players that stake out moral turf that is somewhat different than mine, but which they think is right and good and that's perfectly acceptable.

It's not "can this person do this on a good day with a bit of luck"? It's "would it violate genere credibility for this to be free narrated"?

That seems to me somewhat evasive, as we seem to have established that what is genera credible depends on what is possible mechanically within the system by the character. Or in other words, "can this person do this" seems to be rather the same as "is it genera credible".

This preference/inclination is why [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION], [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and I are seeing your GMing inclinations as primarily, perhaps fudamentally, simulationist.

I don't think that was ever really in contention. I'm not trying to discover what my preferences are, nor what sort of play it leads to.

and is perhaps (? I'm less confident here in interpreting N'raac's posts) the only tenable way of RPGing.

Your frequent appeals to less charitable understanding of what other posters are saying is the main thing that badly undermines your posts.

Anyway, your discussion of BW is interesting, but so far you are only confirming for me that the difference is that BW assumes and mandates backstory creation and GM engagement with the backstory, whereas in many other game systems such backstory creation and GM engagement with backstory is only one of many possible techniques and approaches to play. I still don't necessarily agree that backstory creation and GM engagement with backstory moves BW out of predominantly a simulationist approach to play, as the various techniques of BW I consider part of my bag of tricks and its pretty clear to you and me that I'm predominately simulationist in my approach. All I really see here is different assumptions about what is to be explored and simulated, but I'm still seeing in Luke what is my basic assumption good sim => story.

The players will then declare actions in pursuit of their Beliefs.

So, would you say that BW requires all scenes to be the result of player initiative and GM reaction, or is it assumed that at time the GM will intiate scenes that the players must react to?

Because now Beliefs - about defeating the lich king, about recovering the heirloom - have been directly put into play.

You seem to fall into the habit of using 'belief' and 'goal' interchangably. Are you suggesting in this scene that the players beliefs are, "I will defeat the lich king" and "I will recover my families heirloom", or are they something like, "I will redeem the honor of my family" and "I will free the land from the grip of evil" with the actions undertaken being the "therefore" of the beliefs?

so that the sorts of experiences [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is complaining about (desert crossing, job interviews) can be avoided.

This gets to the real heart of my investigation. You say that this is true. I'm just not seeing it (yet) from your explanation. To me it sounds almost like you are saying, "If the book is in the genera I like, and is about the things I like, then I will like the book."

What can I say? The intention of the text strikes me as crystal clear.

Well, you could explain where in those two sentences you quoted it says something about negotiating the framing of a scene rather than initation action resolution by making a proposition framed in the language of the rules.

But then one of the players takes it differently. "I've heard rumours of the toll collector - it's said that he knows the secret path into the inner tomb." And then calls for a test of Folklore, or Tomb-wise, or Bridge-wise, or Toll-wise, or some other relevant skill to see if this is true. The GM sets a DC, the player rolls. Suddenly we've moved from mere colour to sustantive resolution. (The Adventure Burner discusses in detail how player and GM are to negotiate which skill is tested, and how the GM is to set DCs.)

Ok, now here for the first time I'm seeing something like player having authorial power. The player is asserting power over the setting - not only is he asserting a fact about the NPC, but he's asserting the existance of the secret passage - neither of which exist prior to his assertion. Can you give me examples from the text of this authorial power being affirmed by the rules, and also quote any relevant discussion of how this authorial power is to be managed? For example, how is the obstacle to a PC initiated authorial statement to be set, since the question here isn't "Can I find the secret passage" but "Does the secret passage exist in the first place?"

I didn't get the sense that, in their arrival in the wasteland, the PCs were confronted by a friend/nemesis. It seemed to me that they had to first engage the desert - and in a more than hand-waved fashion - for that to take place. At least as Hussar's GM was running the scenario.

Given Hussar's dim recollection of the events, I don't think that we can assume that. I'm pretty sure from what I remember that the railroad is much more tightly written than that, so that you have no choice but to encounter the NPC (he shows up to aid the players in a fight against some minor demons). Indeed, IIRC it is the NPC who casts the Plane Shift, thereby ensuring that the party will Plane Shift whether they have that resource or not.

I find the example a bit odd - how can a GM, before play has even commenced, find a PC a figure of tragic comedy rather than noble potential?

Well, I do. If the player has the belief "I am the True King", and this belief is false then either he is a figure of tragic comedy or else he is a dangerous lunatic. First the belief lacks an essential heroic quality - humility. Secondly, the belief by being false cannot be noble but is delusional. The belief "I am the True King" must have some basis in fact to be noble. Now, a belief like, "I will rid my land of the tyrant", does suggest at least a noble potential - provided that it has at least some grounding in reality. If my player wants to make his character have some essential nobility, I'll endeavor to make his beliefs have some basis in fact or will at least work with him to find a similar belief that I'm willing to accept as factual. But even a belief like, "I will become King by the power of my own strong right hand", suggests a less than heroic motif since its basis - 'might makes right', ambition, lust for power, violence as the tool for success, all suggest a character in the role of anti-hero, anti-villain or even out right villain rather than in the role of hero.

As I posted upthread, a BW GM who started framing scenes for the peasant-who-would-be-king player, whilst having the attitude that the Belief is ridiculous, would be wasting everyone's time.

On the contrary, I believe a player which creates a peasant with the false belief "I am the rightful king", is wasting everyone's time if thinks that the resulting game is going to be inherently about affirming the truth of his false belief. Either we need to establish in his backstory that he is the rightful king, or at least has reasonable claim to it, or else the player needs to understand that the delusional belief is ridiculous in a peasant. This is something inherently true of the incongruity of a peasant believing he is a king, not something being imposed on it. It's equally a tragic figure for someone who is clearly the true king and recognized as such by everyone to believe he is actually a peasant. Delusion renders a figure pitiable at best, and disgusting and vile at worst. A true king disposed of his throne may claim a right to redress this injustice, both for his own benefit and for the sake of his people. Even so, the rightful king could still be a figure of horror despite having legitimate grounds for his belief. A peasant who is not the true king, who attempts to redress the imagined injustice on the basis of his delusional rights is always an object of horror.

 

[Manbearcat]

Linking it back to the @Hussar -whipping, nothing that I've heard about his desert scenario suggests there was some PC whose niche (i) needed protecting, and (ii) would have been stomped on, by letting the summoned centipede serve as a sufficient versimilitude-preserving, desert hand-waving device.

Yup. I agree with that. Rather than the centipede/desert scenario/queue transition scene, my post was in direct response to the below is a table handling/adjudication premise:

In my games, I don't force that much attention to the rules. I have no problems setting aside the rules of the game in order to make sure that everyone at the table is enjoying the game. Strict adherence to the rules is not my primary criteria. If ignoring the rules would result in one of the players not hating and totally disengaging from the game, then I will ignore the rules every single time, regardless of the rest of the group. Because I know that the rest of the group will enjoy the next thing anyway.

I don't care about losing single scenarios. It doesn't matter to me.

There are 2nd and 3rd order functions of rules that will proliferate and cause issues downstream if not enough wariness is paid to "loose" hand-waving. Context for these decisions is important, but foresight such that they don't manifest in the first place is equally (if not more) helpful in amenable resolution for all involved parties.

Sideways of the entire discussion I've used a skill challenge structure to run an assassination style scenario. So using 4e does not necessarily require too many work-arounds to pull off. The thief/assassin would have an advantage in that structure, and everyone else would just be adequate (average relevant skills) to lousy (below average relevant skills).

Yup. I've used that. I find that using the "bloodied" threshold (on successful stealth contests) for guard-ganking does the trick just fine. It maintains the relative potency of lurker/striker/nova PC build investment (consistent, reliable ganking) while still giving uninvested PCs the off-chance for success.

 

[Umbran]

Perhaps it could be said that the players don't want there to be anything interesting in the desert right now, or in the future, that affects their goals in the city.

As the poet said, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you'll find you get what you need."

I do not come form a tradition that says the players always get what they want, and they only get what they want. I find that to be an unrealistic expectation. Given that you've got perhaps a half-dozen players, each of who wants something different, and only so much prep-time for the GM to have things ready to run, sometimes the players need to cut some slack. If the GM repeatedly and consistently doesn't provide what the players want, there's a problem. But as a practical matter of engaging in a social activity, some flexibility from the players is in order.

They don't know whether something was interesting in it, but they don't want complications from it screwing with them getting to the city or interacting with it.

Ah. Players want their plans to go smoothly and perfectly without interruption or complication? How... quaint.

There's lots of good arguments for skipping over stuff. "I don't want complications screwing up my plans!" is not one of them. The GM is not a plot zamboni.

If the only times [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] went nuclear were with the desert and those mercs, and he has done decades of D&D, then that's far less than even 1% of the time in his entire career where he's gone nuclear.

Okay, so - if it only happens once in a blue moon, do we really need 80+ pages of discussion covering how we should change overall approach to play to avoid it in the future? We should undertake an overhaul of how we approach games and frame events for a rare event that can be talked though in a few minutes by mature adults?

No. If it is truly an exceptional event, it should be treated as an exception, a one-off situation. I don't need a system or gaming paradigm for dealing with a player who has a one-time issue.

 

[Umbran]

Upthread, for instance, [MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION] suggested that if the desert is going to be handwaved, it may as well be a pleasant meadow. My reply is that sometimes we want a desert as colour, but don't want to muck around with all the mechanical resolution that a desert could entail, because the desert is not the point: it's a backdrop to something else. Now here are 3 options: (1) include the backdrop that we all want; (2) include play focused only on what we're all interested in; (3) resolve, in mechanical detail, all actions that, by the lights of the game's action resolution mechanics, have a chance of failure that is procedurally consequential (eg risk of death or injury, noticeable resource depletion, etc).

How do different games and styles deliver on these options? As [MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION] and I discussed on another fairly recent thread, very trad dungeon-crawling D&D delivers on all 3, by including as backdrop only whacky underworlds or mad wildernesses where every path the PCs might take will deliver over-the-top Gygaxian action.

But loosen up your constraints on backdrop - eg allow deserts, or oceans, or cities - and the pressures change. You can only get all 3, at that point, if (2) - the things we're all interested in as a focus of play - is expanded to encompass any procedural challenge the PCs might confront. As best I understand [MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION]'s position in this thread, it is that this understanding of (2) is the default way of playing D&D, or perhaps all RPGs, and is perhaps (? I'm less confident here in interpreting N'raac's posts) the only tenable way of RPGing.

[MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION]'s idea of "meaningful choices" defined in more-or-less procedural terms also seems to take a similar view of (2).=

To be clear - it is not my idea. I didn't make it up.

The discussion here really seems to focus on a narrow wedge of (to use a Forgism) narrativist playstyle. In thinking about the thread as a whole, there's a lot of "If Woody had gone right to the police, this would never have happened," style conversation. If only the GM and players had bought into this technique designed for narrativist playstyle, the conflict in the OP would never have happened!

But that has rather left aside the question of what the other agendas at the table were. Sure, this conflict could have been avoided if that playstyle were adopted, but what other bits of fun might the players lose in the process? For some, taking on the scene-framing style you describe is an exercise in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. My point was merely to note that there's a whole world out there that doesn't buy forgist-narrative as a top priority, and for those, your solution isn't necessarily going to work well.

 

[N'raac]

No. If it is truly an exceptional event, it should be treated as an exception, a one-off situation. I don't need a system or gaming paradigm for dealing with a player who has a one-time issue.

Agreed. Where I find a discrepancy in the comments is the view that, on the one hand, this is "going nuclear" and would happen only rarely, once over thousands of scenes or once in a campaign. And yet it happens with sufficient frequency that it is unacceptable to the player that it not immediately addressed, and with sufficient frequency that we can establish the "tendency to get shirty" when it arises. So how often does this actually happen? Is it really so horrible someone should ask to skip one scene in several years of play? Probably not. But then, is it really the end of the wold, and a sign of a bad GM, if one scene in several years of play bores one player? I find that equally unlikely. Hence my repetitive request for some indication of just how often this "nuclear option" is really expected to come up in play.