If that's what you're envisaging happening in the city, no wonder we're so far apart in being able to appreciate the relevance of the siege.
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- Thread starter Greenfield
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OK, as a simplistic exercise, it turns out that the besieging army is from a foreign land. They seem not to understand your words, and neither do you understand theirs. They immediately attack to subdue you. Their War Priests cast Dispels routinely on this small force, expecting any such group must possess mystic powers to dare challenge their siege.
The PC’s are disarmed, disrobed, and staked out in the hot sun to perish as an example of what will become of all the city’s inhabitants if they do not surrender by nightfall three days hence.
Sure, some leaders speak other languages, but you never get close enough to them to even parlay – and they too have their orders. By the way, how do you think parlay at Helm’s Deep would have worked out?
A good point, and one that demonstrates an actual difference between the siege and the desert. The siege is an encounter within the desert – an event that occurs while the players are attempting to meet their goal of getting from where they started to the city. “The desert” is not the encounter. No one will describe three weeks’ travel in real time detail. There are encounters in the desert. Near the end of the travel, the siege is encountered.
Like JC, I do not see the siege as being, by default, more “player empowering” than the desert, or any other encounter within the desert.
Which is why the GM would expect you would use those resources you have to cross the desert as effectively and efficiently as possible. If you cannot teleport, he expects you to walk. But hey, the centipede riding will work. You still pass physically through the desert, though. You still see that line of refugees from the city. Now you are empowered to choose how you will interact. Just like you would have been on foot.
You Teleported in? Well, perhaps that fellow you were to meet is with those refugees in the desert (or someone who took your MacGuffin is). You can now “choose” to interact with that aspect of the desert, or you can “choose” to give up your objective. Meaningful? I suggest it is just as meaningful as your choice to pursue the Mystery Goal to the city in the first place – which is to say, I have no idea.
Or they get staked out in the hot sun for their troubles. Meaningful?
Or there just happens to be a siege, or there just happens to be someone in the siege willing to listen to you, or there just happens to be a city in the middle of the desert where your goal just happens to be.
The siege is part and parcel to the city. It is right there. It's inherently linked to the city. The DM doesn't have to "interrupt" anything. It's an element of the city, no different than walls or anything else. It's framing the city. This isn't just a city in a desert. It's a city under siege. That's part of the framing of the city.
It's contrived in that it's a bit unlikely that we happen to arrive just as the siege is going on, but, meh, I'm more than willing to allow for that. But, the only way to make the desert actually relevant is by adding things to the desert which aren't actually part of the desert but are actually part of the city - either there are prisoners with the nomads, or city people with the nomads or whatever. The nomads themselves are actually completely unimportant as far as the player's goals go.
I am perfectly fine with the fact that you can use the resources you have. Whether you do or don’t have them is an issue I should have factored in when I designed the desert and planned the adventure.
Are you perfectly fine if you possess and use the resources to completely skip the desert, and your investigations in the city develop in such a manner that you have to go back out into the desert to find the nomads who can tell you how to get to the Pyramid of Pyroptohep, the location the fellow you were trying to find in the city vanished while seeking, all the time carrying your MacGuffin? Is that inherently superior to encountering the same nomads while walking through the desert you lacked the resources to skip, discovering the fellow you were travelling to the city to find also passed by here six months back seeking that Pyramid, and never returned?
Hussar said:
Agreed, JC. My assumption is that the players will use the resources available to them to most efficiently cross the desert. If they can teleport, they will logically do so. If they can ride a giant centipede (Is that what the young folks are calling it these days?) they’ll probably do so. If they have no other resources, they will ride camels or walk in as direct a manner as possible to their target location.
Does that resolve the expectation you will “interact with the desert”?
What I don’t expect is that a player will look across the table and say “Look, I have no idea what you have in store in the desert, and I know our characters have no way of avoiding the crossing, but I just know before we even begin that this will just be a whole session of suck – that’s the kind of faith I have in your adventure design and GMing skills – so how about just handwaving the whole desert crossing, sight unseen? I know this is the only time in the whole campaign you will ever plan anything so mind-numbingly boring, so don’t be offended.” With the expectation I will just say “oh, sure, no problem – you guys arrive at the city gates, carried by the Wind Sprites of the Desert who just happen to, in a completely non-contrived manner, take a liking to you. They fly off never to be seen again.”
The players have chosen to go and do something in the city. To do so, they must get into the city. That means they must cross the desert between them and the city (on foot, on centipede, on magic carpet or whatever their resources allow). They must get past the siege which denies them access to the city. They must find the person or thing they want to encounter to do their something in the city.
These are challenges to the achievement of their goals. They are extra complications. They can, if the GM makes them so, be roadblocks or boring timewasters. I find it no more appropriate to assume the GM’s goal is to roadblock or bore the players than it is for the GM to assume anything a player asks for will be used to break the game, hog the spotlight or otherwise make the game less enjoyable for all participants. If experience shows the GM runs a game you find boring and full of roadblocks, I think you need a new GM, not a fast forward/skip scene button.
Okay, let's look at things. You want to cross the desert to get to the city. There's nothing in the desert that's been communicated to you other than "desert", so you understandably assume "sand and such" and decide to pass through it. After all, what is there to explore? You don't know as a player, really.
Now, along the way, the GM interrupts the "skipping the desert" narration to say "something happens."
Situation A: There is a group of nomads guiding city folk through the desert, with what looks like hardened city mercenaries escorting them. Some of the city folk shout out to you.
Situation B: There is a siege around the city as you approach it.
I'm struggling to understand how one is more "player empowering" than the other. Both could not be explored by players before they were introduced by the GM, as the players didn't know either situation existed. They can react to either one, or even interact with it later on if they choose to (seeking out nomads, looking for leaders in the siege, etc.). I'm honestly struggling to find the "reactive vs active" difference, or the "player empowered" difference. As always, play what you like
Hi again JC. Nice situation! Some thoughts which may or may not be useful.
Do you remember my example way back, with the character trying to cross a busy street to go to a shop? I asked if there was a difference between a street gang on the corner and a crime scene at the shop with bullet holes and spent cartridges and whatnot.
Okay. Let's start the example 10 blocks from the shop now. And I describe police cars whizzing past in the direction you're going, sirens blazing, officers starting to cordon off the street further down, SWAT teams moving into position, black FBI cars, snipers on the rooftops.
Is this making 'the streets around the shop' relevant? It's debatable. What I'd say I was doing was foreshadowing the crime scene at the shop. What's relevant to the player is the shootout at the shop, but instead of jumping straight there I'm giving advanced warning that something's up.
I believe you're doing the same in Situation A, if I've read you correctly. It accepts the seige as a viable complication and is now warning of the seige. The desert only 'matters' in the sense that all human interaction happens 'somewhere'. We could interchange desert for jungle, mountain, boiling lava pits, frozen tundra. The city could be over the next rise or still 75 miles away. The 'where' in this encounter is simply a necessity of our reality. The 'what' in this encounter is 'the city is under seige.'
What this offers is a chance for players to enjoy the seige in advance. And react and adapt. This kind of foreshadowing is powerful, generally regarded as quality GMing irrespective of playstyle. But I don't see a distinction here between desert and seige. It looks, to me, like a choice between seige and pre-seige.
However, I agree with your conclusion that this desert/seige split is at best a tenuous indicator of player empowerment in the way that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] describes. I think questions like 'Who authored the need to go to the city - GM, player or group?' would reveal those authority structures more directly.
Celebrim
Legend
Yes, though its not such a wonder to me. The problem is that you are always filling in details based on your assumptions. Actually, it goes even further than that. Not only are you filling in details based on your assumptions, you are actually filling out the mechanisms you would use to resolve the two in your head. Then, having created these two completely different things in your mind, you are saying, "I don't see how you don't understand these things are different. You must be obstinate and stupid."
But your assumptions are all flawed, and simply that assumptions. Returning to the original example again that provoked all this discussion, there never was a 'city' in the 'desert'. The location in the desert was a crumbling Cathedral. And the goal there was literally, "Walk into the temple (literally). Meet with the High Priest (a Greater Mummy). Get the MacGuffin (a magical latern, recieved from the high priest after defeating a trial he sets for you). Get to the next location in the desert with minimal trouble." A seige would have been irrelevant. It would have presented an conceptually identical problem to the desert. And it wouldn't have been a usuable resource either. The beseigers couldn't have helped with the Cathedral even if they had wanted to, because it was a trope of setting that the inhabitants of the 'desert' were magically prevented (by epic level magic) from entering the Cathedral. Once evaded by rushing past them on a centipede, the besiegers become irrelevant.
The problem you are failing to understand is that the seige is only intrinsically more than the desert if you present the seige in certain ways and make the goals in the city particular sorts of things. If the seige is just a stand alone location in a linear series of temporal/spatial events, and the goals in the 'city' unrelated to the seige - as in fact they would have been in the original example - simply having a seige is just another obstacle, just another random complication, in between the character's and their goal. It is in fact, just a narrow ledge crossing on the way to get into the tomb, calling for a test only because well getting into the tomb is relevant and we've arbitarily decided this is the point we start keeping count. In order to make the seige meaningful, we have to make it intrinsicly applicable to the player goals. But in every sense we can do that, we can make the 'desert' crossing intrinsically applicable to player goals.
Indeed, as I've indicated, I don't think the scenario designer did a great job of making the 'desert' relevant, but the 'desert' was more relevant (because he made it so) if only for weak reasons than a random seige would have been. A seige would have been just another irrelevant bit of combat in a scenario already too reliant on irrelevant random combat - just another grind in a scenario that had too much redundant grind. There was at the end of it all a really strong idea, but the scenario designer did I think a poor job of world building and scene framing, and relied a bit too much on railroad to obtain the result he wanted even without considering the module does after a certain point a poor job of handling train derailments. That being said, fixing the scenario doesn't necessarily mean, "Seige good, desert bad", as if the problem of the scenario was one of poor color.
So sure, in the abstract when you are allowed to imagine whatever you want, you can make a seige intensely interesting and irrelevant. I've little doubt of your GMing ability. But in factuality, we when bring up a counter example, your response has always been, "Well, I refuse to admit that possibility. That would be bad DMing, therefore it can't or at least ought not exist." And likewise, any counter examples of relevance presented about the desert, your response has always been, "A priori, the desert is bad DMing, because Hussar refused it. Therefore, the desert is always bad Dming. But not this wonderful seige I've prepared." When it comes to the seige, you defend it by freely inventing a good scenario unrelated to the discussion at hand. When it comes to the desert, you denounce it by restricting the discussion to the particular 'desert' (that you know nothing about) under discussion.
And you wonder why we can't 'appreciate' the double standards of your argument?
Really, this is very similar in one respect to an earlier argument we were having regardling the centipede. As long as we kept the details vague, it was easy to argue that the GM was just 'having a snit' and trying to throw up roadblocks in the face of Hussar's 'creative solution'. However, once you actually focus on the details about Hussar's binder, the particular power he was calling on, the exact mechanics of Monster Summoning, and so forth, then the discussion takes on a completely different character. Suddenly the fact that Hussar was flagrantly in violation of the established rules is something we want to handwave past, and its all about how that doesn't really matter because the GM should let players get to the scenes that they want if they are 'doing it right'. But, once we actually stop looking at that claim in the abstract case, and actually focus on concrete details, the discussion takes on a completely different character yet again.
Right from the start there has been a double standard in this thread, with GMs judged by different standards than players. There have been examples offered of bad GMing. But there have also been examples offered where the player offered up outcome rather than proposition, and then dared the GM to differ with their - implicitly or explicitly threatening the GM with (at the least) verbal assault and emotional abuse if he dared disagree with the outcome they demanded. Since I really don't want to pick on Hussar, consider Greenfield's example of the tournament play. Admittedly, there was a lot of GMing that sounds very questionable or outright bad going on in the story, but some of what Greenfield narrated is more like player's bullying a GM than GM's bullying players. In particular, I recall the scene where Greenfield chooses to crash through the door on the back of a Rhino, and tells the GM, "We don't have to open the door. We've got a Rhinocerus. We can do these things." But, if you actually examine that claim in the terms of the rules - which a tournament judge absolutely MUST do - it turns out to not only be questionable that they can do it, but actually wildly improbable under the official rules. Had the judge said, "Ok, fine, make a bend/break bars test using your natural strength score, either way you smash into the door headfirst in Rhino form and take 3 damage. The door seems undamaged, but it may pop open depending on the results of your test.", I'm willing to bet we'd be hearing about that as part of how unfair the judge was (and granted, some of his rulings seemed questionable), but putting myself in the judges shoes and trying to deal with Greenfield's proposition as a rules proposition and not as unquestionable outcome (that Greenfield believes it in his excitement with 'discovering' the creative solution to be), the 1e rules say characters using polymorph self to change into rhinos can't batter down doors and the above resolution is just about the most charitable one allowable within the rules.
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What would probably happen is
Oh, a SIEGE. There must be a central courtyard. Teleport in. Walk back across the desert because the damn teleport misfired. Ask the DM to hand-wave the walking back to the city. Ask one of the residents to draw a picture of the courtyard to increase my chances of teleporting there. Rinse and repeat as necessary.
If the entire thing went like . . .
Players learn of something they need in a city on the 31st layer of the abyss.
Cast Plane shift.
End up 100 miles from the city in the desert.
Travel the desert.
Interact with the siege.
Enter the city.
Find the item.
Return home (probably 100 miles from there).
In this scenario the desert is a big waste of everyone's time regardless of what's there. It's the side effect of a spell, not the intent of the DM and Players. Anything that happens there is not preplanned or important unless the DM goes out of his way to make it so.
Now if the entire thing went like . . .
Players learn of something they need in a city across the desert.
Travel the desert.
Interact with the siege.
Enter the city.
Find the item.
Return home.
In this scenario the desert is more interesting because it can intentionally be used as a place to provide the PCs with information or encounter interesting people or what have you. It's still between you and your ultimate goal, but it's intentionally there and preplanned to be part of the quest for goal fulfillment.
It was brought up that the scenario was based on a module that used the spell's misfire as a way of forcing the player's interaction with the desert. The problem is, is that the players are under the impression that the 100 miles off course was a misfire of the spell, not the intention of the DM/Module. If they had known in advance that they would need to cross a desert before arriving there, they could have planned accordingly (in terms of goals, not necessarily resources). If they had been told that they needed to go to the desert to find Mr PlotMan to provide information about where the item was in the city, that would have been fine as well, since they wouldn't have viewed the arrival in the desert as a misfire of the spell, but rather their intended target.
If the plot is requiring me to use Spell GetMeThere, then either the spell needs to work flawlessly, since it's a requirement of the plot, or the plot needs to tell me that the location I NEED to go is not my ultimate destination. Otherwise, as a player, I'm going to assume a misfire and be grumpy that I now need to waste time traveling a desert just to get to the damn place the DM/Plot said I had to go!
Just some added thoughts, most of which have been said a time or two in this thread (hasn't everything been said yet?)
EPIHANY! Emphasis added to a very key statement. Isn’t the crux of much of the bad GMing suggested on this thread, not to mention many others, that the GM refuses to accept possibilities falling outside his vision of how the game will play out? How is the refusal to weigh, in an objective and unbiased manner, the possibility that the desert could very well be relevant, interesting and a legitimate pat of the game any different from a GM refusing to accept an outside the box approach (“we will hire mercenaries to assist us”; “we will ride the Bound centipede across the desert”; “we will take an action not directly addressed in the rule book/scenario book in order to resolve this challenge”) without assessing the merits of the approach in an objective and unbiased manner?
Emphasis added.
OK, you as a player will assume being 100 miles away was a misfire. I, as a GM, will tell you to go and read the spell description. There is not “a slim possibility of a misfire”. There is not even “a slim possibility you will arrive on target”. The spell will, with 100% certainty, deposit you between 5 and 500 miles away from your target destination. If you did not know that going in, it is because you failed to read the spell description. Assuming this was an NPC resource (I think someone mentioned an NPC having the spell in this case), what stops the NPC saying “yup, that’s the problem with Plane Shift – you always arrive miles from your destination.”
Knowing that this was not a misfire of the spell, but a 100% certain result of the spell, precisely as written, why would that side effect not be assumed to be the intent of the GM (who gave you a reason for planar travel and one resource capable of accomplishing it, which resource comes attached to that 100% certain side effect).
Could you “know in advance”? Maybe – but do you have the resources to know, or discover, what awaits you on the other side, well in advance? If you do, did you have the time to use them? If I know you are capable of divining what will be on the “other side”, and can then prepare to mitigate same in a manner that will harm the scene I intend to set, why would I not add some time pressure? “The orcs are at the gates – we can’t wait!”; “the Portal will vanish in another few minutes and will not be accessible again for 10 generations”.
It seems perfectly legitimate to expect the players can intuit that the GM planned for this certainty, or even a real possibility, and that he will either present interesting, relevant encounters or resolve the matter with limited play, and will not force you to waste time traveling a desert just to get to the damn place the DM/Plot said you had to go.
Celebrim
Legend
You are confusing, "How to run BW." with, "How I would run BW." Likewise, you are confusing "can't" with "in my opinion you ought not to".
I'm not sure that I follow you, but if I do follow you, the belief seems to me to be a narrow stand in for something like, "Rights exist to protect the innocent and civilized; they don't apply to the scum who prey on the innocent." or perhaps, "There is nothing I wouldn't do to protect X.", or even, "The ends justify the means." In that case, you seem to be dismissing a moral problem or a belief of such general relevancy that I have never been in a lenghty campaign where the issue didn't come up at least once. Stated or unstated, every character tends to have one belief or the other on this. But then again, as I said, I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.
This is a statement that is being made in my opinion in full and flagrant defiance of the statements I've made in this thread. You are completely confused, and I'd quote myself to prove it but what would be the point. It's not that I have resolute views about what a true king must be, but that settings have resolute views about what a true king must be. The statement, "I am the true king", is either delusional or asserts a fact about setting and backstory that must be congruent with each other from the outset. The society doesn't need to recognize this congruence, obviously, if we are runing the 'Unrecognized King' story, but the 'Unrecognized True King' story is the single most important story in all of Western Civilization and reoccurs in some many important places in history and literature that I won't begin to enumerate them. If you think you've got a blank slate on that story you are delusional. If you don't create a Myth, it's 100% gauranteed that everyone at the table will have a some version of the myth in their heads and conflict at the table level is just or more likely than conflict in the story. Nor can you blunder through this creating Myth as you go and gaurantee that you'll end up avoiding conflict or with a story that satisfies the player. This is not a matter of the GM being vindicative or of the GM's opinions. This is a matter of the GM not responding to the player's agency through backstory authority, but instead thinking he can just leave it all up in the air.
Again, you have it backwards. I believe that your insistance that there is no setting, that the belief 'I am the true king' need only have forestory relevance, all but guarantees that a player that is putting the nature, source, and character of true kingship up for grabs won't get the story they expect. Or at the very least, the same sort of conflict over what makes a good scene that you have declared is a defence against the problems in some of the examples is very much likely. You seem to continually assert that backstory gaurantees forestory. You've seemingly never paused to consider that the sorts of fixed in stone forestories you don't apparantly don't like, Adventure Paths run to script for example, usually have that problem precisely because they are completely independent of player backstory.
Do you really think I care if it is or not? I'm not offended by insults. The things that bother me, get me emotional, are mischaracterizations and logical fallacies. My '???' was not over an 'insult', but over the 'I'm shutting down further conversation by fiat declaration'. If you are convinced that there is one true way, then we really are wasting our breath.
I think we've found yet another story you can't run. So, if you can't run stories about the conflict between your own consciousness and divine dictates, and you can't run stories that test whether the ends justify the means...
Nevermind, I'm not sure I want to know the answer.
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If the GM planned for this to happen, then it is expected the goal is not to go to the city, it is then to go 100 miles away from the city, in this case the desert. If the DM told you the goal is the city, then there is a miscommunication between goals. Which is what I believe others are saying and which I explained in my post.
The purpose of the planar travel is not exploration or investigation, that was made clear when the DM told the players that their goal was in the city. They weren't out looking for a romp in the abyss. As I explained, if the DM had told the players that the goal was to find information that would lead them to the item (which happened to be in the city, although they hadn't known that at the time) then it's a perfectly acceptable and interesting occurrence. But if the DM says, "The thing you need is in the city" and then expects you to spend hours running around the desert talking to people for which you have no reason to talk to because you know the goal is in the city, then that's a problem.
Goal A - Snatch and Grab
Goal B - Explore the Abyss
The Players were expecting Goal A and got Goal B. That's a miscommunication and a problem.
The misfire relates to the use of the spell for plot purposes. There is an expectation that following the plot leads to achieving goals, not to pointless encounters. There's a huge difference between a 5 mile walk and a 500 mile trek across the desert.
This isn't a reflection on whether an exploratory trek through the desert is fun or not. I find them quite fun, especially when I encounter things like "B4 The Lost City." But then exploration needs to be the goal and point of the scenario, otherwise it's just a distraction and I'll use all my resources avoiding it (which would defeat the intention of the desert if it was there for a purpose). All that's required to make the desert interesting is the DMing changing how they share the information. "Look for clues to the item's location in the desert" versus "get to the city to retrieve the item."
Celebrim
Legend
- emphasis added
In abstract, sure, I suppose I can agree with that. But that is all irrelevant to the example from which the 'desert' and 'city' were drawn. In point of fact, all the above elaboration consitutes no more than a red herring. All the bolded assertions are false as they pertain to the scenario and so irrelevant, and thus all the ifs and suppositions about them are counter-factual. In a different situation, maybe that's true, but then again no one has ever asserted otherwise. For example, I asserted that if there was nothing interesting or relevant in the desert, then the best thing is to have the spell land them 5 miles from their destination within sight of 'the city' (but again there is no city, the whole scenario could be described as 'guided wilderness exploration'). So sure, for some irrelevant theoretical example, I can fully agree with you because since the example is irrelevant and abstract it doesn't change my opinions in the slightest.
In point of fact, the players in the scenario were not led what to expect at all. The scenario is intentionally vague. This is because there is something about the setting which is false (I'm not going to spoil what it is) and so one of the ideas behind the scenario is that the players will because of their limited information develop their own theory of what is going on which will be wildly wrong, and then, at a later point there will be a surprise reveal - a twist - that causes them to radically reassess the setting in a dramatic way. This sort of structure has been built into prior modules. For example, the structure occurs in 'Saber River', which when it was ran for me as a young player provided for me then a paradigm shifting moment of awesomeness, and which made me as a DM go, "Wow! There is so much more possible than I thought there could be!" Granted, these particular sorts of twists are often overused and unsurprising now to the point of being cliche, but twists are still at the heart of telling good stories.
Maybe, but this is again irrelevant. There wasn't a random chance of a 5 mile or a 500 mile walk. There was a fixed 110 mile walk and no expectation about the goals to achieve, and if anything an expectation set by the setting of, "We won't be exactly where we intend to be."
I don't want to delve to much into the goal and point of the scenario, and I agree in this case that the 'desert' is just a distraction. Of course, I can agree with that because the scenario also assumes that the desert is just a distraction or obstacle and assumes that the players will use every resource they can to truncate the journey as much as possible. It even mentions using teleport in at least one place in the text. And its worth noting that no one has argued that the players shouldn't use their resources to avoid the hazards of the 'desert' journey, so I'm not sure what you are really arguing here since on some level there is no disagreement. The only thing I might quibble over is the fact that you seem to think the problem is that there isn't enough hand holding and leading players around by the nose ring, since you think everything would have been alright if Hussar had just been signaled more strongly what he was supposed to do. Do you really think the problem here is the DM not explaining their will and desire to the players forcefully and clearly enough?
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