Like I said, though, you can do it regardless of if this door is trapped or not. I mean, it ultimately is a matter of preference, but given how concerned you are with boring the players in other ways, I’d assume sitting around talking about a door would be something you’d like to keep brief.
As long as they're talking in-character I'd never want to curtail it.
Even Tolkien handled his door puzzle relatively quickly in the actual narration, though it supposedly took hours in the story.
Where had that been part of an RPG where Frodo etc. were all PCs I'd expect all of it to be played out, at least in terms of everyone's ideas and possible solutions and so forth. This is where play of an RPG differs from reading a book or watching a film; particularly as in an RPG the party in this case would be free to make other choices (e.g. go somewhere else, or abandon the mission, or whatever) absent knowledge of the future, while in the book Tolkein already knows what the future holds and just has to get there.
But why? What I don’t understand is the immediate assumption that something’s boring just because it has to do with someone else’s character.
Like this necromancer story you have....I imagine the PC who has the book finds this situation compelling in some way. Is everyone else bored with it?
In this case I don't have to worry about that, as it's a one-player game!
Stories are interesting or boring independent of being connected to one’s character, I’d expect. Do the players really begrudge someone else getting a little more focus as a reason to check out?
Often yes, IME.
It's not that someone's getting more focus in itself, though, it's what that focus is on. If a single PC is off scouting for the party and thus all the focus is on her then everyone's cool with it. But if a single PC is playing out his family drama that has nothing to do with the party, then yeah...it's check-out time.
Honestly it sounds like a lot more work. The world doesn’t “run itself”. You have to actively track and/or narrate all that stuff. Maybe you have a system in place that makes this relatively easy....Blades in the Dark kind of does that by tracking the progress of different factions’ goals during downtime. The GM can just assume a certain amount of progress, or can make a quick fortune roll and track it according to the result. But even with this in place, they recommend only doing it for factions that have become relevant to play.
It's more work up front before the campaign starts, no question there - but (to use one of my favourite phrases) it's work I only have to do once. The payoff is that it means less work later during actual play.
So a question comes to mind....do you consider the consistency of the fiction to be more important than the players’ enjoyment of the time spent playing?
I know they need not be mutually exclusive, but if it comes down to a choice, which would get priority?
Situationally dependent. I suppose it comes down to me advocating for consistency of the fiction, the players advocating for their enjoyment, and we meet in the middle somewhere.
I don’t know....do you have like copious notes on all this stuff that you reference during play? So if someone asks “does this river flow North?” do you spend the next 10 minutes flipping through pages to confirm?
Most of the time I'd already know which way the river flows. Most such information comes simply from the map - where is the high ground, where is the low ground, odds are pretty good a river flows from one to the other.
Yeah...a session of play with no rules seems like something to avoid, in my book. Like I said, scenes like this aren’t bad, but entire sessions just push it too far. I mean, it’s a game.
It's a game, yes, and part of that game involves free-form downtime.
