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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9677588" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, I think there is a general point here, which is that pacing matters to pretty much everyone. It's a subjective thing, so different people will find different kinds of pacing valid, but that doesn't dismiss the general point that pacing matters. As a result, it's not a cost-free choice to include "conflict-neutral"/"low-stakes" situations. (IMO more like "no-stakes" in a lot of cases, but that's my perspective talking.) The way it has been presented, this happens pretty much any time the players interact with NPCs when in any safe place. Every transaction has to be played out to the letter, more or less. From the descriptions given earlier, it comes across as "everything short of describing yourself going to the bathroom or chewing your food needs to be played out in full".*While some people will certainly want all of that, a good number of people won't--and it isn't strictly more (nor less) supportive of verisimilitude to do so. In fact, I'd actually be quite surprised if more than a couple people in this thread would truly expect THAT degree of playing things out. All of us will engage in some amount of eliding away nitpicky detail; most likely, most (perhaps not quite all) of us will expect that a few kinds of nitpicky detail are worth the cost of admission, namely, the risk of dull events that detract from the overall experience more than they add to it.More or less, it's something people should care about. Is it the player's fault for falling asleep when the party spends 30, 45, 60 minutes on "we talked to the seven different merchants we needed to in order to buy basic supplies, and the guards who wanted to know what we were up to, and then the wagon-men to get our wagon and rented horses out of the stable, and getting onto the road, and navigating the bumpy road under a light rain, and [three further "conflict-neutral" events], and then we got to the dungeon and stuff started happening"? Or is there an issue with the behavior at the table overall, spending much too much time on tasks and events that don't actually make any difference other than really, really, really heavily stressing the color? Some groups, it would be that player who needs to adjust or possibly seek a better fitting table elsewhere. Others, especially if it's multiple players having this problem, maybe the GM needs to not put so much emphasis on low- or even no-stakes events, so as to not kill the pacing completely dead every time mundane life rears its homely head.But, more to the point: the choice to elide is not indicative of verisimilitude nor its absence. It is completely orthogonal, which is what Abdul Alhazred and pemerton have been talking about. A game that has the proverbial "camera" focused on the action isn't necessarily any more nor less grounded (verisimilitudinous, realistic, plausible, what-have-you) than one that isn't. Some people may find that a game which elides past too many things will be a problem. Some people may find that a game which doesn't elide past enough things will be distractingly un-grounded because their mind wanders during those moments and thus they struggle to stay invested.*And no, this isn't an exaggeration. I have seen things showing some old-school GMs that did in fact go further than the described limit.</blockquote>

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