He has set foot in it. The GM has described a desert; the GM has not described anything that relates to or is leveragable as a resource in relation to the city as a goal; @
Hussar has therefore decided to deploy a player resource (centipede summoning) to create a fictional state within the game that will permit, at the metagame level, the resolution of this scene with a few minutes of narration for colour and continuity.
The complaint against the GM is that the GM insists on resolving the scene in a more detailed fashion - ie has rejected the player's attempt to offer up a device within the fiction that will permit resolution of the scene via a few minutes of free narraion. This, indeed, is how the example got into the thread in the first place: Hussar surprised the GM by offering up such a device, and the GM - instead of following the players' cue - has pushed back hard against it.
OK, first the trip through the desert arises only because the players have chosen to leverage the city. They could instead choose to stay where they are, but their goals are presumably better served by whatever action they wish to carry out in the city. Getting through the desert is a challenge the PC's must accomplish to access the city they have chosen to leverage. Just like, say, getting to the siege leaers requires getting past the initial line of soldiers.
[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] attempted to use the centipede as a means to address the challenge of crossing the desert. The GM adjudicated the success or failure of that effort. Plenty of reasons that the centipede might assist in the crossing, but would not resolve, eliminate or circumvent, the desert were provided. Similarly, a player might say "I use my Intimidate skill to impose my will upon the entire besieging force to depart". That does not mean the PC is so very intimidating that the besieging force's morale shatters and they flee in disarray into the desert. No, not even if he rolls a '20'. Not eve, in my opinion, if he glares at the GM and intones "Say yes or roll the dice". The GM "insisting in resolving the scene in a more detailed fashion" seems, to me, perfectly reasonable.
No, as I replied upthread to @
Nagol: depending on system details and table conventions, a lot of time can be spent on ride checks, use rope checks, animal handling checks, tracking consumption of food and water, etc.
"We can make the process tedious and meaningless" does not mean "the process will be made tedious and meaningless". I don't believe anyone objects to a table style where his aproach is not used. At the same time, if the rules show that riding the centipede would require a DC 20 Ride check to remain mounted for 2 minutes, and the best Ride check in the group is +5, I think the GM is within his rights to rule that the players' solution is not viable. Riding the centipede is simply not reliable. This is no different from the players deciding to scale the city walls, and having it pointed out that a +3 Climb Check will not allow the PC group to readily scale the sheer city walls.
No doubt the GM could set up a siege by ants who are resistant to the druid's animal control, and whose siege has no impact upon the inner workings of the uninhabited, unbuilt "city". In such a case, I would object to it on the same grounds that I object to the irrelevant desert.
"I do not like this challenge so we should autosucceed" is certainly one way to run a game. I do not agree that it is mandatory, nor that it is the best way to run the game.
Yes, the siege can be set up as a tedious, irrelevant roadblock. I happen to think that the typical GM who rolled up a siege on his/her "city complications chart" would be more likely to put in siege with soldiers, commanders, siege engines etc, but perhaps I'm wrong and the typical GM would default to a siege with no fictional elements that the players can leverage in pursuit of their interaction with the city.
Just as the desert can be set up as a tedious, irrelevant roadblock, and just as many of us feel that the GM who places a desert would ensure that the desert includes ineresting and relevant encounters. No matter how interesting interactions with the soldiers, commanders, siege engines etc. may be, if the ultimate purpose of interacting with them is simply to gain access to the city, then those encounters, interactions and challenges are no more, and no less, relevant than the encounters in the desert which are resolved in order to permit the players to achieve their goal of entry into the city. They could be designed to have more, or less, relevance once the PC's have entered the city. This is true of both siege and desert.
The desert having stuff the players know about is less tedious than the actual situation that Hussar described and complained about. It is still different from the city under siege, because it is still not clear that there are any elements of the fiction that the PCs can leverage - unless the game has fairly tight conflict resolution-style rules for exploration (eg a skill challenge), the players still have to wait upon the GM to narrate the discovery of what they're looking for.
The players must wait for the GM to narrate the discovery of the siege. They must then engage the soldiers. Perhaps that front line of spearcarriers greets them with "You shall not pass. We were hired to prevent anyone from passing. That is our sole purpose. When the siege is ended, we will take our payment and leave. We have no personality, backstory or future existence beyond our role as Spearcarriers # 1 - 3,627. This is our purpose. It is all we are. Begone, or we shall stick our pointy sticks in you."
By the way, how did the players even find out about the city, and whatever valuable objective awaits within, in the first place?
There are two ways I can see to interpret this.
One I easily agree with - the choices made by the players shape the content of the subsequent fiction. Hence, if the PCs teleport across the desert, or speed across it on their zippy centipede, then - by definition - the subsequent ingame events will reflect that fact that they did not interact with anyone in the desert, nor explore it in any but the most superficial way.
But the idea of "critical goals" that a GM will ensure can be accomplished in multiple ways, and the idea of "skipping" ways, I'm less sure about. This suggests to me GM authorship of both means and ends. And I'm not really much into that.
I am uncertain how the goal in the city, whatever it may have been, was set. However, Hussar had been quite clear that this was the goal on which the players were focused. However it was set, this was a "critical goal" to the players. Can they accomplish it without entering the city? If not, then they must resolve whatever challenges stand between them and the city. They could, as at least one poster has noted, look at the desert, say "no way!" and abandon their goal of accessing whatever it is they want in the city. But they cannot achieve their goal in the city without getting to the city, and that requires passing through the desert. Their in-game resources determine their options for travel through the desert, and their efforts to leverage those resources to that goal are the actions the GM must adjudicate.
Here is a summary of an episode of play from my own 4e game:
- The PCs had come to a town ruled by a Baron, and were ingratiating themselves with the Baron. The city and Baron were GM-authored; the players' choice to have their PCs ingratiate themselves with the Baron was their own - they wanted to build up their PCs' political standing within the town.
So far, so good. The city, whatever was rumoured to lay within and the desert between us and it were GM-authored. The players' choice to travel to the city was their own - they wanted to do something which we don't know what it is in the city. Therefore, they chose to travel to the city.
- The PCs learned that the Baron's niece was missing and decided to go looking for her. That the Baron had a niece was GM-authored; that the PCs learned of her disappearance was primarily GM authored (as an adjudication of consequences in the course of resolving a skill challenge); that the niece resembled very much her grandmother whom the PCs had recsued from a trapping mirror when they briefly travelled 100 years into the past was GM authored also, but the inclusion of that connection past exploits was a response to the prior player engagement with the time travel scenario, and in particular their interest in the rescued woman. The decision to go and look for the niece was made by the players, based on their desire to have their PCs ingratiate themselves with the Baron, and on their interest in the connection to the woman they had rescued in the past.
The decision to travel to the city was player-authored. Everything else was GM authored. I suppose we could resolve the travel across the desert on a centipede with a skill challenge (although this having been 3e, I don't believe this would have been an option in the specific game in question), but that would require rolling such things as Use Rope, Animal Handling and Ride checks. It seems reasonable that the resolution of the skill challenge would set the time required to cross the desert, and the longer that takes, the more food and water would reasonably be consumed. How fortunate that 4e brought us such a clearly superior replacement for the tedium of
onride checks, use rope checks, animal handling checks, tracking consumption offood and water, etc.
[lost the bullet - oh welll]
Through a series of adventures the PCs saved the niece from Kas and brought her back to the city. As an adventure this was fairly standard site exploration, but the inclusion of Kas was in response to the PCs' prior discovery of the Sword of Kas, and the fact that one of the PCs is something of a Vecna affiliate. In their negotiation with Kasn for the life of the niece, the PCs learned the (GM-authored) fact that he had been trapped in a coffin by the rescued grandmother; the PCs worked out that this grandmother was, like the Baron's niece, probably a necromancer, and negotiated a deal with Kas whereby they would track her down on his behalf, and let him know when they found her. Mechanically, these negotiations were resolved via free roleplaying; the outcome was therefore jointly authored by the GM and players - in effect, I mostly "said yes" to what they wanted - a promise to Kas in exchange for the life of the niece - but there was an element of "yes, but" - they had to swear oaths to Kas that they otherwise would have preferred not to swear. Kas would have let them leave without so swearing if they had handed over the niece, but the PCs (as chosen by their players) wouldn't go back on their promise to the Baron to return her to him.
So you had the players exploring an unknown area (which could be a desert) in search of a desired goal (which could be a niece or a city). Within this, you set relevant encounters tied in to the interests of the players which were linked to PC backgrounds and prior events in the campaign. But [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] assumes his GM will do none of these things in their desert explorations. With no context, selecting relevant desert encounters is tough, but I see no reason that a rival faction to one favoured by the PC's (Kas vs Vecna), a character linked to a prized possession (Kas and the Sword of Kas), an old enemy or an old friend, or any number of other matters that link to past experiences and aspects of the PC's could not be integrated into the desert encounters, to occur during the efforts to travel to the city. By the same token, you could have made every encounter between the PC's an locating the niece a random wilderness monster. At the outset of the "series of adventures", what prevents me glaring across the table and saying "Our goal is rescue of the niece. Story Now! I summon a giant centipede for us to ride directly to the location of the kidnapped niece - sue, it's not perfect, but it's a plot coupon to avoid the doubtless tedious intervening encounters you have set and GET TO THE ACTION. Say Yes or Roll the Dice!!" OK, so let us assume the negotiations with Kas and rescue of the niece were our "goal within the city". We negotiated, swore our oaths, got the niece, you tossed out this unesired complication she is a necromancer, back we go to the Baron.
- The PCs returned the niece to her uncle. They also reported to him that they had learned that she was a necromancer, and that they felt she should suffer some consequence for this. Via either simple skill check, or skill challenge (I can't now remember) the players got to impose upon the fiction their desire that the baron agreed to this. (In the fiction, for various reasons I haven't elaborated, he has become too politically dependent upon the PCs to refuse them on this matter.)
Let us assume that the players previously rejected every adventure hook offered which would enable them to gain that political clout. Would they still have it, or did they have to accomplish things to obtain it? I'm removing the chase scene, as it (like the above) consists only of the players reacting to what the GM dropped in their path. A Necromancer niece (they could not choose to leverage that into consequences until it was presented by the GM), chasing the niece (possible only when the GM plopped her escape down), the boat chase (the PC's can't leverage the boats until the GM narrates them and the river), etc.
In other (and fewer) words, I once again do not see the huge difference you seem to perceive between
pemerton's game and a standard & game, deftly planned and run by an experienced GM and tailored to the players and their characters. Nor do I see why the journey through the desert could not have been planned and executed in an equally meaningful and relevant manner. Rather than just rolling up a Wandering Siege on the Random Complications table.
On to your summary
The authorial role of the GM in what I've described is important, and probably larger than in @
chaochou's game. But it was the players who chose to build up political standing in the town (they didn't have to - as paragon level heroes they could easily have treated the town as beneath their notice), and hence to take appropriate steps to do so. I led them into the hunt for the niece via a fairly obvious play upon an earlier event in which they had been invested (the rescue, in the past, of the grandmother as a young woman). But they were the ones who chose to negotiate with Kas rather than fight him. They were the ones who decided to make an ally of him and thereby, in effect, an enemy of the woman they had rescued in the past. They were the ones who decided to push the Baron to hold his niece to account as a necromancer, thereby (fairly predictably) triggering her escape attempt. And they were the ones who chose to kill her, even though they knew that the Baron was already under emotional stress and would not take the news well. (Their hatred of necromancers goes very deep; they seemed far more sanguine about Kas's vampirism.)
If the players had not chosen to have their PCs hunt down the niece, I suspect I would have brought her and Kas into the picture some other way, but it might all have turned out quite differently. (I certainly had no anticipation that the players would decide to have their PCs ally with Kas, and in other circumstances they might not have.) Had the players not chosen to have their PCs kill the niece; or had the Diplomacy check upon telling him the news been a success; then events with the Baron may have been different too.
There are no GM-authored "critical goals" here, and hence no concerns about the PCs "skipping" them. I am doing my best to use my authorship to make the players make choices that they care about, in virtue of their investment in the situation; and not because they just want to see how things turn out (in which case tossing a coin would do as well as making a choice) but because they (the players, not just the PCs) care that things turn out one way rather than another.
Again, tough to assess [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s game without the context. However, perhaps we may assume the players decided on the goals which lead them to wish to travel to the distant city, across the desert, to fulfill some broader goal. In an AP, I assume that this goal would be consistent with the goals and motivations of the PC's, broadly set in advance for party cohesion as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has suggested in prior posts, and as many AP's seek to do now. Their goals have lead them to want something in the city, so they need to get there, led into the desert by that desire. They will choose how to react to events in the desert (fight, negotiate with, ignore or flee from a group of nomads, or mercenaries, or refugees, or what have you). They will choose where to proceed after resolving matters in the city. Maybe they will even choose to forego the trip to the city at all, or delay it until they can obtain resources needed to cross the desert, just as your players could have chosen not to rescue the niece, or to maintain the secret of her necromancy, or to blackmail her with that secet, or what have you. But those choices did not exist until you dropped the niece in their path, and later until you both decided and dropped the clues that she was a necromancer.
If her escape attempt was so predicatable, why were no efforts made to prevent it? If the players choose to ignore the desert and the city, presumably any important elements of the desert encounters (like Kas and the niece) could later arise in some other manner. The players' actions, and their successes or failures, would also dictate the outcomes.
No "critical goals"? Then why will the niece and Kas show up later?
I think one difference is the AP. If the GM is using a published resource, he has more of an incentive to keep the plot on the rails. However, nothing prevents the GM playing out the story differently because the players take unexpected actions, even to the extreme of abandoning the story (and the AP) to seek different adventures. But I can certainly see an AP suggesting "if the players do not seek out the kidnapped niece, here are some other ways she and Kas can be introduced to allow them to play their inevitable roles in the storyline" - and the simple fact you say they would show up later suggests a certain inevitability - and contemplating the possibility they will negotiate with (or battle, or evade) Kas, and kill the niece (or capture her, or have her escape, or never reveal her necomancy) as well as successes or failures in subsequent interaction with the Baron. However, given the limitations of a published AP, I suspect most will re-rail the plot so the next three books reamain plausible, not create a separate series of "Pats 7, 8 and 9" for each permutation and combination. You only have to pen the results of one combination of player choices and successes/failures, so you can't say what would happen had they chosen differently, or at least not too far forward, nor do you need to.
Again, not seeing anything revolutionary in the above, nor any necessary huge deviation from [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s game, other than the fact that you know all the relevant context leading into the encounters and choices to be made.
I note that the PC's "as paragon level heroes" could ignoe the town. This implies that lower level characters could not. At some level, the characters would possess the power and resources to ignore the desert, but it appears [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s group (and the AP assumed power level group) could not.
