You're doing what? Surprising the DM

[Hussar]

I would be interested in Hussar's comments on this area specifically. He has said at least once, I believe, that telling him how to play his character is a dealbreaker. I know a lot of players who have similar feelings about the importance of their 100% control over their character. Let's say the other players at the table decide that this need for vegeance agains the grell is getting stale, so the vote is unanimous that Hussar's character should lose that Vengeful trait, to take an extreme example./quote]

Just pulling this one out. If the entire group told me to shut up? Ok, fine, I shut up. I'm not going to start piddling on everyone else's fun. And, I'm perfectly willing to compromise.

So, when the DM rams these scenes down my throat, forcing me to play through them, despite my expressly stated wishes that I don't want to do this, what compromise is the DM showing?

Again, I understand that. What you continually ignore is that Hussar is never in any position to judge whether the exploration of the desert or the NPCs has story and thematic heft. In order for Hussar to make that judgment, he has to be able to read the DM's mind and accurately see the future - both of which are beyond his ability. He has no idea what ties to the story and game theme the exploration will have, and by refusing it he may very well be refusing the most interesting parts of the story. Indeed, this is true even if we are playing BW. And the problem I have is by having this opt out stance where he signals the DM at the meta level, he's implicitly forcing the DM to defend his decisions on the meta-level. In other words, he's demanding that the DM provide spoilers, which isn't fair to the DM (since reveals are a big part of what makes DMing fun), spoils the story (surprise being a huge part of what makes stories interesting), and is in fact a type of munchkiny power gaming.

Well, I've been playing a few years now. It's generally not too difficult to tell when something is going to matter and when it's not. We're at point A. We need to be at point B. In between these two points are nothing that has anything to do with what we need to do at B. It's not really a big thing to realize that there really isn't a whole lot there.

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Look, let me jump over the GM screen for a second and show what I would do as the DM in both situations. For me, the primary, single most important criteria is:

What is the goal?

What are the players and their characters doing right now and why are they doing it? That is the primary concern. If the goal was "hunting bandits in the desert" then fine, wander the sands. If the goal was, "Find the lost temple of Ix", then fine, let's go wandering. But the goal here is, "Let's get to Point B where we have to be in order to move the game forward."

So, with that in mind, when the players figure out a way to get to point B that bypasses the stuff I had planned on having them encounter because I presumed they were walking? Fine, no problem. Red Line ho! I might, possibly, use a skill challenge to narrate how the trip went - Each failed check is a loss of a healing surge. Arrival is guaranteed. Get there with no fails? You have smooth sailing. Three fails? You get there, badly sunburned, spitting lots of dust and you probably fell off a few times. Total table time: 10 minutes.

In the Grell example, there is a very clear goal - revenge/payback on the grell. I might make them make a Streetwise check to see how long it takes to recruit six guards in a city, but, that's about it. Total table time: 10 minutes, 5 of which it takes me to write down stat blocks for the guards.

IOW, the pacing of the game, combined with clear goals, means that I don't screw around with, what I consider to be extraneous details.

I mean, in real life, when you hire someone to paint your house, do you ask them personal questions about their backgrounds and goals in life? I certainly don't. I get their name, pay the money and that's about it. I couldn't really care less. So, why would my character really care about these guys? They are there to do a job, get paid and go away.

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It's baffling to me, this thread is. What have I really done here? All I've said to the DM is, "Hey, Mr. DM, this situation that you've put in front of us? Not really feeling the love. Can we just skip it and move on?" With the expectation that we would, in fact, move on.

The reaction to that has been an endless stream of insults and questions about my ability to role play. Constant shots about how I should stick to video games and not pollute the one true way of gaming. And the worst part is, there are other DM's here agreeing with it. It's mind boggling to me.

Do you really hold this level of control and power trip over your players? That if they express a liking for a different sort of playstyle, you belittle and berate them and kick them out of the group? Seriously? Look at the automatic presumptions coming out here - I'm whiney and only trying to spoil everyone's fun. Constant appeals to how the rest of the group feels, with the automatic assumption that I'm the odd man out here. It's just too bizarre.

 

[Hussar]

Nothing. But are the rest of the players at the table also only interested in combat? I would think that, if we have five or six gamers(including the GM) sitting around the table, and all of them are interested only in combat, then the GM would not be incorporating "exploration of the desert" or "interviewing the hirelings" scenarios. He would skip to the combat. If the GM is out of step with the player group as a whole, then the GM needs to adapt his style to the group, or the group needs to find a new GM. But if the other players enjoy these other aspects of the game, then perhaps it is the one player who only enjoys combat who needs to either compromise or find a new group.

Umm, you might want to go back and do a bit of rereading.

I'm commented on two examples. Only one has anything to do with combat. The other is crossing the desert to reach a city where our goals are. Information gathering and a bunch of other stuff that had nothing to do with combat. The grell example is combat based, but, considering the motive here is payback, it would kinda go with the territory.

So, please, it would be nice if the complete mischaracterization of my points could get left at the door. If all I wanted was combat, it would have been better for me to NOT summon the mount. That way we would be guaranteed of more random encounters and thus more combat.

In fact, the situation was never "exploring the desert" it was crossing the desert.

Just trying to set the record straight.

 

[nijineko]

Just pulling this one out. If the entire group told me to shut up? Ok, fine, I shut up. I'm not going to start piddling on everyone else's fun. And, I'm perfectly willing to compromise.

So, when the DM rams these scenes down my throat, forcing me to play through them, despite my expressly stated wishes that I don't want to do this, what compromise is the DM showing?

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Well, I've been playing a few years now. It's generally not too difficult to tell when something is going to matter and when it's not. We're at point A. We need to be at point B. In between these two points are nothing that has anything to do with what we need to do at B. It's not really a big thing to realize that there really isn't a whole lot there.

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It's baffling to me, this thread is. What have I really done here? All I've said to the DM is, "Hey, Mr. DM, this situation that you've put in front of us? Not really feeling the love. Can we just skip it and move on?" With the expectation that we would, in fact, move on.

excellent. thank you very much for your comments. it is so very easy to misunderstand things when just reading the parts that people manage to type. i apologize for my portion of the contributions to the mix which may have been unhelpful.

if i were the dm in a situation where one or more players mentioned to me that they were not really enjoying some aspect of the game, i would try to work it out with them. frequently, compromise and taking turns is the only way to satisfy a mix of players with disparate gaming styles and goals with regards to the game.

 

[Celebrim]

So, when the DM rams these scenes down my throat, forcing me to play through them, despite my expressly stated wishes that I don't want to do this, what compromise is the DM showing?

Let's back up and establish something. Your original example was you 'surprised the DM' by summoning a mount. You then asserted that this was a clear signal that you didn't want to explore the desert or even play out crossing the desert. This is not 'expressly stated wishes'. This is implicit signalling. As I said, I would generally get the exact opposite signal from someone summoning an exotic mount to ride across the desert.

Now, if you stopped and said OOC to me, "I've got really no interest in playing out crossing the desert. Can we just skip to the Temple of Ix so we can retrieve the Golden Gizmo?", I'd probably be aghast. My first thoughts would be along the lines of, "How long has the player been unhappy with my game? I'm I really failing as a DM that badly? Why haven't I picked up on this players unhappiness before now? Why hasn't he discussed campaign direction with me privately if he has lost that much trust in me? Is everyone else this unhappy? Should we maybe just close the books and go watch a movie?" For one thing, this has never happened to me ever. I've had scenes that weren't playing out like I planned and decided on my own that I couldn't extend them the way I wanted to (usually because of under preperation on my part), but I've never had a player initiate that.

Well, I've been playing a few years now. It's generally not too difficult to tell when something is going to matter and when it's not. We're at point A. We need to be at point B. In between these two points are nothing that has anything to do with what we need to do at B. It's not really a big thing to realize that there really isn't a whole lot there.

How the heck do you know that? Have you been to point B before? Have you crossed the desert before? I mean, I could sympathize if the DM wanted to run the third or fourth time across the same desert in the same high granularity, but I generally avoid having retreads like that to avoid that very thing. Maybe it would be clearer if you would tell us what point B you were in such a hurry to reach actually was. But in general, I can think of tons of reasons why the desert crossing is important:

a) The desert contains valuable clues about point B. This could be all sorts of things like ruins built by the same civilization, which in turn have writings or frescos depicting elements of point B or tell you things about point B's history.
b) The desert contains widgets which will be useful when at point B.
c) The desert introduces monsters or themes which will later be expanded on when you reach B.
d) The desert introduces factions which control or occupy point B.
e) The desert contains allies which will help you in your mission in point B by providing clues, resources, or direct aid.
f) An opposing faction has prepared ambushes in the desert to prevent you from reaching point B.

Additionally, the desert even if it doesn't directly relate to the goal, the desert can still be important to overall play:

a) The desert is effectively the first level of the dungeon and is integral to the design of point B simply because it is just as much part of the layer of obstacles to be over come to complete your mission as the upper ruins or the first or second sublayer (in the case of a traditional dungeon) or the urban environment and the inner fortress (in case this dungeon is dressed in the trappings of civilization). Depending on my purposes, I could have even drawn the desert as a dungeon, with rooms, corridors, and encounters. To bypass the desert without interacting with it effectively lowers the challenge and makes the mission in point B less epic. Player disatisfaction with the design of the desert may hint that the entire design is flawed, since what the player is effectively saying is something like, "No dungeon crawling. I want to show up in the inner temple, kill the priest, and take the widget and be back in Haven before the end of the session."
b) The desert may have been invisioned as being an important section of some other theme than the immediate mission. There may be events in the desert that the designer envisions as being about the larger story of which the mission to point B is just a stage. Some earlier element of the campaign which seemed minor may here be enlarged upon or hinted at that it is going to increase in relevance. Think about the discovery of the underground library and the day of black sun in the Avatar series. It's not at all about the immediate mission of getting to BaSingSai nor is it even about the PC's immediate personal goal of refinding Appa, but its a critical story point. You might discover an abandoned Sun Temple in the desert where you learn from the frescos what the story is really about. Maybe the Sun diety is intended to personally show up and frame the larger mission. Things may occur here which frame the whole story. Even if that isn't on the table, there may be sidequests and events related to a particular characters back story. For example, one player may have always wanted a pet dinosaur. In the desert, there is oppurtunity for that. It's not important to the overall story, and its not important to you at all, but oppurtunity to obtain a dinosaur in a way that the player feels he's earned it, and that its been something of an achievement, may be a real highlight of the whole campaign for that player. The DM may have planned all sorts of natural character development to happen in the desert simply because it is down time from the mission which would be inappropriate when you reach Point B precisely because the mission is then immediate and pressing.
c) The desert is simply dangerous and therefore a doubtful proposition to cross it.

The desert could also be important at a meta level:

a) The DM may believe that the party is insufficiently well equipped or insufficiently leveled to take on whatever is at Point B. More time is needed to develop PC abilities and some largely superfluous encounters may be just the thing.
b) The DM may have prepared 50 pages of notes on the desert and is reluctant to abandon the work without at least trying to get players engaged in what he built. He's probably excited about it. He's put blood and sweat into it, and now you won't even try it?
c) The DM may only have some very loose and unfinished ideas about what is at point B, and he knows he won't be able to do it justice if you get there immediately. He probably can fake it for an hour or two, he may have a few rooms or encounters ready, but after that he's going to be just pulling stuff out of his butt and he knows that's when balance issues occur, that's when he ends up contridicting himself or forgetting important things. It's just not ready. He therefore needs to stall for time

Look, let me jump over the GM screen for a second and show what I would do as the DM in both situations. For me, the primary, single most important criteria is:

What is the goal?

What are the players and their characters doing right now and why are they doing it? That is the primary concern. If the goal was "hunting bandits in the desert" then fine, wander the sands. If the goal was, "Find the lost temple of Ix", then fine, let's go wandering. But the goal here is, "Let's get to Point B where we have to be in order to move the game forward."

So, with that in mind, when the players figure out a way to get to point B that bypasses the stuff I had planned on having them encounter because I presumed they were walking? Fine, no problem. Red Line ho! I might, possibly, use a skill challenge to narrate how the trip went - Each failed check is a loss of a healing surge. Arrival is guaranteed. Get there with no fails? You have smooth sailing. Three fails? You get there, badly sunburned, spitting lots of dust and you probably fell off a few times. Total table time: 10 minutes.

So one of the big problems I percieve here is that you presume that the proposition, "I conjure a giant centipede" invalidates anything I have planned or allows them to bypass anything I had planned. In my case I know it wouldn't. Any time there is a journey, the first thing I figure out is what each possible mode of travel to the destination is like and what particular difficulties it involves. Riding a mount is always paragraph number two and in this case I consider it pretty much bog standard and expected. Now it could be that you surprised a novice DM and he wasn't ready, but I wasn't there so I'm not going to get into that. The point is that its going to take a lot more than a huge centipede to get across a desert in 10 minutes. Mass teleport would do it, but if you were a level that you could teleport, I'd be ready for that and it would have altered the focus I put on preparing for the session - less desert, more destination. Then again, I can think of probably a half dozen complications even for teleport.

In the Grell example, there is a very clear goal - revenge/payback on the grell. I might make them make a Streetwise check to see how long it takes to recruit six guards in a city, but, that's about it. Total table time: 10 minutes, 5 of which it takes me to write down stat blocks for the guards.

Without any context its difficult for me to judge the value of that approach. All I can say is that if that is the best resolution you can come up with, it makes the world you are building feel really empty and inorganic to me. And also, as a minor point to quibble with, if you use Streetwise or something equivalent in one of my games to do recruiting, you won't get 'guards', you'll get bandits or thugs. I've tried to explain why I can sympathize with the DM for wanting to play this out. I don't know whether this deserved to be played out. I would have 95% of the time, but I can also envision this being really screwed up by a DM who didn't really pour his imagination into the NPCs and try to make the interview process meaningful. As I said, most of the time I wouldn't have played out the shopping, and the few times I did I'd have very special reasons for it. Without the DM here to explain his reasoning though, I can't know what was going on here. But I can tell you one thing, I don't really feel any kinship to someone claiming the title of DM that doesn't understand why you'd choose to play scenes like this out.

It's baffling to me, this thread is. What have I really done here? All I've said to the DM is, "Hey, Mr. DM, this situation that you've put in front of us? Not really feeling the love. Can we just skip it and move on?" With the expectation that we would, in fact, move on.

Here is the thing. I've never had a player do this. I've never done this to a DM. What's baffling to me is that you seem to think this is normal.

Do you really hold this level of control and power trip over your players?

Power trip? Me doing the standard normal job of a DM to act as the provider of setting is a power trip?

That if they express a liking for a different sort of playstyle, you belittle and berate them and kick them out of the group? Seriously?

It's never happened. I've never had players do this. If it did happened, my first instinct would be to ask if everyone wanted to continue the campaign or if everyone was really this unhappy maybe we should do something else or maybe someone else should take over DM duties. Seriously, if the whole group was unhappy with me, I'd fold up my DM screens, put away my notes, and apologize for wasting everyone's time. If I can't keep the group entertained, I've failed as a DM and I just just hang up my hat. I don't know what else to say. This has never happened to me.

Now I have seen it done by a player to DM implicitly, and so maybe I'm just associating you with that particular player's behavior unfairly, but it's really hard not to see you in a negative light the way you've presented yourself here. The player wanted the DM to continue being the DM, he just wanted to dictate to the DM outcomes as well because he could not ever lose and he always had to be the center of attention and recieve validation of his coolness in every scene. I wouldn't have had the patience as a DM to sit through his crap, but one thing I did decide after that, no matter how much I disagreed with the DM I was never going to give him flak ever. If the DM is wrong on the rules, I'm not going to argue the point during a session. It's too damn hard to sit behind that screen and 'wear the hat' for me to ever sympathize with anyone who doesn't have absolute respect for the DM when sitting at his table. He may be a crap DM - I've 'stolen' tables from less than stellar DM's before, both by party concensus and by the DM passing the hat - but by golly I'm never going to be rude to anyone who takes on the burden. DMing well requires putting blood and sweat into the game.

 

[Hussar]

Now, if you stopped and said OOC to me, "I've got really no interest in playing out crossing the desert. Can we just skip to the Temple of Ix so we can retrieve the Golden Gizmo?", I'd probably be aghast. My first thoughts would be along the lines of, "How long has the player been unhappy with my game? I'm I really failing as a DM that badly? Why haven't I picked up on this players unhappiness before now? Why hasn't he discussed campaign direction with me privately if he has lost that much trust in me? Is everyone else this unhappy? Should we maybe just close the books and go watch a movie?" For one thing, this has never happened to me ever. I've had scenes that weren't playing out like I planned and decided on my own that I couldn't extend them the way I wanted to (usually because of under preperation on my part), but I've never had a player initiate that.

Perhaps no player has said anything like this to you because of the massive over reaction that you are showing here and the fact that doing so would get them ejected from the game?

You are telling me that at no time when you've DM'd that you've had bored players? Never? Not once? Every single scenario you've brought to the table has been gaming gold? Well, I suppose that could be true. I'm a more average DM, so, I know that not every idea I have is gold and have no real ego problems with the players telling me so.

I'd much rather have the players do so than pretend to like what I'm doing just to protect my fragile ego to the point where suggesting that a given scene wasn't much fun would cause me to close the books and quit the game.

But, hey, that's just me. Like I said, I would not enjoy your game Celebrim. I wouldn't. I'm sorry if that's so offensive but, I just would not enjoy it. It is not to my taste. Not that it's a bad game or anything like that. It's just not to my taste. That doesn't mean that I'm immature, or a bad gamer or anything like that. I just have no interest in spending table time on things that I don't enjoy. Skip to the fun.

Now, if I'm the only one at the table not having fun? Sure, bow out gracefully and no harm, no foul. But, again, suggesting that the current scene isn't that much fun, could we just skip to the next bit, should not result in the DM taking his ball and going home. It is not a failure to have a bad scene. It happens. At least, it happens to us mere mortal DM's. I'd rather trust the players enough to believe that they know how to make the game fun, just as much as I do.

When you give the players that much trust, it's amazing what happens. The entire group is now responsible for everyone's fun. It's liberating and absolutely fantastic. At least, that has been my experience. The idea that anyone at the table owes "absolute respect for the DM" when I'm sitting behind the DM's screen is so far from my experience that I have no idea what that would be like. I do not expect nor want that from my players.

 

[Hussar]

Now, looking at those meta-reasons you gave Celebrim, because IMO, these are generally the real reasons for DM's doing what I'm complaining about.

a) The DM may believe that the party is insufficiently well equipped or insufficiently leveled to take on whatever is at Point B. More time is needed to develop PC abilities and some largely superfluous encounters may be just the thing.

Then either lower the difficulty at point B or give the PC's what they need. Why waste hours of table time just to achieve something that has absolutely nothing to do with the character goals?

b) The DM may have prepared 50 pages of notes on the desert and is reluctant to abandon the work without at least trying to get players engaged in what he built. He's probably excited about it. He's put blood and sweat into it, and now you won't even try it?

Yup. Tough. I don't care any more. I cannot stress that enough. If you want to show off your fanfic, post it online. Don't expect me to care about something just because you wrote it down. Not when there are things that you KNOW we care about sitting right over there.

c) The DM may only have some very loose and unfinished ideas about what is at point B, and he knows he won't be able to do it justice if you get there immediately. He probably can fake it for an hour or two, he may have a few rooms or encounters ready, but after that he's going to be just pulling stuff out of his butt and he knows that's when balance issues occur, that's when he ends up contridicting himself or forgetting important things. It's just not ready. He therefore needs to stall for time

Then let's go for pizza. Why am I being forced to do things I don't enjoy simply because you aren't prepared? Let's go bowling. Let's call it an early night. Heck, let's break out another game. I'm always up for a good board game night. There are ten thousand other things I could be doing with my free time. Why am I being forced to be bored?

 

[Celebrim]

Perhaps no player has said anything like this to you because of the massive over reaction that you are showing here and the fact that doing so would get them ejected from the game?

How do you go from me blaming myself to me ejecting people from the game? I don't think I've ever had to do that either.

You are telling me that at no time when you've DM'd that you've had bored players? Never? Not once?

No, I never said that. I said I've never had a player explicitly ask to opt out. Never in the middle of a scene (though I've had players move out of scenes ICly), and certainly never before a scene played out. I've had bad sessions several times. Mostly its been to under preparation on my part. You plan 1 clue instead of 3, or 3 clues instead of 5, you don't create enough plot threads, events and NPCs to fill up dead time, and your PC's lose the plot and suddenly you've got dead air. The players are confused. They don't know what they should do next. They try repeating prior conversations with NPC's to see if they missed something. They head out in unexpected directions because they don't have any better ideas. Things aren't going as planned and players are starting to tune out, and you are wracking your brain for what to create extemporaneously that will get things moving again. It happens. Fortunately, it doesn't happen often.

What I've never had was players expressly opt out of the game.

I'd much rather have the players do so than pretend to like what I'm doing just to protect my fragile ego to the point where suggesting that a given scene wasn't much fun would cause me to close the books and quit the game.

You know, this is the kind of statement that you make that makes it really hard for me to take your side of the story for granted.

The entire group is now responsible for everyone's fun.

That is always true. Everyone at the table has the job of being entertaining to everyone else. That doesn't really tell me anything.

 

[Celebrim]

Now, looking at those meta-reasons you gave Celebrim, because IMO, these are generally the real reasons for DM's doing what I'm complaining about.

Yes, I know what your assumptions are Hussar. Let's just drop this. I'm tired of it. I have tried to be very concrete and give examples from adventures, from stories, from other media, and from my own campaign as to why those meta reasons are the least important ones. I never really expected you to be sympathetic to the issues the meta reasons raise. And I'm tired of trying to parse your empty replies. There are ten thousand other things I could be doing with my free time.

 

[pemerton]

That's a table convention. Fourth edition doesn't play that way by default.

The relevant text from the PHB and the DMG is quoted by me in the BW thread.

There is no comparable text in clasic D&D. To the best of my knowledge there is no such text in 2nd ed AD&D or 3E either.

Its presence in 4e is not irrelevant tothinking about ho 4e plays, and is intended to play, as a game.

To the extent that you can treat players requests for quest XP as a formalism of 4e, you could say the same thing about every game system.

Sure. You could introudce "credits as XP" into Traveller, too, if you wanted to (let's say +1 skill for every 10,000 credits gained). That doesn't show that it's not an interesting feature of classic D&D that it has the XP for gp rule, whereas Classic Traveller has no PC advancement rules before the Instruction skill was introduced.

That's not a mechanic, and to extent that it is a mechanic we can do that in every gaming system.

Any system can be houseruled, sure. In AD&D we could have a system where every player gets to choose their stats, or wheter the plaeyrs have some sort of auction for stats (they could use their starting gp to play for the acution, perhaps). But AD&D has its PC generation and advancement rules, which give no formal role to other players except the need for the GM to determine training time. And BW has its PC advancement rules which include the trait vote. They look pretty different to me, and I'm pretty sure they produce different play experiences.

Classic D&D has extended mechanisms for determining what hirelings and henchmen are available to hire and mechanisms for relating gold expenditure to the number and type of henchmen available.

You seem to be running together the hencmen mechnics, which especialy in AD&D are quite intricate, and the hireling mechanics. There are no intricate mechancis for hiring hirelings (except some of the more esoteric types ilke sages).

Again, this ignores the fundamental issue. Hussar cannot know prior to engaging what is actually engaging.

That strikes me as being the same logic that says I can't tell I won't enjoy a film before I see it. It's a fallacy in both cases. I can project my preferences onto things that I know only by (narrow) description rather than by experience.

If someone is not interested in the desert, they're not interested in the desert. If their goal is in the city on the other side of the desert, let's cut to the city.

In a system with harder scene-framing, Hussar wouldn't even need to summon a centipede, because the GM could just reframe things in the city. It's only because D&D assumes continuous resolution with no cuts between scenes unmediated via action resolution mechanics that the centipede is needed at all, in order to create an "excuse" within the framework of the action resolution mechanics to make the crossing resolve easily.

I'm with you 100%, and would XP this post in particular if I could.

My mind is especially boggled by (i) the assumption, on the basis of zero evidence, that you're spoiling things for everyone else, and (ii) the assumption that the players' job must be to engage with whatever the GM frames without the GM having regard to player flags.

The whole things is more bizzarre when you think about the reason scene-framing RPGs, in which players can run up clear flags, and in which action resolution won't break down if you move away from continuous resolution, were invented - namely, because both players and GMs got sick of having the experiences you're talking about. Heck, less serious versions of those epxeriences as a GM are part of the reason I changed my GMing from Rolemaster to 4e (precisely because 4e can handle non-continuous resolution, whereas RM is built around assumptions of continous resolution and can be hard to prise away from those assumptions).

 

[pemerton]

the desert even if it doesn't directly relate to the goal, the desert can still be important to overall play:

a) The desert is effectively the first level of the dungeon and is integral to the design of point B simply because it is just as much part of the layer of obstacles to be over come to complete your mission as the upper ruins or the first or second sublayer (in the case of a traditional dungeon) or the urban environment and the inner fortress (in case this dungeon is dressed in the trappings of civilization).

<snip>

The desert could also be important at a meta level:

a) The DM may believe that the party is insufficiently well equipped or insufficiently leveled to take on whatever is at Point B. More time is needed to develop PC abilities and some largely superfluous encounters may be just the thing.

To me, this reads like "desert = grind". I'm not interested in grinding in my RPGs.

The desert may have been invisioned as being an important section of some other theme than the immediate mission.

If that theme is key, maybe it can be introudced in some other way. Link it in somehow to the immediate goal.

The DM may have prepared 50 pages of notes on the desert and is reluctant to abandon the work without at least trying to get players engaged in what he built. He's probably excited about it. He's put blood and sweat into it, and now you won't even try it?

I've been running my 4e campaign for over 4 years and I'm not sure I've prepared 50 pages of notes - as opposed to generated notes in the course of play.

Obviously the playstyle [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is talking about is not intended to waste the GM's time in the way you describe; that's why various sorts of techniques for supporting more-or-less No Myth play have been invented.

I don't see anyone denying that there are playstyles - grinding for XP and/or attrition, heavy DM scenario prep, etc - in which the players are expected to resolve the desert journey in the way you describe. The relevant points are (i) not everyone enjoys those playstyles, and (ii) the past 20-odd years of RPG design have shown us ample techniques for running very successful games in other ways. I'm surprised that this is even contentious - I feel like I'm in some strange dialogue in which I'm being told that Forge games and Forge techniques at one-and-the-same time both suck (or even are impossilbe), but are no different from anyone else's traditional games.

Whereas I would have thought this dialogue - in which multiple posters are making clear they're not very interested in the sort of RPG experience [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and I are advocating - would have been overwhelming evidence that whether or not Forge games suck (and that's clearly going to be a matter of preference), they're certainly different!