You're doing what? Surprising the DM

[billd91]

Can a GM make mistakes? Sure. No one's perfect. But when mistakes are made - when a scene is framed that turns out not to enage the players (whether some, or all, of them), why keep pushing it? For some playstyles there may be answers to that question - for instance, maybe we're all committed to serious setting exploration, and even if the setting turns out to be boring in parts, we're committed to sticking to it. But for some, perhaps many playstyles, there's no reason to keep pushing a scene that's losing the players. Let it go.

What if there are players in the group who are enjoying the scene as framed? Should they give up on the enjoyment they're having with it because one or some other minority of other players isn't as engaged as they are? What's the decision rule? Everyone gets veto power? That's what Hussar and you seem to be advocating here.

 

[N'raac]

N'raac - The one key element that you are ignoring in all of this is that the group had a clear goal. It wasn't skipping the scene simply because this scene happens not to be all that interesting. It's skipping this scene because I am invested in the next one.

The group of characters have a clear goal. That does not mean the group of players have any reason to expect that will be the next scene. I like Christmas, but I don't get to skip there from July.

I know that I want to get to the next scene. That's where the goal is. That's what I want to do.

So what if I decide I want to get to the scene that follows the one which engages you? Again, we're back to "one player wants" vs "the player group wants".

Which brings me around to the opening lines of Celebrim's wall of text where he mentions skipping 3-5 scenes. Sorry, that's never been something I said. I said I wanted to skip THIS bit of minutia where we have to detail how we rig up saddles, roll several skill checks (presumably use rope, ride, possibly Nature (depending on edition)) and, because the entire party has to make these checks, fail pretty much automatically.

If the skill checks are apppropriate (and I suggest they are) and their use means pretty much automatic failure for your plan (and it seems you believe they are), that suggests your plan should not work. We're back to "rule of cool" suggests "I leap down on the sea serpent and stab it through the eye with my two-handed sword, slaying it instantly" succeeds vs the rules say I need to make a variety of rolls to determine success or failure of those actions.

Same goes with the recruitment scene. Again, there is a clear goal. It's not a secret. Spending an hour of table time making small talk with a number of NPC's who are never intended to be important - they should be around for one single encounter and then go away - is getting in the way of that goal.

If the NPC's are unimportant, then let's just go with "you can't find anyone willing to sign on". I suggest that, as a critical component in your plan, you have made them important. Will they only be around for a single encounter? Maybe they will get the adventuring bug and be a rival party going forward. Perhaps they aren't coming along to fignt the Grell, but because they have seen the cash you are flashing around, and the fact you are using it to build combat power, and are actually planning on killing the PC's and taking their stuff (hey, you're the one who wants to motivate violence with gold - what's the guarantee you direct that violence exactly as you see fit?). Regardless, by involving these NPC's you invested into their importance.

SO, N'raac - it's not about skipping stuff that's boring. It's about skipping stuff that's boring when there are clear goals in sight. I mean, even if we found caves on the way to the city, we wouldn't stop. Why would we? We're not tourists. We're not interested in this location. We want to be at the city. The only reason we're not at the city is because of the way Plane Shift works. Given the choice, we would have gone straight to the city and never even entered the desert in the first place.

Given the choice, my character would have lived a life of peace, security and luxury. We don't always get to choose, and the results if we do can make for amuch poorer game. You're in the desert. That was a cost of your chosen goal and tactic - that's the way plane shift works, as you say. If travel through the desert is trivial, it should make no difference whether you have a mount or not - that just means you get there faster. If it's not trivial, I'd hope it's not boring. You seem to have set your sights on a single outcome. I agree with another poster's comment that this is like the GM envisioning a specific result in a scene and roadblocking anything that might lead to a different result.

When your players have clear goals, do you routinely set up obstacle after obstacle to prevent them from reaching those goals?

Sure. Their goals include accessing wealth and power. The game is a series of obtstacles to them doing so. Overcoming the obstacles is where most of the fun comes from. I could just have them open a door and out spills a treasure trove, but where's the fun in that? My players' goals, however, as opposed to their characters' goals, typically prioitize the fun of a challenging campagn with a variety of different encounters and experiences. So having a desert between them and the city tends to be viewed as an enjoyable part of the game, not an obstacle thrown in the way of their fun.

"The Sword" is an introductory scenario for BW. The players look at the pregen PCs and hear the GM's description of the situation, which is pretty straightforward ("Having made your way through the dangerous ruins, you finally see it sitting on an altar through the doorway before you - the Sword!"). If the players aren't interested in any of this, then the scenario's not going to be run, is it - I guess we'll be doing something else this afternoon! Most of the time, though, if the group has agreed to playtest BW, then I would assume they'd have a go at it to see how it plays.

And I'd expect, having agreed to play in the GM's campaign, that when he sets a scene I assume they'd have a go and see how it plays.

This really isn't my experience. It's not that hard, at least in my experience, to set up situations so that the players buy in from the get-go.

As the BW Sword scenario clearly failed to do in celebrim's case. Guess we're off to the movies, however engaged the other players may be, right? In my group, a player not interested in a given game says so, and does something else.

@Hussar has made it clear in his case how this could have been done - Get the action to City B, which is where we're all super-keen to get to! Let us hire our spearcarriers so we can get back to the grell already! When the player goals are as clear is that, I don't find it hard to frame scenes around them.

Again, we are assuming hussar is 100% consistent with the rest of the group. Again, I have a tough time envisioning 90 minutes of NPC interaction occuring with no player engagement. I have a much easier time envisioning several engaged players and Hussar so focused on his vision of the Grell battle that he refuses to consider any possible enjoyment that could be derived from this scene.

You made a book analogy some time back. Hussar's approach seems to me like skipping through this book in order to get to the next one faster.

 

[Celebrim]

I don't fully understand these posts...Most of the time, though, if the group has agreed to playtest BW, then I would assume they'd have a go at it to see how it plays.

Why should D&D be any different?

Hussar has made it clear in his case how this could have been done - Get the action to City B, which is where we're all super-keen to get to! Let us hire our spearcarriers so we can get back to the grell already! When the player goals are as clear is that, I don't find it hard to frame scenes around them.

No, but you aren't addressing what I consider the central issue in scene framing as a DM - diverse player agendas (where we must include the DM as a player of the game, even if he doesn't have the role of player).

But when mistakes are made - when a scene is framed that turns out not to enage the players (whether some, or all, of them), why keep pushing it?

No one has suggested that if the scene is clearly not engaging for all the players, and it clearly isn't 'working' that we keep at it. There are various techniques for 'moving on' that we could cover, and 'the handwave' is just one of them. This really isn't a question of playstyle. Even in serious exploratory play, you'll see various 'moving on' techniques. Really, I think you whole 'playstyle' thing is increasingly obscuring any discussion. You keep pushing this whole 'you play one way and I play the another' agenda that is getting really tiresome, because this isn't a situation where there are two nice clear buckets and players, GMs and groups always stay in one bucket. This is a situation with 32000 colors and people paint with them as they please. You might say, "I favor more greens than yellows" in my game, but treating everything as distinct non-overlapping categories rather than a multi-diminsional range of operations and methods used by one extent or another everyone who plays RPGs is beginning to look willfully obstinate to me.

I think it's higly relevant in at least one respect - it's relevant to showing that there are viable methods of play which (i) don't rely on GM force over plot and don't rely on exclusive GM force over content, and (ii) treat the framing of a scene that fails to engage as a mark of GM failure (to frame a decent scene) rather than player failure (to pick up on the hook that the GM has offered).

Speaking of. The problem is that regardless of your play style, sometimes the problem is player failure to engage and sometimes the problem is GM failure to frame engagingly. Learning how to engage is a player skill just as learning how to frame is a GM skill. This is true regardless of how much burden we put on the GM. Indeed, the more we rely on GM force the more we are also relying on GM skill, and the more we rely on player choice the more we are relying on player skill. And while you can rely on different degrees of what you are calling (in my opinion obfuscatingly) "GM Force" (forcing my wry use of the concept of "player force"), the fact of the matter is all systems with a GM also have and make use extensively of "GM Force".

But it does make the point that there are some posts on this thread that make assumptions about GM force which are, from other points of view, quite untenable.

For instance, the idea that a GM might allows a particular combo once, but then veto it - exercising some sort of ad hoc fiat over the action resolution rules - is something I personally can't fit into my conception of how to run an RPG.

I don't favor it, but I can put it in my conception because I've played systems - say Exalted - where that is a formalized mechanic in the rules. Any system that formally rewards players for creative uses of narrative power - that is player agency and player driven scene framing - generally has the built in exception that if you utilize the same narration repeatedly, it loses its effectiveness. You as a player have an expectation that you can frame scenes and be rewarded mechanically, but not that it will ever work twice.

BW expressly assumes that at the start of a campaign the players and GM will discuss what the game is to be about - with the GM as the leader of that discussion, but not the sole voice. (This is set out in the OP of the current "Is BW useful for D&D" thread.)

To a certain extent, I play D&D (and pretty much everything else) that way and have for about the last 20 years. We call it 'discussing a PC's background' and it includes discussing things like 'what does the PC want from life' and 'what does this PC risk his life for' as well as looking at the PC's background and thinking about what adventures the player is offering me by telling this particular story. Then I incorporate that into play, bringing into the game peices of the world that relate to that player specificly - friends, family, acquaintances, organizations, foils, villains, oppurtunities, etc. However, I don't rely solely on player input for setting, and frankly neither does BW.

Whether or not many players want to approach RPGing this way, it seems fairly clear that some do.

pemerton, that's the sort of BS statement that makes me want to just get this over with and mute you. I don't think you are intending to be condescending and insulting, but you know, I'm not sure I've ever played any RPG that lacked player input ever. I imagine that there are some out there, but they are based on my experience the rare exceptions.

But that sort of discussion is not a constant recurrence in scene-framed play, at least the sort that I run. The way that you get scenes that the players are invested in is to follow their cues. In BW this is particularly straightforward because they are core to the PC build mechanics. In my 4e game it is a bit more informal, but still - in my experience - pretty straightforward.

Yeah, in my 1e, 2e, and 3e play as well. It is not something amazing or novel to suggest player agendas shape play, nor is it in my experience highly unusual for player agendas to shape play. Every RPG expects the player's agenda to shape play, even if you are playing something as restrictive on play as a published adventure path (and in the hands of a good DM, those aren't so restrictive). Heck, look at something like 'Knights of the Dinner Table' which is about the humor in disfunctional player agendas, but player agendas always dominate play - much to the frustration of the long suffering DM who wants his table to have more literary agendas (which often leads to table conflict with humorous results).

For instance, in my 4e game one of the PCs is a member of a player-invented elvish secret society. When the PCs were hanging out with some elves during (what MHRP would call) a transition scene, the player mentioned to me (as GM) that his PC was making the secret sign of the "Order of the Bat" to the elvish captain, hoping to learn that the captain was also a member of the secret society. Now in one sense this is an in-character action. But it's also a clear request by the player to bring part of his backstory to the foreground. So responding as GM, for me at least, isn't just a matter of narrating the setting. It's deciding how to respond to a clearly signalled player desire.

Up to that point I'd given no thought to these elves' relationship with the Order of the Bat, but I knew that as well as the elvish captain there was one other interesting NPC with the elves, namely, their crafter, whom this PC had already asked to fashion a tooth taken from a slain dragon into a Wyrmtooth dagger. Now I didn't want the captain to be a member of the society, because for various reasons (pacing, plus my own sense of what sorts of scenarios I can and can't run well) I wanted to downplay rather than intensify links between the PCs and these elven NPCs. But I did want to give the player something for his efforts. And I also knew that I wanted the crafter to come back into play down the track, because I wanted the dagger, when finished, to be delivered to the PC in question. So I told the player "The captain doesn't respond to your secret signal. But the crafter notices it, and signals you back."

That's bog standard DMing. You haven't fleshed out everything. You can't flesh out everything. The player engaged with the environment in a way you really hadn't htought about yet, so you needed to make something up. You thought about the scene and made a reasonable choice about hitherto unexplored NPC depth and background. But note that what you didn't do was actually let the player frame a scene, assume narrative authority, or anything of the sort. There is nothing unusual about your DMing choice in what you call 'simulationist' play. It's so standard I'm not even sure it qualifies as 'narrativist' in any fashion, or if it does that just reinforces my belief that the whole GNS theory is so fundamentally flawed that it may need to be scrapped. What you did is the sort of GM choice you are just free to make and often should make regardless of your style, which means your 'style' wasn't even really important to the scene you just discussed. The only 'style' differences I can think of here is some DMs would probably rely on their sense of the character in question, others would assign probabilities in their head and roll the dice because they don't trust straight fiat, others would favor choosing based on what is interesting, and some (probably most) would make some sort of complex choice based on several criteria with the goal of making the game 'fun' for themselves and the players (or the players and themselves). BTW, you just described using "GM Force".

That's a pretty basic example, but I think it shows how in-character choices can be pretty clear vehicles for expressing player preferences...

OMG, I've been DMing/playing for 30 years now. All you are showing me is that you DM pretty much like every other DM I've had. But the above example is radically different than what is being discussed in this thread and has no bearing on it nor does it inform the discussion of it. You had a player 'opting in' and offering an IC proposition based on engagement and experimentation. Big freaking deal. Of course that's easy to play back to. You fleshed out a scenario and improvised based on unexpected player propositions. Great. But stop acting like this is some esoteric secret knowledge used only in certain enlightened circles.

 

[pemerton]

What if there are players in the group who are enjoying the scene as framed? Should they give up on the enjoyment they're having with it because one or some other minority of other players isn't as engaged as they are?

Perhaps, yes. More information is needed.

For instance, for many people Wagner is an acquired taste. If I want to play Wagner to accompany my sessions (there's some heroic fantasy music there!) and you can't stand Wagner for whatever reason, do I cut it back to only one-third of the session? Or do I not play it at all, and find some other music that we can agree on (or perhaps agree to no music)? It's very hard to have a blanket rule, but probably the "play Wagner for only a third of the session" rule isn't the best form of compromise here. After all, there's plenty of other music I like too.

Likewise with this stuff. Is it going to take 5 or 10 minutes to resolve, and in that time I can check over my spell list, or my equipment list, or take a modest pleasure in observing your play? Sounds fine. Is it going to take an hour or two in a four hour session? That sounds less fine to me. I turned up to enjoy myself, not just watch you enjoy yourself.

What's the decision rule? Everyone gets veto power? That's what Hussar and you seem to be advocating here.

I'm not advocating for a universal decision rule. Heck, outside of certain unusually formal contexts (eg maybe some clubs with rules about games being open to all comers) I don't see the need for a decision rule at all.

What I talked about in the post you quoted wasn't a collective decision procedure for scene-skipping. It was about what counts as good or bad GMing in certain playstyles. For me, a GM who knows that all the group is keen to get to City B, and who strings it out with a desert crossing that is of interest to less than all the group, is not a GM I want to play with. I don't care how interesting the prepared desert encounters are, or how interested the relevant subset of the group is. That's a GM who's not trying to keep the whole group involved when the means of doing so is obvious and ready-to-hand.

 

[Umbran]

Can a GM make mistakes? Sure. No one's perfect. But when mistakes are made - when a scene is framed that turns out not to enage the players (whether some, or all, of them), why keep pushing it?

If the GM notices that the players are, in general, not engaged, it would probably behoove him or her to consider moving things along, sure. But, reasons for pushing it also exist. Maybe there are some players who *are* engaged, for example. Or maybe the GM has reason to think that the scene will come to be engaging if folks stick to it. Or maybe just soldiering through for a little while is less disruptive to the session overall than skipping the scene. Or maybe there's some other contextual reason why the thing cannot just be tossed out the window. There's a whole lot of possibilities.

It is contingent on the players to inform the GM that they're kinda bored. The GM is not a telepath, and cannot read the minds of players.

For some playstyles there may be answers to that question - for instance, maybe we're all committed to serious setting exploration, and even if the setting turns out to be boring in parts, we're committed to sticking to it. But for some, perhaps many playstyles, there's no reason to keep pushing a scene that's losing the players. Let it go.

See above for "no reason". There's any number of reasons that are not even linked to the highfalutin' notion of playstyle, but are instead practical issues of making play work.

 

[Nagol]

The thing is, the desert is the result of a known complication the players accepted by the use of gambit in getting to their destination. The players knew the characters would not be at their ultimate destination save through fluke of luck.

The players chose to have that scene happen -- not necessarily a desert, but a trip of a few hundred miles was more likely than not!

If the players wanted to mitigate that, the tools exist in the system for them to do so at or below the power level of the ability that got them to the other plane.

Players shouldn't try to skip a complication they imposed on themselves -- it's like a player ignoring an unfortuate Belief in BW. It undercuts any form of complication mechanic from any type of game -- be it narrative, exploratory, or resource management. Taking action to increase character effectiveness or efficiency to mitigate the complication is one thing. Trying to skip out of any possible developments of the complication without paying a mitigation cost (dependent on game system) is quite another.

 

[pemerton]

The group of characters have a clear goal. That does not mean the group of players have any reason to expect that will be the next scene.

Why not?

So what if I decide I want to get to the scene that follows the one which engages you? Again, we're back to "one player wants" vs "the player group wants".

Is there any evidence that this was actually the case in the situation you're discussing?

Again, we are assuming hussar is 100% consistent with the rest of the group.

Is there any evidence that he wasn't?

Again, I have a tough time envisioning 90 minutes of NPC interaction occuring with no player engagement.

Of course there'll be player engagement, in the sense of player participation. Presumably [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] participated too, if only to try to make things go faster. I mean, if the players have turned up to play the game, and the GM serves them second rate-stuff, the choice is either play the second-rate stuff or go home. The fact that the players choose to hang around and play the second-rate stuff doesn't show that the second-rate stuff is really first-rate, or that bad GMing is really good. It doesn't show that the GM has engaged the players in the sense of drawing them emotionally into the ingame situation.

My players' goals, however, as opposed to their characters' goals, typically prioitize the fun of a challenging campagn with a variety of different encounters and experiences. So having a desert between them and the city tends to be viewed as an enjoyable part of the game, not an obstacle thrown in the way of their fun.

No doubt this is true, but how does it shed any light on Hussar's experience?

And I'd expect, having agreed to play in the GM's campaign, that when he sets a scene I assume they'd have a go and see how it plays.

Fair enough. Some other people would assume that, when a GM sets a scene that is obviously at odds with what (one? some?) player(s) want, the GM would rethink and cut to City B, which is where the players want the action to be.

As the BW Sword scenario clearly failed to do in celebrim's case. Guess we're off to the movies, however engaged the other players may be, right?

I still don't get this. What has running a playtest/demo of a new system, as a one-session one-off, got to do with what counts as good or bad GMing for Hussar in his ongoing campaign with established PCs and player-defined goals for them (namely, getting to City B)?

Why should D&D be any different?

If I agree to playtest D&Dnext, and the GM breaks out the Caves of Chaos, it's not going to be any different. But I'm pretty sure the game Hussar is describing is not a playtest to find out how D&D works, and whether or not he likes it. So I still don't understand how it sheds any light on what counts as good GMing to discuss the circumstances under which a group might agree to playtest BW using The Sword demo module.

I don't favor it, but I can put it in my conception because I've played systems - say Exalted - where that is a formalized mechanic in the rules.

Which already makes it different from what I queried. HeroQuest revised also has a "limited mechanical benefits from a given narration of an augment" rule. That wasn't what I referred to, though. I talked about a purely ad hoc of more-or-less process simulation action resolution mechanics.

diverse player agendas (where we must include the DM as a player of the game, even if he doesn't have the role of player).

I guess every instance of bad GMing could in principle be redescribed as a clash of agendas - the GM's agenda was do whatever it was that s/he did, and the players' agenda was at odds with that.

If you want to narrow the notion of "agenda" in some way - say, a self-conscious program of play - then I want to know what the evidence is that Hussar is describing an agenda clash, as opposed to just bad GMing. I've had crappy GMs who are more interested in running the group through their preconceived scenarios, than in running a game that is actually responsive to and riffs off the players. Hussar's description reminds me of those GMs.

The problem is that regardless of your play style, sometimes the problem is player failure to engage and sometimes the problem is GM failure to frame engagingly.

Perhaps. But there's zero evidence that Hussar and his fellow players didn't want to engage. They had City B to get to. They had a grell to take revenge on. They were raring to engage. And the GM responds by framing scenes at best orthogonal to those concerns: a desert trek; a sequence of job interviews. I'm not seeing an almighty clash of agendas - I'm seeing bad GMing; a GM who has engaged, enthusiastic players and is framing scenes in such a way as to actively kill that off.
[MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION] has said above that just because the players want to get to City B, or take revenge on the grell, the players can have no reasonable expectation that the GM will frame those scenes. My question is, why the heck not? When was the last time a GM advice book said "Don't pay attention to what your players want" or "Make sure that if your players are really keen to engage some part of your scenario, you run 90 minutes of orthogonal, low stakes stuff before you get there"?

To a certain extent, I play D&D (and pretty much everything else) that way and have for about the last 20 years. We call it 'discussing a PC's background'

<snip>

I'm not sure I've ever played any RPG that lacked player input ever. I imagine that there are some out there, but they are based on my experience the rare exceptions.

Cool. Which leaves me a bit puzzled about why you said upthread that it's a problem to be resolved by GM-as-god.

I don't rely solely on player input for setting, and frankly neither does BW.

Who said it does?

But note that what you didn't do was actually let the player frame a scene, assume narrative authority, or anything of the sort.

Who said anything otherwise? My point was to say that the contrast between incharacter choices and out-of-character decisions is not always an illuminating one.

That's bog standard DMing.

<snip>

There is nothing unusual about your DMing choice in what you call 'simulationist' play. It's so standard I'm not even sure it qualifies as 'narrativist' in any fashion

<snip>

The only 'style' differences I can think of here is some DMs would probably rely on their sense of the character in question, others would assign probabilities in their head and role the dice because they don't trust straight fiat, others would favor choosing based on what is interesting, and some (probably most) would make some sort of complex choice based on several criteria with the goal of making the game 'fun' for themselves and the players (or the players and themselves).

I don't think those differences are unimportant. My own experience as both GM and player makes me think that there is (for instance) a huge difference in play experience between a game where a GM works out this sort of stuff via a random dice roll, and a game where a GM works out this sort of stuff by following player cues. Likewise between a game in which that sort of gap in the background is considered a weakness of prep, and where that sort of gap in the background is a deliberate part of prep.

And given discussions I see about the sense of "a real world", not wanting to notice that the scenery is realy props, Schroedinger's this-and-that, etc, around issues of exporation, sandboxing, fortune-in-the-middle mechanics, etc, I don't think I'm the only one who thinks those differences matter.

But the above example is radically different than what is being discussed in this thread and has no bearing on it nor does it inform the discussion of it. You had a player 'opting in' and offering an IC proposition based on engagement and experimentation. Big freaking deal.

I actually think it's hugely relevant. Hussar's GM had players "opting in", so riled up by their defeat at the beak of the grell that they went out to hire spearcarriers to come back and beat it. And instead of following the players' lead, telling them how much gp to mark of their sheets, and getting back to the action, he brought the game to a halt for 90 minutes.

That's bad GMing. I mean, suppose the GM has all these wonderful ideas for the personalities and backstories of these NPCs: a good GM would use that material in the fight with the grell. Only a bad GM would think that the time and place for that material, in a context in which the players so overtly want to engage with that bit of the scenario over there, is to bog them down here with 90 minutes of job interviews.

 

[Umbran]

P
For me, a GM who knows that all the group is keen to get to City B, and who strings it out with a desert crossing that is of interest to less than all the group, is not a GM I want to play with. I don't care how interesting the prepared desert encounters are, or how interested the relevant subset of the group is. That's a GM who's not trying to keep the whole group involved when the means of doing so is obvious and ready-to-hand.

Eh. That one's a bit slippery. Should the GM skip the logical barriers to accomplishing the goal, just because the players don't want to be bothered with them?

 

[pemerton]

The thing is, the desert is the result of a known complication the players accepted by the use of gambit in getting to their destination.

<snip>

If the players wanted to mitigate that, the tools exist in the system for them to do so at or below the power level of the ability that got them to the other plane.

Players shouldn't try to skip a complication they imposed on themselves -- it's like a player ignoring an unfortuate Belief in BW.

This is an interesting analysis, but I don't know that I fully agree, for two reasons.

First, both the way D&D (at least pre-4e) is designed, and the way it is typically played, make it less clear that players really are buying into a system of complications and stakes. For instance, Plane Shift has not always had the wording it has in 3E - in AD&D it was unclear whether or not it permitted precision travel, and it seems likely to me that the 3E wording is a result of the desire to eliminate scry-and-buff style pinpoint teleportation than to introduce some systematic complication mechanic.

Second, in complication-driven systems the complication itself should be engaging, so that what is a burden for the PC is not a burden for the player. Being bored at the game table isn't the sort of complication an RPG should be using, in my view. Obviously I can't speak for Hussar, but if the PCs had tried to Plane Shift to City B and instead ended up 250 miles away immediately outside the walls of their mortal enemy's desert palace, I imagine things would have gone differently.

Part of the problem here is that D&D has no simple mechanic for saying "OK, to cross this desert we'll spend resources X,Y,Z - roll the dice and let's see how it turns out." The closest thing I can think of in 3E is the caster resting and memorising Teleport Without Error, or working for a couple of days to craft a Flying Carpet - but there are features of the system (eg depending how it handles random encounters) that tend to militate against even that sort of solution (which obviously has other well-known issues, like a tendency towards caster dominance of play).

 

[pemerton]

Eh. That one's a bit slippery. Should the GM skip the logical barriers to accomplishing the goal, just because the players don't want to be bothered with them?

In my view, it depends a lot on what the underlying play is like.
[MENTION=6688858]Libramarian[/MENTION] has had some interesting posts recently about a type of gamist classic D&D that is in some ways light (ie no one take it too seriously) but in other ways hard core (in that the gamism is really front and centre). In the sort of game that Libramarian has described, the imagined setting is very important, because that's what the players engage with via their PCs, and character is unimportant - after all, you might be cyling through lots of them, especially at low levels!

In that sort of play, if the players get so attached to their PCs and the story that is building up around those PCs that they would rather get to City B than engage with the barriers in the way, then the game has drifted away from what Libramarian had in mind; likewise if the barriers become "logical" rather than White Plume Mountain gonzo. (This is obvious if you look at Libramarian's sample dungeon rooms here.) At that point the group might have to stock take what they're really looking for in their game.

In my earlier post that I quoted, I also referred to a type of serious simulationist play, where the group is dedicated to exploring the world even if - at times - it gets a bit boring. For that group, it would make sense to resolve the "logical barriers" even if they are a little bit boring, either at the fictional level ("There's not much in this desert besides sand and escarpments") or the mechanical level ("OK, make another Use Rope check.").

But if you've got players who are prioritising getting to City B over exploration as such, than once again the game has drifted away from that simulationist goal, even if simulationism was where it started. Again, perhaps a stock take is needed. (And I think [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has told us that he took stock, and quit the game.)

In my post I said that the GM who prioritises the "logical barriers" over going to where the action is (in terms of players' emotional investment) isn't a GM I would want to play with. I'm not saying that no one else should play with that GM either, and above I've tried to sketch out at least one playstyle I'm familiar with - world exploration simulationism - where that could count as good GMing. It's just not a playstyle I'm very keen on (either as player or GM).