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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6092499" data-attributes="member: 4937">The problem with that description is that it is so vague that it could be said to be true of all games.  I also run my game this way.  Many encounters are designed to challenge PC's and to be encountered in a certain order so that the PC's are likely to find the encounter requires thoughtful play.  Many of the locations within my world can also be viewed as a series of problems to solve.  I'm not sure that it tells us anything really useful about anyone's game to say that DM's prefer players to be challenged.  It's more informative to talk about how they prepare for play and how they adjudicate games in order to achieve that.   Otherwise you run the risk of seeing 'challenge' as being the exclusive quality of a particular play style or social contract, and not a rather generic feature of a lot of different play styles.There are probably 10 threads in EnWorld where people ask for advice on how to build a maze, and in all of them my short answer is, "Don't."  Mazes are terrible elements to include in a game, and if you are going to include them you are better off 'cheating' than running them from a standard simulationist framework.  The problem with a maze is that they are typically very long railroads in that there is one right way through them.  They also violate the rule that a dungeon shouldn't contain empty rooms.  The best way to run a maze if you are going to do it at all is episodically, skipping over the elements of travel.   This assertion may come as a surprise if you are accepting Hussar's description of me or my techniques as being accurate.We have very different ideas about what a railroad is then.  A railroad is usually defined as linear.  Whereas hex crawling and free form exploration is generally defined or at least brought up as an example as being the opposite of a railroad.   I've got a post around here somewhere where I define a railroad in terms of the DMing techniques that you use.   Insisting on resolving events at a certain granularity didnt' make the list.  I can't help but think you are using 'railroad' here simply as a synonym of 'something the player doesn't like'.  We are kinda getting away from the theme of 'surprising the DM' toward very different things.   Now we are no longer arguing about surprising the DM but rather 'signaling' the DM.  And indeed, since apparantly these signals are to be obeyed, we are actually talking about commanding the DM.   In other words, the player is ordering the DM to skip the desert travel.   Now leaving aside the question of whether that's fair to the DM, or whether the party might not all agree to that plan, there is a question of how that is to be handled.  Things are usually only handwaved if no important events can occur.  I handwave things all the time in order to cut to the chase.  But players are no position to make that judgment, because it requires knowledge of what's in the desert.  If the players actually signalled clearly and respectfully that they had no interest in travel, I'd probably only be able to accomodate that by having teleport portals arranged around the world to provide a reliable way to get from A -> E without actually having to make assumptions about B,C, and D in between.   You can't just say that 'Hey, we crossed the desert', because as I said earlier, I believe its a design flaw to have empty rooms.   I don't have deserts that don't have things in them.  And if I did have an empty room in the desert, then I would have never played out going to it in the first place because the whole desert would be represented in my mental space by a corridor linking room A to room B. That's more or less true, though it neglects that I'm willing to adapt the structure to suit the game space as I hint to above.  Nonetheless, what you describe is a fairly accurate description of what I consider the default approach.   I would also argue that its beyond the ability of either the player or the DM to know ahead of time what the players will become emotionally invested in.  Many of the more emotional scenes we've had so far arisen out of the granularity and might have never occurred had I been skipping to whatever scene I thought was important.There is a huge question about how far you are going to go down this slope.  Crossing a desert and going through a labyrinth are part of stealing the Sorcerer-King's artifact.  If there wasn't significant challenge in stealing the artifact, why hasn't someone done before (again, my simulationist default perspective)?  So you say, well, I just want to get it from the Sorcerer-King's tomb.  Ok fine, but the Sorcerer-King's tomb is a large trapped filled dungeon.   Now the PC says, "Well, I'm not interested in dungeon crawling either."  So are we to have teleport portals leading from the square outside the Inn in town, directly to the inner sanctum of the Sorcerer-King's tomb?  And then, if the player isn't interested in solving the riddle that protects the artifact, "Hey, I've got 24 Intelligence, can't I just make an intelligence check.  Xardoz is smarter than I am and should be able to solve this with ease.", are we to just directly go to handing over the artifact?  Speaking as a player now, the value of stealing Sorcerer-King's artifact is directly proportional to all the difficulties that were overcome in getting the artifact.  If I don't have to cross a desert, navigate a deadly dungeon, fight deadly foes, solve a riddle and wrest the artifact from the Sorcerer King's undead hands, isn't all just rather anticlimatic and meaninglesss?I don't think I argued that there was.   All I said is that a DM who recieves a proposition is well within his rights to begin to narrate the outcome of that proposition without his motivations for doing so being challenged.  I'm not responding to someone's propositions with a desire to punish anybody.   I don't have plans that are so easily upset that any of the so called 'creative solutions' presented in this thread would disrupt them, nor do I believe that I run a game where the PC's must accept my goals as their own.  If you set your own goals and recieve, "Yes, and then..." as a responce to your propositions (as opposed to, "No, you can't do that."), I think that you are being dealt with fairly.  If you set your outcomes, then you don't need a DM.</blockquote>

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