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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6092530" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has made it clear that the point of summoning the huge centipede was to circumvent the desert trek. That is, he as a player was hoping to reframe the current ingame situation, from one of "How do we cross the desert?" to "Now that we've crossed the desert, how do we achieve our goal?".D&D traditionally has many mechanics which have more-or-less this function: flight (at least in some modes), teleportation, ultra-high Perception bonuses (reframe scenes from "How do we find?" to "What do we find?"), ultra-high Diplomacy bonuses in 3E (reframe scene from "How do we deal with this troublesome NPC?" to "What does this NPC do to help us?"), etc.There is a serious design question about whether it is good to hide scene-reframing capabilities inside what are generally action-resolution mechanics. For instance, it produces the sort of confusion/conflict we are seeing in this very thread - a player like Hussar tries to reframe the scene to avoid having to engage in action resolution with a scene s/he doesn't like, and the GM responds by treating the reframe as a move within the previously framed scene rather than an attempt to move to a new scene.But the real issue is - who gets to control scene framing? If the game's answer is "The GM" then there is a huge onus on the GM to frame decent scenes. And if the players are using their resources to try to reframe towards scenes that they find more interesting, I personally don't blame them for that!I think that here you are running together action resolution and scene framing.Hussar is not expressing any general desire to "set his own outcomes". He is using the tools that the game - rightly or wrongly - gives to him to reframe scenes away from ones he finds boring to ones he finds interesting. And he is under no general obligation to "trust the GM". In the labyrinth example, he's talking about 20 hours of play. GMs earn trust by framing scenes that their players want to engage. And by recognising signals to the contrary - such as the summoning of giant centipeds to avoid having to actually play out the trek across the desert.I guess that would be one way of doing it. Another well-known technique is that of "say yes or roll the dice" - that is, crossing the desert or passing through the labyrinth is handled by fairly speedy free narration, and the action is recommenced in a situation that is engaging to the players.Speaking as a player for my part, my RPGing rarely involves leaving the living room. So the real question is, what bits of my PC's imaginary life am I interested in dealing with in any detail? And as with Hussar, the trek across the desert is probably not one of them. As to whether it is anticlimactic to free narrate the corssing of the desert, not as such, no. The Indiana Jones movies free narrate plenty of travel (with doted lnes over maps). Citizen Kane doesn't show us the journalist travellingto New Jersey or Florida. Yet there are plenty of climaxes in these films.Obviously this is not a point on which there is universal agreement, as far as RPG preferences and techniques are concerned. For instance, when I am GMing I rely all the time on signals sent by the players as to what is or is not interesting to them.As for things being in the desert - if the players summon a huge centipede, and there is (say) a hidden temple in the desert that I think would be interesting for them to encounter, it's pretty easy to narrate "After X days of hard riding on your summoned centipede, you see some worked stone sticking out of the desert sands in front of you."There are some approaches to play where this won't work - for instance, it won't work with highly exploratory Gygaxian skill-based play, where discovering the hidden temple is meant to be a reward in itself, earned by effective hex-crawling, use of scrying spells etc. But I am pretty confident that Hussar, like me, has little interest in that particular playstyle.</blockquote>

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