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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6093852" data-attributes="member: 4937">Without being able to get into the head of the DM, I'm not sure what to make of this.  Generally speaking, my rule is, "If I don't think anything significant or fun is going to happen and the players also are in agreement, handwave the passage of time and get on with it."  I'll often pause for a bit to see if the players have any significant input or plans of their own in a scene, and if the pause becomes extended silence, then I'll cut to the next important event that I think would occur.  In my present campaign, I've pretty much had six players the whole campaign.  Six is a pretty big party, and the more players you have the less time you can spend on each players affairs.  For that reason, I've got a standing 'shopping is done OOC unless I say otherwise' rule.  I try to get any shopping done in four or five sentences.  But, if the party actually wanted to get hirelings, I'd probably play out the interviews too.  The primary reason is something apparant in your attitude toward the hirelings in your story - you consider them game peices, tools to be used to overcome an in game problem, and are primarily viewing them on a metalevel.   If that is occuring, I would know that there is fundamental disconnect occuring between how the player is experiencing my game world and how I would like them to experience my game world.   To put a fine point on it, I would think you weren't playing the game right (for my values of right) and I'd want to try to alter your perception of what it meant to play the game.   Or, to take that even one step further, I'd be trying to figure out if it was even worth my time - and yours - for us to be playing together.In the game I'm trying to create, I want a player to never think of an NPC as a game construct.  I really want players to consider NPCs living breathing human being with rights and feelings, and I really want to get them to consider consciously how their character would view this person and by extension how they would view this person.  If that isn't going on, then I believe my game is to some extent a failure.   We may be having fun, but we aren't achieving for me nearly the level of fun (for me) that I know from experience is possible.So for me shopping for and equipping the hirelings wouldn't be important and would be handwaved, but you can be absolutely sure that I'd on the fly turn every hireling into a 'seven sentence NPC', give them unique abilities, give them an alignment I would try to hide, try to characterize them, try to play several with comic personalities, try to play several with annoying traits, try to give them unique motivations (including actualizing statements like, "I need the money for my family"), try to make a couple intriguing with markers I could use to later flesh out a backstory, try to give them hooks (one is secretly a wanted for a crime, one is the lover of another interviewee, another is hated rival, another isn't who he claims to be, one has a crush on one of the NPCs, etc.) and so forth.  In other words, I'd be angling for all the following:a) Make the players think about the moral value of treating humans as disposable, giving people money to risk your life for you, etc.b) Make them rethink simply dismissing the hireling because of the value added by the hireling to the game, or at least make them there 'go to' hireling.  In other words, try to make one at least into a reoccuring memorable NPC.c) Make the choices matter. I'd be doing this for both in game (simulationist) and out of game (gamist) reasons.  On one hand, I'm insisting that my world be treated as being in some way 'real' and so it has realistic features.  On the other hand, I have certain goals I'd like to achieve so as to maximize the game's fun for me, and this includes emotional investment in outcomes other than 'winning'/'losing'.   For one thing, as the DM, you are playing to 'lose'.  Winning has negative emotional value.  As I said earlier, I don't believe we should try to play together.  That wasn't (entirely) meant as snark.  I think our gaming goals are just vastly different.   We have vastly different notions of what a game is, how a game is played, what is fun in a game, and what contitutes the maximum derivable enjoyment.  I've scrapped a campaign before when it was clear, after six or seven sessions, that the group of players weren't remotely interested in anything I care about.  Several wanted me to keep playing, but after the third boring session in a row and clear lack of what I consider player engagement, I couldn't handle it any more.Again, without knowing what the DM was thinking, I can't judge, but even the shopping scene is potentially something I wouldn't skip over if I was laying groundwork for later events I knew were going to occur.   I also might run at lower granularity if I didn't want to give the players meta information about what was important.  In the current campaign, very early on I ran a trivial scene with the PC cleric bumping into his neighbor, who was an undertaker, and general 'polite conversation' including the neighbor trying to sell the PC on buying a coffin and a plot before he died so as to not be a burden on his loved ones in the event of untimely death and so forth.  I ran a lot of other trivial scenes like that, including repeated conversions with the polite helpful undertaker Mr. Findel.  Why?Because the first TWO YEARS and 40+ sessions revolved around chasing down a terrible necromancer named Tarkus and 30 sessions in, after the players finally started putting two and two together and asking questions about Mr. Findel, they realized that Mr. Findel - that minor local color NPC - was Tarkus (at that point the most important NPC in the game).  Now that was one of the single most successful reveals I've pulled off in 30 years of gaming, and that level of awesomeness is simply impossible playing the game your way.Sometimes as a DM you can't explain why you are doing what you do without ruining it.  My players trust that if I'm not hand waving things, it might not be immediately apparant why I'm playing through an entire session with zero combat and nothing but local color, but that I have a good reason.   That at least is my defense; whether it applies in your case I don't know.  But in my game, if the player repeatedly tries to thwart me and I can't seem to win their trust and we don't seem to agree on what makes a game fun, I'm goiong to want them to quit and stop ruining my game for everyone else.  And its quite possible that that is what I'm going to be 'signaling' to the player.I don't let players decide what is on the menu.  I give them a menu, and let them choose what they want to eat.  But if they want to change the menu, I tell them to go find a different restuarant because we serve what I'm interested in preparing and that's the way it works.   If I hand them a menu and they say, "I don't need a menu.  I want a cheeseburger.  You know, ketchup, pickles, diced steamed onions, real yellow mustard and not that brown kind with the seeds in it.", I'm like, "Yeah, I know what you want.  I've eaten those occasionally too.  But if you don't want to try what's on offer you are definately in the wrong place, sir."</blockquote>

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