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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackinthegreen" data-source="post: 6098066" data-attributes="member: 6678119">Situations like that seem a bit hard on the players to me.  If the party had come across a Djinn Lord who could do all manner of things, including whisking the party across the desert quickly and safely, wouldn't you have prepared for that possibility?  The first thing that came to my mind in that case would be that if the party was able to bypass the desert so quickly, then the encounters in the city might be easier because they haven't had as much time to prepare and perhaps get muscle.If the party didn't have access to a way to get through the desert so easily, what happens if a player says that he would much rather play out the things in the city, and the party then agrees?  I'm sure some of them would probably think there is stuff to do in the desert that might progress their characters and/or the story, but I don't know if most would be compelled to go for those things unless there was more information given about both the city and the desert.  After all, it's far easier to make a city compelling as a place one wants to be than a desert.Perhaps making the desert the main goal instead of the city on the other side would be a better way to get the players engaged with the idea of exploring the desert.  The desert can't be an implicit goal either, since it runs the risk of the players simply not getting it and then thinking "Going across the desert sucks!"  And to be fair, going across a desert usually does suck because it requires a lot of preparations.  Getting by in a city usually doesn't because there is assumed to be easily found shelter, food, and water.And then we get into magic and other D&D systems that would allow the party to laugh at the desert's harshness and plumb its dunes for all manner of things.  Some players need to be reminded that they can do such things, assuming they are able to do them (and a typical party usually is).So it comes down to defining the setting and making it interesting.  It can also come down to not making the end of the road more compelling than the road itself in case there are players who will fixate on bigger goals and then want to bypass everything between where they are and where they want to be.  So if we arrive in the situation where the city is the focused goal and not the desert, yet the desert must be crossed, it's possible to argue that there has been a failure in game design.</blockquote>

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