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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6098166" data-attributes="member: 22779">See, I look at it like this.If, in the crossing the desert scene, I had simply whipped out a scroll of Teleport and teleported to the other side of the desert, Celebrim and the rest of you would have zero issues.  None.  No complaints at all.  So, I look at the summoning a mount things as pretty much exactly the same thing.  There is no functional difference between a scroll of Teleport and redlining travel.  Same thing for the Grell example.  We were in a city.  If we had simply bought a scroll of Summon Monster IV (3e/3.5e game - take it as given that magic items are available for purchase) we would have had the exact same results as hiring 6 1st level warrior hirelings.  No functional difference.And, I see this as why players stop trying anything that is not expressly permitted on their character sheet.  Think of it this way.  You have two options.  Both will give you identical results.  Option A has a 100% success rate and Option B has a less than 100% success rate.  Which option will you choose?---------Throughout this thread, my position has been taken to ridiculous levels.  Skipping 6 years of school to battle Voldemort?  Why would I do that?  That would spoil my fun.  I have suggested, and ALL that I'm suggesting is that a player can choose to opt out of a SINGLE scene.  That's it.  One scene that the player is not enjoying.  Celebrim talks about me opting out of the game.  That's way beyond what I've talked about.  I don't know about your campaigns, buy my campaigns consist of dozens, if not hundreds of scenes.  Some are blurred together, some are pretty distinct, but, in any case, there are lots and lots and lots of them.  A player telling me, "Hey, Hussar, this one?  Yeah, not feeling the love, can we move on?" would certainly not cause me to rage quit the campaign and stop being a DM.  Nor should a player ever feel like he owes me anything simply because I'm the DM.  If what I'm serving isn't fun, I'd much rather skip it and get on to the next bit with the thought that the next bit will be fun.Again, I'm not talking about someone who's being a dick.  That's a separate problem.  But, I absolutely trust my players to know what they find fun and if what I'm serving at the moment isn't fun, for whatever reason, then why force them to "eat their greens" just to somehow justify the work I've put in.  Heck, it might not even be that they don't find something fun all the time.  It could just be they had a really bad day at work and don't feel like breaking out the minis to play out an hour long battle with random bandits on the road.  The next session, they might be perfectly happy.  No worries.  Those bandits don't have feelings.  They can vanish back into my head and my notes just as easily as not.But the idea that I am somehow beholden to the DM to play through everything he wants to play through, just because he wants to play through it is far, far beyond anything I would ever consider to be good DMing.  And it's the reason that players have all their creativity crushed out of them.  Because as soon as the player tries being creative, just as Celebrim has shown, if that creativity isn't something the DM likes, he'll simply pile on roadblock after roadblock until the notion of stepping outside the lines is no longer a real option.  I mean, look at all the stuff he's talked about for crossing the desert.  If he spent that much time making the desert important, why not spend a fraction of that time making it matter to the players?  As I said, we had no interest and no reason to explore the desert.  We were simply crossing it to get to the place that we actually care about.  Why not spend all that time preparing the place that he knows we are invested in?</blockquote>

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