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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6098366" data-attributes="member: 42582">The bottom line is, why does this have to be resolved via the action resolution mechanics, as opposed to free narration?One answer might be "Because deserts are hard to cross!". I'm not sure that's a very good answer on its own, but anyway the point of summoning the giant arthrod is to counter that answer "Not hard to cross anymore - all aboard the centipede!"At that point a veneer of plausibility has been given to the narration "OK, it's sweaty and a little bit gross, but you succeed in your centipede crossing."If, despite that narration being plausible, we still insist on breaking out the dice, I want to know why. If the answer is "Because that's how we do it in this group" then I know I'm in a simulationist group that I probably don't belong in.No. That's about the worst sort of GMing I could imagine experiencing, and I would almost certainly leave that game. (When something a bit like this happened in the second session of my first game with my old University club the players quit en masse and I took over as GM.)Impatience to leap to the endgame is the same thing, in this context, as boredom and lack of interest. As a GM, my goal for my sessions is All Awesome, All the Time. In principle, every scene should have the pressure or drama of the endgame.In practice I'm not creative or energetic enough to realise my ideal, but that's what I'm shooting for.I don't see anyone (certainly not [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]) saying that everyone should play like that. But it's plain to me that it's a reasonable way to play the game.That could be pretty good, if you ask me. In my session a few weeks ago I narrated four days travel through the underdark in about a minute at the table - the PCs arrived at their destination, where the interesting stuff was.Did you miss Hussar's post where he said he's not very interested in interacting with the setting? And for my part, I don't GM an RPG so the players can interact with the setting - I want them to engage the situation, and I try to achieve this by framing engaging situations.Interacting with the setting is not the only way to play an RPG.Given this, I'm surprised that you're surprised that I characterised your GMing upthread as very different from the default Burning Wheel approach, which - among various other differences from your own approach - presupposes that the GM will frame scenes and generate complications on the fly, relying upon the PCs Beliefs, Traits, Relationships etc as providing the requisite guidance and structure.I think this is the sort of GMing approach that Hussar is describing as "railroading" - namely, exercising GM force (after all, it is the GM who decides what the challenges are that will be in City B, and how mechanically difficult they will be) with disregard, in a certain fashion, for player preferences as to the sorts of situations in which they find their PCs.Whether or not one want to use the term "railroad" for that, the phenomenon is fairly clear. Of course, some players want the situation to be mechanically determined independently of their choices and preferences (eg Gygaxian dungeon crawling depends on this as part of the challenge - it's what scouting and scrying are for, after all). But many don't. They want a different sort of game, such as - in this particular case that we're discussing - a scene-framed game.</blockquote>

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