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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6098455" data-attributes="member: 6681948">QUOTE=Jackinthegreen;6098066]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.</blockquote>I think we’re confusing two possible approaches.  There is “exploring the desert” and there is “crossing the desert”.  I don’t think the players are setting out to explore the desert.  They want to get to the city on the other side.  But to get to the city, they need to cross the desert. So what’s the point of having a desert for them to cross if it just gets handwaved? ”Boy you guys are cool, you can cross a desert”?  Maybe I want to give the wizard a chance to show off that new Teleport spell, or maybe I want them to use up that favour the Sheik of the Desert owes them, or maybe the very ability to cross the desert using that favour was the reason they encountered the Sheik three levels ago in the first place (ah – now we see why that scene was actually relevant when it seemed just a distraction and a grind at the time!). Or maybe there is something(s) in the desert for them to encounter which have story relevance.  The PC’s certainly don’t know.  The players may or may not know, but likely suspect.  Most groups I’ve gamed with would look at getting across the desert as one more challenge, and would have some faith that the GM isn’t putting it there for an opportunity to bore and frustrate the players.  But then, my group generally trusts to the GM to make the game interesting.  If, after some game play, the desert seems all about hunger and thirst checks and random, boring wandering monsters, we’ll probably have a chat, but simply assuming that the GM has designed a dull, boring, monotonous trek through the desert so he can waste three hours of game time for no good purpose begs the question why I would game with that GM in the first place, if that’s the approach I expect. I can’t know whether the scene holds interest unless I give the scene an opportunity to unfold. If the desert is, in fact, just background scenery, then I would expect “After a bumpy, sweaty three days on centipedeback, you reach the other side of the desert – cue description of city”.  But absent the centipede, I’d expect “after a hot and dry week of trekking through the night and sheltering from the hot sun in the day, you reach the other side of the desert – cue description of city”.  If the travel has no bearing on the story, it won’t be a focus either way.Even if the city is the goal, achieving the goal requires crossing the desert.  If getting past the choke point of the dungeon requires defeating the Grell, I don’t expect the Grell to just step out of the way – I expect that the players will deal with the Grell.  If the city is the goal, then crossing the desert is a challenge that must be met to get to the city.  I don’t expect, as a player, to cut either one out. I think there is a significant difference.  In two hours, a sandstorm can force me to consider whether we press on with our bold centipede mount, but if we teleported, I’m already in the city sipping a cool drink.  If that sandstorm unearths an ancient ruin, then I won’t know that after Teleporting, but if we happen to have been close enough to now see this structure in the desert, I know have a choice to make – even if that choice is “move on – our goal is in the city”.  And if, after several days of investigations in the city, we discover that the Holy Maguffin of Power was lost in an ancient temple which was swallowed by the Sea of Sand in an ancient disaster, having teleported means I have no idea where to go next, but the trip on centipedeback left me with more knowledge.  These all seem examples of obvious functional differences from where I sit. Unless we have an encounter on the way back to the Grell.  Or it attempts to Sunder the scroll when the party wizard pulls it out.  Or the Grell makes a tactical retreat when faced with superior numbers – the hirelings won’t fade away as their duration expires.  There are lots of differences. So you assume playing out a trip through the desert (on centipedeback or otherwise) will be no fun but playing out six years of school will be fun.  Either could be the focus of an entire campaign, or a quickly glossed over bit of scenery, depending on the writer/game. So you’re OK if the scene cut is “two hours of travel through the desert” and we cut not to the city, but to the sandstorm?  Or is that the GM railroading you to spend time in the desert?  And you keep coming back to a scene the player is not enjoying – if you have not let the scene develop, how have you concluded it is one you are not enjoying?  The final question which has never been answered is the possibility that you are cutting a scene that the other players ARE enjoying, perhaps to get to one they will enjoy less, or not at all.  How happy are you if ONE other player at the table says “Hey, GM, this whole Grell VengeanceQuest?  Not feeling the love.  Can we just cut scene past the choke point?”  And to me, that’s a key difference.  You aren’t exploring the desert.  You are crossing the desert.  The GM has no reason to get upset if you decide to cross the desert in the most expedient manner possible.  That temple revealed by a sandstorm?  If the GM thinks you would show some interest and you didn`t, well and good.  And if the players say “move on – our goal is in the city”, well and good – it`s up to me to motivate them to check out the temple, or just let in vanish. The Holy Maguffin could be anywhere.  But if you just decide to say hey, I don`t want to bother playing out the desert crossing, and Player 2 doesn`t want to bother playing out the investigation and interaction to learn about the goal in the city (whatever that was) and player 3 finds fighting past the minions of the Big Bad Guy a boring grind, then what`s left?  A BBG end battle with no context.  So now player 4, the storyteller, is bored.  Full agreement One caveat – I think that all of our positions, Hussar`s included, are easily taken to a ridiculous extreme, and probably have been. Exactly – without the scene being framed, how can its relevance be judged, or a conclusion be reached it`s just boring.  I wonder how the cool centipede riding trick would have been taken if the GM had just said ”yeah, sure, whatever – I was just going to say `so after a few days you reach the other side of the desert` anyway, effectively robbing the scene of all its cool. To add one further question, why is it acceptable for the player to get into a snit, but unacceptable for the DM to do so?  Seems like a double standard. So same thing every game. Ho hum another trip out to save the world. Well and good.  As a player, I get left wondering what the point of setting the interesting stuff four days of travel through the underdark away, rather than an hour on horseback out of town, if the four days of travel is of no interest anyway, but that may be because we`ve already done lots of underdark exploring, through which our characters have become pretty experienced and blasé about such travel. To me, the setting is everything that is not the characters.  It includes the NPC’s, the environment, the monsters/dungeons/what have you.  If the setting is of no interest, then who cares whether it is the underdark, the desert, the forest, the plains or just down the street?  And if a battle will be the same in each and every location, then let’s just call it a flat plain arena every time and we’ll grind through “I hit the monster and he hits me back” every combat. Agreed 100%.  When my players are taking steps preparing to cross the desert, or sending out criers to advertise their need for hirelings, that’s a sign they are engaged in the challenge, or maybe even that they are changing the challenge.  Hey, you’re doing all this planning to cross the desert – well, if you’re that interested in the challenges of crossing the desert, maybe I should not handwave the travel after all.  Let’s move that ancient temple out of the city underpassages and into the desert so you find something for all that prep work.  You want to hire some help?  Well, let’s make the help interesting, and let you play out that aspect of the game (after all, a couple of you invested character resources in skills for interacting with NPC’s, so let’s give you a chance to shine).  And if you show me I misread the situation – we’ll just take whoever shows up – that’s fine too.  Let’s see what interesting results can come from that.The players I game with, myself included, enjoy the flow of the story.  Could we get to the end quicker and ignore everything along the way?  Probably - but it's not that one encounter at the end that makes the game great.  Much of the fun is in the journey, not the destination.[/QUOTE]

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