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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6099132" data-attributes="member: 6681948">That requires “minutia” be defined.  To me, the big fuss over one creature in a dungeon setting is minutia.  To you, that Grell was the be-all, end-all of the game at that point in time.  You wanted, it seems low level bit player cannon fodder, and the GM wanted NPC’s with some actual persona.  What were half a dozen L1 Warrior guards going to do?   Randomly suck up a half dozen attacks from the Grell?  To what end?  I think the point was made much earlier in the thread that, if these guys are just backdrop scenery, then they probably get scooped up and eaten by the Grell as background scenery, with no impact on the outcome of a battle.  Again, ”we” the characters or “we” the players?  The characters want to get to the city, so they will use their resources to do so as quickly as possible.  “We” the players, however, should be capable of recognizing that we don’t know the whole adventure arc, nor what is in the desert that might add to the gameplay.  And, as has been pointed out a few times recently, I’m still not sure what was in the city that make everything else pale in comparison, and excited the players so much that they couldn’t bear any time be spent on the journey to that city. Nor am I sure how it became the goal – presumably, there was some GM exposition in that regard that wasn’t skipped over to “get to the action”.  For the desert, my question is how you can know up front this will be a mindless slog before setting foot into the desert.  For the hirelings, clearly you were not into the hiring of the NPC’s.  Again, however, I’m back to whether this impatience was shared by the other players, or whether they were enjoying the role play of the interaction with the NPC’s. You keep coming back with this “well, it’s not my game and that’s fine” comment that’s inconsistent with your belief it’s appropriate to get “shirty” with the GM when the game does not bend to your implicit wishes.  [btw, since others have noted the same “whatever that is” meme – from <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/shirty" target="_blank">http://www.thefreedictionary.com/shirty</a> “shirt·y(shûr t ) adj. shirt·i·er, shirt·i·est Chiefly British Ill-tempered; angry: "He saw how shirty she was about it" (P.G. Wodehouse)”.So if this is just a difference in play styles, move on, live and let live, why are you getting shirty about it?I was thinking Star Wars has been discussed in enough depth elsewhere, but the two deserts line up nicely, so let’s drag that out, at the risk of someone getting shirty. Let’s look at C-3P0’s player.  He doesn’t want to go through the desert.  Slogging through the sand in his gears will just suck all the fun out of the game, and there’s nothing meaningful in the desert anyway.  Just cut scene to the spaceport so we can get back to whatever it is these droids have to get back to. GM says “OK”, so we never meet the jawas (just some desert random encounter anyway), get captured (GM railroading at its finest), get purchased by the Lars farm (just GM setting and Mary Sue NPC wank anyway), meet Luke or come into contact with Old Ben.  But I’m sure it will be a great campaign as the droids walk into Mos Eisley and are quickly picked up by Stormtroopers realizing that hey, these are the Droids they’re looking for.  Then they get their memories wiped.  TPK, no more game, but hey – it finished, so it’s all good, right? That depends on which “you” we are discussing.  If I am “you, the internet poster”, then I am guessing, as I don’t believe Hussar has told us what happened in the desert, or even what, if anything, prevented the scene being skipped over due to the centipede ride.  I’m just asking how Hussar gained his precognitive powers to know with certainty precisely what the desert would hold, and expressing my sympathy that those powers didn’t manifest earlier and prevent him joining a boring group whose playstyle was incompatible with his. If I am “you, another player in the game”, then I may well want to see what the desert holds.  Let’s play the game.  Centipede?  Cool – how do we ride it?  Playing out that ride may be just as cool.  Or maybe my character has a morbid fear of insects – how will it play out when my character refuses to ride the blasted thing?  Probably someone getting shirty because my insistence on playing my character to his personality impedes rapid desert crossing.  Perhaps my character is a desert nomad, and this desert travel is his opportunity for some spotlight time, so I very much do want to play out desert travel.  I have no way of knowing what the actual other players wanted, but unless they were also getting shirty at the very thought of rolling a die before reaching the city, I suspect they may have been more amenable, or dare I say even interested, at playing out the travel to the city.Or am I “you, the DM”?  Well, if I am, then I absolutely certainly know far more than Hussar about what the desert holds.  I know whether it is likely a 40’ moving centipede charging across the dunes would avoid, deter or attract the encounters that wait within.  And I know whether there are reasons as set out above to lean towards, or away from, playing out the desert travel.   But I was neither the DM nor a player in the game, so I’m still waiting, obstinate internet poster that I am, for Hussar to tell us what was so important in the city, or how he could so clearly foresee desert travel being nothing but a slog.  Maybe he already knew this GM had a hard and fast rule that a mile travelled means 15 minutes’ description, regardless of any activity during the journey.  But if so, I’m not sure why he was still at the table slogging through it.  Certainly not.  But neither am I required to simply believe he is 100% in the right and no alternate view can be valid.  He even states his own agreement that this may be a perfect game for different players.  Maybe it was – I’m not hearing about the agreement of the other players at the table that the GM should get on with it and just fast track past the desert. Simple solution – just skip past all that exposition crap in the middle, get to the POINT of your book in the last chapter and then you have lots of time to read the last chapter of my novel.  That’s much better then reading all the boring stuff in the middle, right?  How many chapters do you skip when you read a novel?  I don’t typically skip chapters – that’s a sign I should just skip the whole book.  And crossing the desert would be the chapter(s) immediately preceding arrival at the city on the other side, at least in most books I’ve read.  Unless that travel is lacking anything interesting, in which case we get a brief description of hot, dry travel and move on – but in that case, there wasn’t much point to having a desert, was there? Exactly as you say, Hussar has not told us the reason for the haste to get to City B (for the players or for the characters), so I can’t do much more than speculate with general tropes.  If Hussar would care to enlighten us, perhaps these “what if’s” could be more specific, but I rather suspect that, if Hussar felt this would skip the discussion ahead to the good stuff, he would already have provided that information. I don’t generally find Nietzschean or existentialism to be words I associate with fun leisure activities, but suit yourself.  If I want something all about someone else’s character, I have fiction for that.  I have no particular desire to play a randomly generated personality created by the game system, thanks all the same.  At least fiction will have a character created with a purpose.</blockquote>

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