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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6101392" data-attributes="member: 4937">Because you keep leaving out a key word in the quote you are responding to 'next'.  Possibly.  I feel some clues lead that way.  But I'm hestitant to rule against someone - Hussar the DM or anyone else - when I wasn't there and don't have full evidence.  Without hearing for more players at the table, including the GM, I'm leaving it indeterminate what was going on.  We can invent different scenarios and talk about different responces depending on the situation. But, whether or not in this one scene everyone was engaged or not, the larger issue is that in general we can't take one players lack of engagement as overriding everything else.  We need a more nuanced responce than that.There are some huge assumptions in that.  I would assume that there are no right or wrong answers here.  There are however, for whatever we choose to do, skillful and unskillful ways to accomplish it.   I would in general say the GM's overriding concern is, "Of the options for handling this situation, which one do I think I can use to make this session most fun."   That will at times mean, for any number of reasons, overruling what the players want next.It addresses the reoccuring assertion that it is always better GMing to let players frame scenes than to let the GM frame scenes.Yes, but was the poster you were quoting (or rather pointedly not quoting) talking about that?No.  But most table conflict comes down to a clash of agendas.Haven't you spent most of this thread trying to prove that there was an agenda clash taking place (explatory/simulationist play vs. narrative play)?  Now all the sudden providing for a player agenda like exploration ("I want to feel like the world we are sharing in my imagination is real!") isn't merely providing for an agenda, but "just bad GMing"?   I hesitate to assert that any bad GMing took place without being there.   It's entirely possible that bad GMing took place.  It's extremely likely that artful and masterful GMing didn't take place, or we'd be talking about very different stories.  But we don't have a lot of evidence that the problem was just bad DMing.   There isn't anything enherently wrong with playing out scenes.Yeah, this is the 'chip on my shoulder' thing I keep noticing.  It's possible that the answer is always 'crappy abusive DM', but I doubt it is always the answer.That's not what I'm seeing.  Next.  Frame those scenes, next.   You are again misquoting people.   I think at one point in this thread I discussed about 20 potential reasons, one or more could be in play here.  Without knowing what the GM was thinking, I won't judge.   There is nothing inherently wrong with framing a complication in the path from A to B.   The real question is, as a GM, do you think that you can make the logical or potential complications fun?   In general, if you think you can, I'd advise playing those out.  The extent that you play them out should be balanced against the amount of fun you think you can get out of them, versus the fun you are forestalling.Which leaves me a bit puzzled with you providing an example of resolving a problem in your role as GM as god.Maybe, maybe not.  Both paths are fraught with dangers.   For any choice presented you, you can say, "No.", "Yes.", or you can roll a dice.  None of those answers are inherently better than the others.   In different situations, all could be correct.   Depending on the details of 'The Order of the Bat', each could have been the right choice.   The danger of giving the fiat answer as a DM is falling into the trap of being predictable.  Every time the secret sign is given, half a dozen elves flash it back because you think 'that's what the player wants'.   Or else, every time the secret sign is given, crickets chirp.  Fiat has the danger of falling into the uninteresting trap of "always yes" or "always no".   Many DMs, even those who want to be lead by player cues, don't trust their own judgement exclusively.  Players can also prefer that, since rolling the dice means, "At least sometimes what I want rather than what the DM wants" without it meaning something that they don't really want, "I always get my way".   Sometimes throwing the dice rather than relying on player cues is absolutely the right approach in the vast majority of cases.   An example in my game is player requests for divine intervention.   This can't be relied on because it leads to unsatisfying 'god in the box' resolutions if it is reliable.   But at most tables the rarity of divine intervention always leads to 'no' being the default answer.   My game is tweaked to foreground the gods active meddling in mortal affairs as inspired by the Greek myths (it's not unsual to meet a god at 1st level), and as such I always dice for divine intervention.   So far in three years of play, the gods have made their presence known via direct intervention three times.   It doesn't happen often, but mechanically if you don't pester the gods there is a small chance that reaonable cries for help when in mortal danger recieve responses that aren't totally governed by DM fiat.  Why?  Because I don't trust relying on fiat in this situation, and I believe that is the skillful decision.In play, its largely irrelevant because its not possible to achieve sufficient prep to cover every case.  In this case, it wasn't a weakness of prep.  In some cases, not prepping is a weakness of prep because it removes resources from players.  It would be wrong as seeing preperation as always disempowering players, and frankly, if we want to talk about anything that I'd consider 100% likely to lead to bad GMing it would be treating all prep as disempowerment of players.   Little could be further than the truth.Not only is a lot of that an assumption, but it such a skewed perspective that I think it rather uninformative.   I can't imagine how you'd bring a game to a halt for 90 minutes without at least some player engagement.  I gaurantee that the GM didn't go into a 90 minute monologue here (misuse of a summary technique or misuse of exposition as narration).   Hiring spearcarriers in 5-10 minutes is virtually impossible to prevent without offering up a different scene (an attack by assassins in the middle of it, or something).   If the interviews took 90 minutes, it's because the GM implicitly offered that the players had a choice to either accept the DM's choice regarding mechanical elements or else engage in the scene to get the outcome they wanted and the players - including Hussar - chose 'engage in the scene'.  In other words, they prioritized the obtaining the desired mechanical outcome (six fanaticly loyal, capable, cheap, willing to die for a few coins mercenaries) over the risk of hiring NPCs that may or may not have the characteristics they desired.  The real question is therefore, is a GM obligated to accept the player's prefered _mechanical choice_ all the time?  I personally criticize the GM for deciding to offer interviews and not making those interviews AWESOME, but not over offering the interviews.  And I think it ridiculous to criticize the GM for the players prioritizing thier gamist goal (win without complication) over thier narrative goal (revenge on the Grell, however weak of a narrative goal that may be).I disagree.   Moreover, the GM is going to have a hard time forcing that decision on players.  In my experience, 99% of the time if the players suspect the GM has wonderful ideas for the personalities of NPC's, they'll INSIST that material be engaged with in the context of a job interview rather than be sprung on them in the middle of a battle.</blockquote>

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