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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6102388" data-attributes="member: 4937">Because there is a logical inconsistancy here.  The players have said they are interested in assassinating the Duke.   Clearly, if the story is about assassinating the Duke, then part of the story is about doing that and all the things round about the Duke become part of the story.  Sure, we could cut frame to in media res of them standing above the body of the Duke, dripping in his blood, but the story is not then about assassinating the Duke but about its aftermath and two major questions are immediately raised.  First, since players aren't the audience of the story, why are we showing the story to them rather than letting them experience it - which is the most powerful and unique characteristic of the RPG art.  If we only wanted to show them  a story, why play an RPG at all?  Secondly, when do we stop?  When do we stop all this truncation of the story and actually get on with the story?  These sorts of jumps are fine if they jump no significant events or if perhaps they happen once, starting the story in media res?  But how long do we keep skipping scenes and why?  If the story was to be about the aftermath of assassinating the Duke, can we start the story now or were the players not really interested in that story either?  If not this story, then what?  When is the story allowed to happen, or do you think us well served by flitting around with every random whim?   Stories have a structure.   Things like in media res and jump cuts are techniques and often weak ones that make for weak, confusing, jarring stories even when you are telling a story to an audience, much less when you are trying to achieve that singular power achievable in an RPG of actually becoming part of the story and living it from the inside.   Big continuity breaks like that are weak framing techniques.  If we don't want to spend a lot of time on the planning and lead up to the Duke, fine, then there are economical techniques for creating bridging scenes and continuity cuts that let us advance the story without breaking emmersion. But just 'jump' 'bang', that's crappy story telling and implies quite the opposite of the indication - that the killing of the Duke is trivial to the story the same way that the preperation of the lunch is.If the travel is trivial to the story, safe, reliable, etc., then no it isn't unreasonable.  I 'redline' travel too.  Much of the travel on the way up to Campansalus from Amalteen was 'redlined', describing only the changing of terrain.  Most of the travel back and forth between Amalteen and Dunbaugh was done in under a minute of narration, a quick summation of the journey to establish what the change in terrain was like on the way up, and then a quick summary of the refugees passing them on the way back.   All this was handled this way because the PC's were travelling through largely safe settled lands, and as such there was no need to deal with bathroom breaks, saddle sores, stops at inns for meals, or any of the other mundane things of travel.  In a different story, that might have been important, but I promised the players a story at a heroic and not mundane scale.  However, to the extent that it matters what condition that you arrive in at the destination, even those journeys provoke Endurance checks to see if you can make the journey without fatigue (or worse).  I don't necessarily narrate the saddle sores, but they are mechanically accounted for.  Why?  Well, for one thing, because two of my PC's are heroic travellers; it's is their right to show and know they can escape hardship less heroic travellers can not.  One of them now could keep up with Strider the Wingfooted on his heroic chase across the plains of Rohan.  However when it came time for the journey from Amalteen to Talernga, the PC's were passing through a war zone.  That, we didn't skip over, because there were going to be non-trivial events.  It wasn't possible to get to Talernga without danger and heroic adventure.  Therefore, I didn't uses the same technique.</blockquote>

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