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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6102964" data-attributes="member: 6681948">It gets contrasted with "It is appropriate for me to get shirty with the DM if he does not immediately accept my rather hare brained approach to crossing the desert must immediately cut scene us to the city beyond" and "I can't be bothered to interact with the hireling applicants I chose to recruit."  We can only see the examples you gave, not that they are the only two examples of a request to skip a scene that you have made since you started gaming the day after the OD&D rules were published.You seem to be confusing "action" with "plot".  Keep on the Borderlands has three settings.  It has the Keep itself ("the bartender loves honey mead and hates small beer"), which is largely ignored by most newbies (and it is a newbie module - that's why it was in the box!).  It has the area surrounding the Keep (in your search for the Caves, you may locate the giant spiders and lizardmen - there was a third encounter, IIRC), which you can wilderness explore through, hex by hex.  And there are the Caves.  A rather disparate assortment of various monster tribes, that generally get more powerful as we rise higher in the geography, are presented as not getting along that well, yet live in some precarious balance.  And, if you kill off half the goblins, that shift in the balance of power will have had no impact whatsoever when you return a week later to finish off the rest.There is no plot ("Also called storyline.  the plan, scheme, or main story of a literary or dramatic work, as a play, novel, or short story."; dictionary.com).  There is no story. There is a setting (including a few sub-settings, occupants both friend and foe, etc.) with which the PC's interact (generally meaning "kill and loot", but sometimes "spend loot").  Any plot is added by the GM, but is not inherent in the module.  Maybe someone will provide some evidence to the contrary some day.  Actually, there is evidence to the contrary in that you are still gaming, which leads me to believe the snippets we get here do not tell the whole story - and they rarely, if ever, do.  I have still seen no examples of what you would consider a great, well run session.To date, I believe you have described a sum total of four scenes: - the desert scene ("skip it") - the hireling interviews ("skip it") - killing the Grell ("worthy of playing") - interrogating the hobgoblin ("worthy of playing" or "should have been skipped"?)The two you have focused us on seem like pretty bog standard scenes to me.  The desert scene was described as you presenting a means of skipping it without considering whether it had any merit, then getting "shirty" when it was suggested there might be challenges to your solution, and it may not have the desired effect of an immediate cut scene to the other side of the desert.  The second was presented as you deciding on an out of the box approach, the PC's recruiting additional combatants, then being displeased when the GM insisted these hirelings have some back story beyond being "spearcarrier #1 - #6".  90 minutes seems like an extended period, but I can attribute that to everyone else having a blast interacting with the applicants as easily as to a scene dragging on.  30 seconds seems like, again, dismissing the scene out of hand, not skipping only a single scene when it has dragged.  It seems like the scene cut became a lot less frequent at some point between your first comment on the desert scene and the 100th or 200th post, but I'm not sure how that evolved.Seriously, would this be the only time in the campaign you would ever have engaged the services of one or more hirelings?  And every other time, you would be good with playing out the hireling interview process, provided the NPC's were fleshed out, but only this one time you're not interested?  How likely does that sound when read objectively?  I suspect that there may have been an exchange suggesting it may take some work and time to find the half dozen spearmen you want to recruit, you probably got shirty and snapped something about how there must be dozens or hundreds of capable warriors in the city, so your approach was accepted and more than the precise number you wanted had the gall to show up and apply, forcing a decisionmaking process be implemented.I'm curious how the scene played out.  Did you suggest just taking the first six in line and moving on?  Who insistent you could not do so, the GM or one or more other players, or both?  Was it a 90 minute GM monologue as each NPC read out his/her/its CV, or was one or more player an active participant in dialogue with the potential hirelings?  How many actually showed up (am I misrecalling that you said ten?) to be interviewed?  Did you actually say "guys, I find this really boring - all I wanted were some no-name extras to give us some extra combat punch for this one battle.  Can we wrap this up and move on?" or did you just withdraw, yawn occasionally and expect the rest of the players to notice that you were disengaged?  Finally, you've described a couple of scenes where you wanted to move on.  I have heard no examples where you noticed the rest of the players seemed less than engaged and said "Hey, are you guys not enjoying this?  I'm having a great time,  but if you'renot finding this engaging, let's move on!"  I mean as a player, not a GM looking from player to player.</blockquote>

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