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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6103479" data-attributes="member: 6681948">And if you want to visit the city across the desert, travel across the desert seems a reasonable expectation to me.  If you want to hire people who are going to kill or die for you, speaking with them also seems a reasonable expectation. I don’t believe he is irrelevant – but I have been told by a player that we must skip to the castle because nothing outside the castle is relevant. Sure it is.  And I’m sure we could come up with much more subtle occurrences on the road, or anywhere else. The simple point is that it is easily possible for relevant encounters to also happen on the road. OK, so you get to the city in a fingersnap because your centipede cannot be stopped or slowed by man or Gods alike.  You go looking for whatever the heck you were looking for in the city, but you need something in order to get in there.  That something, on investigation, leads to a trail that ends at the desert border.  Are you going to go search the desert for this thing you need, as the desert has now become relevant, or bitch and moan that the GM is just forcing us to interact with his setting wank desert to get even with you for your brilliant “avoid the desert” strategy? Yes, that’s how the source material always works, isn’t it? Then don’t complain when the guy subsequently turns out to have some importance, but in the intervening time the situation has changed (the nomads moved on, formed alliances, killed the prisoner, whatever). OK, let’s do so…  So, from that post, we see you “get rather grouchy” when the DM “pulls the rug out” from under your creative ideas.  I see that as “accept my solutions or I will cop an attitude”. We then see some discussion of why this plan may be neither as simple nor as 100% effective as you seem to think.  That is, perhaps it’s not that easy for a party of humanoids to ride up a verticle slope clinging to the back of an enormous centipede, and maybe it’s movement rate is not so stellar that it can evade anything else in the desert.  So…  Immediate assumption:  the only reason for the GM to challenge my brilliant solution is that he’s going to force the issue.   It is impossible my plan could be less than 100% successful.   It sure looks like your point was that the GM was a poor sport and a poor GM because he had the gall to decide your plan was less than 100% foolproof.  That may not be what you wanted to say, but it’s sure what I see when I read the words.  I can’t read your mind, so I’m stuck with what you post. I think, again, that it depends.  How much am I planning on spending?  Am I letting these guys have access to my house, and my possessions, in my absence?  I think we have a lot more options here in the 21st century world.  I might go online and search for house painters.  I’d probably nose around at work and see if anyone has a recommendation based on their own experiences.  I might contact the Better Business Bureau.  And I may just rely on modern contract law and the existence of a solid judiciary to defend me if things go wrong. I don’t think I’ll be hiring mercenaries to guide me on a hunt through the jungle to bag a Rhino without doing a little fact checking first (but then, I’m unlikely to do so at all). I think Celebrim said that, seeing the players engaged in a creative means of crossing the desert, he would invest the time to assess the implications, and allow them to demonstrate their skills, expertise and creativity in determining how best to achieve the goal, within the constraints of the plan.  And, by implication, that he would not just call your solution an autosuccess without assessing it.  You are the one who decided that the sole reason he could have for anything short of saying “Your brilliance is awe inspiring – you arrive at the other side of the desert with no problems” can be attributed only to mean-spirtited, heavy handed GM roadblocking, Perhaps that’s why it so seldom happens in the fiction or in other games.  But let’s go on… So what were the other players doing?  Did they not buy into your plan?  It seems we never get to hear about what the rest of the group did.  So it was not possible, in your view, that anyone would show up for a hastily written ad for mercenary killers who was not perfectly suited for the job you had in mind?  And how does it take 90 minutes for you to say “you’re hired” to the next six in the door?  Actually, what would likely bug me more is that the hirelings actually did the job if you just grabbed the first six guys through the door. Funny – from your initial description, I got the sense you had interrogated the hobgoblin, made your intimidate check and had some back & forth discussion before the other player killed it.  That is, the scene had player out, not been cut from its inception.  OK, let’s throw that back into Hussar’s court.  Assuming the game played at the time had these mechanics (or the GM proposed something similar), would you be OK with cutting the scene short on the basis that a single roll is made for each hireling in turn.  Based on that roll, for each recruit, your character either makes a good call (hires someone reliable or dismisses an aberration worshipper or a guy hoping to kill you after the grell and loot both), or a bad call (dismissing a reliable recruit with similar goals; hiring someone who wants you dead more than the Grell). The results then play out in combat. Or would betrayal by a hireling or two indicate the GM is just punishing the players for refusing to find his brilliant NPC design and characterization engaging enough to spend a few hours on? Let’s flesh it out, because right now, my answer is “it depends”.  Did I ask if the player wanted to examine the possible purchases and make some Handle Animal checks?  If he responded with “I want a horse, I want it immediately and I don’t want to screw around with your lame NPC characterizations and minutia rolls.”, then I get the sense the PC is rushing the deal and having him buy a lame horse may be a reasonable result. Did I presuppose he did so and roll for him and **oops** he picked the lame one (maybe with a Bluff roll from the salesman)?  Depends on the table’s style, but it still seems a reasonable result, on the assumption that the player did not indicate he was taking any special precautions, nor that he was especially rushed.  It also depends on the character – if he’s a Ranger with the Horse Lord archetype and a +15 Handle Animal check, it seems unlikely he would fail to notice the horse was lame under most circumstances. Or have all the players routinely bought riding animals in the past with no issues, but this player just did something that ticked the GM off?   That seems like the differentiation to me as well. I see the same – “I don’t care how much fun everyone else is having, move on to what I want immediately” does not seem consistent with “I put everyone else’s fun on the same level as my own”.  Add the recent comment that it’s up to them to ask to cut the scene, which seems quite different to prior claims that “I’m not having fun if my buddy is bored”, and that impression becomes stronger.</blockquote>

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