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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6105320" data-attributes="member: 6681948">Frankly, I never saw those followers play any role in battle.  Mass combat has never been a D&D strength.  The one exception was the early Ranger, and I often saw it suggested that those followers be role played into the game, not just tossed at the Ranger’s feet – they would be a part of the campaign, so they should not be flat cardboard cut-outs. Part of the problem is that the battle against the grell really isn’t all that important in the grand scheme of things.  So several were pretty much unimportant Redshirts, killed for illustration and colour and one was a guest star who had an actual impact on the action.  Hussar wanted the spearmen to have an impact on the battle, not just die like redshirts.  “But I would have asked about combat experience in the hiring process – I should have had a chance to realize one of these guys was lying about his experience, and hired someone else.  It’s not fair.  The GM’s out to get me because he can’t stand my brilliant plan of hiring mercenaries allowing us to defeat his Mary Sue Grell!”  This assumes the recruits’ personalities, backstories, hiring stories and interaction is “nothing interesting”.  If the GM doesn’t make them – or the combat against the Grell – interesting, then the problem lies there, not with the nature of the scene.  The onus is on the GM to make it “not minutia”.  If it is minutia, then it’s like buying gear in most games – shell out the gold, write down the gear and move on. But it’s not really luck, Pemerton, because you’re going to assume and appply the worst possible results in your continuing efforts to screw over the PC’s. Haven’t you been following along?  That’s what GM’s do!  That’s when the player screams blue murder that he should have been given the choice of what precautions to take so he could ensure you could not screw him over like this.  And that’s one way we end up playing out the minutia – because the player can’t bear to give up any control that might lead to a possibility of failure.  The other option is for the GM to accept that the player’s plans always succeed 100% with no complications or ramifications. Where are you “more likely to meet genies or pixies”?  In the desert or forest that you explicitly don’t want to interact in any way because it’s booooooooring setting wank?  Since it’s all just colour anyway, there is no reason my desert nomads can’t be armed with broadswords and longbows.  Why do you care, again?  Oh, because there are mechanical differences between infantry armed with longbows and cavalry archers.  How do you know they’re not Hippogriff mounted crossbowmen, whether in the forest or the desert? And that colour interacts on the gameplay.  I’m much more inclined to learn Create Water in a desert setting, and far less likely to invest a lot in Swimming ranks, because I know that the challenges in a desert will find the former more useful than the latter.  But if the entire campaign never leaves the Sultan’s palace, or all travel is by flying carpet so we never see the sand, it makes no difference that we are surrounded by a desert. If, at no time in the game, there is any impact of your gender, skin colour or origins, then yes, it has been made irrelevant. OK, I’m confused (and I misread “intra-party” because of this).  How does moving the party, through space or through time, invalidate intra-party RP?  Aren’t all the PC’s still there?  Either the setting was important to this RP (in which case changing the setting has an impact) or it was not (in which case that RP is not invalidated by the fast forward).  [ASIDE:  I’m not reading blogs, so I’m responding to your points] Emphasis added.  Job?  Does he get paid for this?  He is also engaged in a leisure time activity, and there is no reason for him to do so if it isn’t fun for him.  “Introducing complications” seems to include “to get to the city, you need to cross the desert – man versus nature” and “do you want to take the first six spearcarriers who come along, or do you want to interview them in more detail?” are both valid complications in the game, at least as I see them. A lot of reference to backstory (setting) influencing the game, rather than just providing colour, I think. I don’t see where the GM has been advised to always tell the players up front exactly how each scene ties in. Often, the protagonists do not know precisely where the action is going, and I find that works just fine in the game as well.  However, none of the above outline works if the players don’t trust the GM to use that power wisely to deliver an enjoyable play experience, rather than with malice to screw them over and rob them of their fun.  The GM cannot do his “job” if that is how he is viewed by his “employers”. And there you have it spelled out – no trust, game fails.  Hussar wants us to trust that he would only use his scene-skipping power wisely and in the best interests of the game.  From the examples given, I don’t know that I have that trust.  Meanwhile, Hussar does not trust the GM – he expects the GM will do everything in his power to screw him, and the other players, over, railroad them into his pre-fab scenes and reactions and overall abuse any trust placed in him.  So the game cannot work. I think the deeper problem is that Hussar was unwilling or unable to extend that necessary trust at the outset, approached the game with a “GM versus Player”/ “GM will always try to screw us over” viewpoint, and as a result got “shirty”, likely causing the GM (and maybe other players) to get defensive.   The reality could fall at either end of those extremes or anywhere in between – we weren’t there so we can’t know with any certainty (and if we were there, we’d be biased by our own perceptions and experiences anyway).  It seems clear Hussar considers himself to have been 100% in the right.  I doubt his GM shares that viewpoint.  It would be interesting to know his, and the other players’, views, but we don’t.  All we have is Hussar’s views.</blockquote>

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