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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6107087" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think it has to be a given that D&D plays this way. Or, to put it another way, I don't think that a player who uses 3E Plane Shift is, per se, agreeing to the acceptability of the GM running a more-or-less freestanding, unrelated scenario for a session while we get from the point of arrival to our desired destination.I think this is also borne out by the history of the Plane Shift spell. In AD&D (1st ed, at least), it is a cleric only spell and silent as to accuracy. In AD&D, the wizard doesn't get Plane Shift, but as a 7th level spell (in UA) gets Teleport Without Error, which can cross planes but when it does so has the ordinary (5th level Teleport) chance of failure.In 3E the plane-crossing function of TWE was pulled out, and given to the wizard instead in the form of access to Plane Shift as a 7th level spell. And the designers seem to have reached some sort of compromise or clarification on the accuracy issue - no chance of failure in the Teleport sense, but a random deviation from the intended destination. This makes the spell unreliable from the point of view of Scry-Buff-Teleport, but I don't think it was done with the intention of marking out any special realm of GM authority over pacing or scenario content. Which is to say, if the group in general plays a more tightly focused, player-driven game, I don't think Plane Shift is in any special way intended to figure as an exception to that.Of course, in a certain sense the GM is always free to frame things however s/he wants, including on insisting playing through the desert. But for a player-driven group that would be bad GMing, regardless of the use of a Plane Shift spell.But this doesn't require any extended playing out. Within the confines of 3E, for instance, it can be resolved within 5 minutes via Gather Information checks ("What's their reputation?") and Sense Motive checks ("Do they seem shifty or unreliable?").Furthermore, as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] pointed out above, there is no particular reason to think that playing things out over 90 mintues makes it particularly more likely that the players (or the PCs) would do better at learning any of this stuff. I'm 99% confident that the GM Hussar is complaining about did not do the resolution the way he (?) did because he thought that was required to be fair to the players. He did it that way because he learned somewhere (from a rulebook, or a magazine article, or some other RPGer) that "real" roleplaying is not about combat but is about immersion, and that immersion includes free roleplay between PCs and NPCs even in completely mundane, low-dramatic-stakes situations.Maybe Hussar and I are the only ones on these boards who have encountered such GMs, but in my part of the world they were a dime-a-dozen at least in the late 80s through late 90s. (Maybe still today, but I don't get out as much as I used to.)This passage seems to me to treat "player interests and story momentum" and "purpose" as equivalent. I was not treating them as such. I was not suggesting that GMs are running their desert and hiring scenes without purpose. I was suggesting, rather, that purposes other than player interest or story momentum are not purposes I'm interested in. With world exploration being the number one such purpose.You also stated how you would handle the purchasing of the horse, and determination of whether or not it is lame. I said above that what you described is different from what I would do, and what I would want in a game. Likewise your description of how you would handle the desert scenario.I don't think I'm a special snowflake at all. I'm pretty confident that Hussar would recognise his approach to GMing as being present in my game, and vice versa. Likewise [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION], plus many other ENworld posters who aren't participants in this thread. That I think my preferences and approach differ from yours and [MENTION=6681948]N'raac[/MENTION]'s doesn't mean I think I'm different from everyone else. And that you think your preferred approach to play is no different from mine or Hussar's strikes me as odd, given that you seem to be at pains to explain why Hussar's judgement about the two episodes of play (desert and hiring) was wrong, while he and I both think that he was correct.</blockquote>

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