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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6107320" data-attributes="member: 6681948">You approach this from the perspective that it is impossible the GM could design the desert crossing scenario to be relevant and related to the larger ongoing scenario.  Why?  As I see it, the players had one way, plane shift, to get where they needed to be.  That approach is unreliable – they will arrive some distance away.  Walking in, they should know some further travel will be required.  This has become an inescapable part of achieving their goal.   Given that, I would expect the GM has incorporated the travel into his scenario plan, and that it will be relevant to the game as a whole.  Will it have immediate relevance to the city destination?  Maybe.  Maybe not.   Perhaps it will foreshadow later events, provide information that will be important in a later arc, provide resources that will be helpful at some later time or introduce characters who will resurface later.  Maybe it will advance other plot threads (perhaps, to be very facetious, signs of that Grell who escaped your righteous vengeance some time ago have been here will arise – what’s the Grell’s connection to this scenario?  Do we break off our “get to the city” priority to chase the Grell, or is the city more important today?) You seem to confuse “player-driven” with the GM laying out a roadmap of every step the players might consider taking and providing instant gratification to every player whim or desire. How much does this delay the PC desire to return to the Grell?  “Gather Information” is a skill that takes considerable time to perform.  I thought they (PC’s, not players) wanted to hire these mercenaries and get back to Grell slaying without delay.  Do the PC’s have the patience to run extensive background checks, contrary to the player’s desire for immediacy?  Is “You return to the Grell’s lair two weeks later” satisfactory to the players, even if it takes 2 minutes of table time or less?  Hussar seemed to indicate some in-game time pressure to get past the Grell. Maybe you are the only ones who project that approach on every situation with the assumption you will be gaming with a poor GM.  If you expect every GM to be a lousy one, I am surprised you would still bother to game. I would suggest you surrender any control over the results.  You want to dictate the precise results with no effort or resources expended. OK, you’ve been travelling through standard territory for some time when you discover a location you wish to go to is on another plane.  You Plane Shift.  Turns out this new location is arctic cold.  Were you carrying cold weather gear through a temperate zone, or is it reasonable to question whether you have immediate access to such gear?  I would certainly expect players knowing they are headed into arctic climes to purchase cold weather gear.  I would also note that “purchase means “sacrifice the in-game resource of cash in exchange for cold weather gear”, not “assume the character has a full wardrobe with him at all times with clothing suitable for every occasion and climate”. I suspect some PC’s might also be wanted criminals.  Are they aha-gotcha players?    For myself, I don’t like the concept of PC’s being completely paranoid lunatics with food tasters, contingency plans for buying groceries, etc. etc.  But I also don’t like playing a game where everything is simple, predictable and obvious.  That means I accept the GM will throw in complications at time, and I accept that no, my PC would not have pre-tested every possible purchase to ensure no possibility he would ever be placed at a disadvantage.  I trust the GM not to abuse that aspect of his control over the game (just as you trust your players not to abuse the “sure you can have reasonable equipment” rule).  I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that it is unintentional, but I find the statement that one approach prioritizes fun to strongly indicate a negative view of the other approach, which is by implication less or no fun.  Other than the fact that the manner in which the hiring is done is the aspect which will most likely bring a measure of engagement to the 40 minutes of role play.  Since we are making assumptions let’s assume that the NPC’s had well established and played personalities, the 40 minutes flew by, and the players talk for years about how these fully fleshed out NPC’s enhanced the game experience. But OK, we spent 40 very enjoyable minutes role playing our PC’s personalities and interacting with NPC’s who also had fleshed out personalities. I’m with Celebrim on the “playing out a shopping expedition” aspect.  But let’s assume we have played out 10 minutes of fabulous role play with the players’ favorite weapons dealer from times past – consider him a deveel, a ferengi, etc., well fleshed out and the bargaining is an aspect of the campaign that players regale other gamers with at every opportunity. Again, like Celebrim, I question whether this is the likely or best reveal, but let’s roll with it (even the prospect of PC’s surrendering!).  In keeping with our theme that NPC’s are fleshed out and interesting, the authorities include a former colleague of one PC, whose background included working as a city guard.  This colleague has worked his way up through the ranks, and is leading the particular group, so the PC was unwilling to just fight his way out, instead engaging with this old comrade.  That comrade just KNEW when he heard his old buddy was looking for spearmen  that he’d somehow manage to recruit this criminal who has gone to ground and been so difficult to track, so he staked out the group hoping for just such an occasion.  After some discussion, the old colleague lets slip that there’s a reward for this fellow’s capture, and the PC’s negotiate being paid the reward in exchange for peaceably turning the criminal over.  20 minutes of great role play that maybe sets up contacts in the city guard going forward, perhaps results in a vengeful blood enemy if that criminal escapes, and leaves you one man down for the battle with the Grell – recruit another or carry on? PC goals?  No.  Player goals?  80 minutes of great, in-character role playing action that furthered the goal of obtaining the mercenary support, developed more ties with that weapon supplier, established connections within the city watch and possibly set up a future adventure related to that criminal.  What a great break between the grind of a dungeon crawl with nothing but constant, repetitive tactical combat scenes.  Eighty minutes well spent, and bonus xp to all the PC’s for great role playing and developing their characters.  On to the Grell! Pretty good, actually.  Or maybe they’d try to track down and recruit some or all of the five guys who worked out well – we didn’t hear a lot about them, but I assume they are also fleshed out, interesting characters in their own right, so if I need help again in this neck of the woods, they (and/or that guard captain from one PC’s past) would be the first people I’d try to get in touch with.  Wow, a world with interesting and engaging recurring NPC’s.  You’re right – what player group could possibly want a game like that instead of one where you insert a gold coin in a slot and out pop three man-days of L1 Warrior service? I like to think the players are thinking past the next combat scene with a broader goal, and I think it essential the GM layer the game in such a fashion.  The encounters as you try to recruit may not be directly relevant to the 10-15 minute battle to slay the grell, a one shot monster who will never be seen again, but will hopefully foreshadow future encounters, possibly tie in to the longer term goals of the party, maybe start the ball rolling to future adventures, and basically work to make a game that is a layered work of shared fiction rather than a series of loosely linked tactical combat exercises. Truly the stuff of songs and legend.  **yawn** And I must get past the locked gates or beseiging force to enter the city.  Where is the emotional or thematic relationship?  It’s in the nature of the experiences in either the desert or the efforts to get into the city so we can pursue our next short-term objective within the city. Differentiating PC’s and NPC’s outside a game context is a challenging exercise at best.  My preference is a game that does not assume PC’s are the only characters with any personality or potential to recur.  Your own engagement in the NPC’s of a different campaign suggests I am not alone in this. Agreed.  At the same time, I don’t think the game is nearly as interesting if the PC’s live in a vacuum with a tattered backdrop, rather than a living world, in which to adventure.  There’s a balance to be struck, and “skip along to the next scene” doesn’t strike it, any more than watching the GM play out interactions between a bunch of NPC’s however compelling his dramatic fiction.   BTW, the GM rolling dice for 6 spearmen vs the Grell is at risk of falling into that trap as well. One reason given for the importance of the grell was that it occupied a choke point the PC’s needed to get past with limited time.  That suggests some other, longer-term, goals of which we are not aware.  Whether the mercenary recruitment can be used to link into those goals is a question we can’t answer because we do not have that broader context.   The GM, I assume, has the context of the PC’s mid term goals (broader picture of what they presently seek to accomplish), their long term goals (character background, etc.) and the upcoming events likely or possible in his own game milieu, so I think he has a lot more specific detail to work with in planning the mercenary recruitment than we do. But he delayed the party getting their vengeance on the Grell.  That is the only thing Hussar is interested in at this moment in time, and anything deviating from immediate return to the GrellQuest is tagged as unacceptable.   Is the real problem that the GM wanted to spend time on the NPC recruitment process, or that he did a poor job with the NPC’s themselves?  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] questions whether the players will ever try to receuit NPC’s again.  How many times will the GM try to create engaging NPC’s with real personalities and backstories to interact with the PC’s, only to have the players say “Nah, just want cardboard cutouts” before he simply reduces his game to a series of loosely connected tactical combat scenarios, since the players seem to just want to skip from one of these to the next? Agree fully.  If the choices the players make have no consequences, and no impact on where the game goes next, they didn’t really have any choices at all – they are just railroaded along between scenes, with their choices having no bearing on whether they succeed or fail, or how effective they are at achieving their goals.  The only difference is that, instead of frustrating the players’ ability to guide their PC’s destiny, the GM is acquiescing to their whims so there is no real challenge to achieving their goals. What the other players were doing is a question that continually goes unanswered.  This can have a few meanings.  It could mean they were engaged and having a blast, and Hussar’s pressure to push along would ruin their fun, so Hussar doesn’t want to answer the question because it will not favour his position.  It may be that Hussar has no idea because he was focused solely on his own experience at the table, and not on the other players’ fun, despite his assertions (which seem to have faded) that he is focused on the enjoyment of everyone at the table, not just, or even primarily, his own, altruistic fellow that he is.  Or maybe they were also bored to tears, but I would have expected that to have been mentioned before we were 50+ pages in, especially with numerous questions about their level of engagement (sheesh – that’s a cue that we want to explore that aspect of the scene, Hussar!) A concise summation of the issue.Again, the sense I get is that we are to trust Hussar’s judgment as to how the game will be most fun, but we should never extend any trust to the GM, as GM’s are consistently out to ruin the players’ fun, over and above all other objectives. This could very well be a couple of encounters in the desert.  However, if you read Hussar’s posts, he posits that the centipede ravel eliminates all possibility of encounters in the desert – he has pre-judged that all such encounters are both meaningless and easily avoided by his centipede mount.  There is no reason the encounters you suggest (or, despite some voiced acceptance now, a siege or locked city gates) would be any better received than the “bandits in the desert” he so consistently refers to.  Maybe those bandits include that criminal from GrellQuest – closure, or extension, of that story arc.  Perhaps they are deserters from the besieged or the besiegers, providing foreshadowing of that upcoming complication and/or some intel to assist in resolving it successfully.  Or would that also be contrived? I recently started a new job.  Unknown to me, also working here are a lady I worked with about 15 years ago, and a lady who I went to elementary school with well over 30 years ago.  That sure sounds contrived, doesn’t it?  I mean, who could ever credit such a coincidence as being reasonable – shocks me right out of my suspension of disbelief. The tunnel vision is a significant contributor to the problem.  “Accomplish one task and move on to the next” seems a very dull way to run a campaign.  But to each his own, I guess (to follow the theme of disparaging another game of which I have minimal knowledge, then dismiss it that others may enjoy such monotony in their leisure time). I question how [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] would react if the GM insisted on exercising a similar level of control over scenes in the game.  Or perhaps much of this thread indicates exactly how he would react.There is no next scene in [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]’s world – he is focused exclusively on a single scene to the exclusion of all else.</blockquote>

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