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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6109549" data-attributes="member: 4937">Why?  If the siege is the aforementioned zombies, they are essentially mindless.  If you say, "Well, I can control zombies so they are potentially a resource", then we can always replace them with chaos beasts or something else uncontrollable.  There is nothing inherently interactive about the siege.No more or less than a desert journey does.You are suggesting that they are qualia.That's ridiculous.  The beseigers can have a completely different goal than yours.  I've already given one example, but its hardly the most extreme case.  Particularly when we consider an outer planar seige, the goal of the besiegers can be ineffable and incomprehensible.   Perhaps the beseigers are Slaad, and they want to plant white flowers in a certain garden that the inhabitants of the city only wish to see have black flowers.  They have neither desire nor ability to communicate to your their reasons, and fundamentally have no interest in your goals.  They exist only to provide 5 predictable combat scenes to grind through and some outer planar color to the setting.  Is this a good scene?  Perhaps not, I wouldn't do it (unless I had a really clever blow your mind later reason behind the flowers) but it just shows that intrinsically there is nothing about the seige that has to intrude on your goals.  The beseigers do not need to be interested in your goals or to threaten them, even if they threaten you (in the same way that random desert encounters do).  And in an outer planar siege in particular, this seige could have been going on for centuries and might not complete for centuries more. If sneaking past or evading the siege counts as interacting with it, than surely travelling through the desert counts as interacting with it to the same degree.I accept that for the purposes of this thread you have a subjective personal preference for 'seiges' over 'deserts'.  I believe that it a real experience for you, however illogical and ineffable the reasons may be for it.   But yeah, if the difference is truly uncommunicatable, then there is no way to agree about it.The two beliefs aren't contridictory.  I happen to insist on both of those things.However, the city itself is also an arbitrary decided upon time and place.  It didn't even actually exist in the original scenario.  There was no city.   The actual destinations were three locations in the desert.   Suppose we say that the goal is in the desert.   Is the desert relevant now?  What if the goal is a black pyramid in the desert.   Is the desert relevant now?  What if you don't know that the goal is the black pyramid, only its approximate location in the desert?  Is the desert relevant now?  Consider that in the original scenario, the PC's don't actually know any details about there destinations.  They only know they are in the desert.  In fact, if they know the final destination, two of the three destinations can be skipped.  Figuring out what the destinations are and where they are is part of the original scenario.  Is the desert relevant now?  Note, we both agree that it is a bad scenario as written, but I'm only asking about the question of relevancy.  Suppose the goal is to protect a caravan across the 200 miles and five days of the desert journey.  Suppose that the mechanics of resolution - same chance of random encounters, same random encounter tables - is exactly the same as in the original scenario.  Do these random encounters get alchemically transformed into something more fun because of the relation to the goal, or a is 5 day journey with 20 random encounters boring and tedious despite relevance to the goal?</blockquote>

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