NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6112826" data-attributes="member: 6681948">As I read your initial discussion on the centipede, the sense I got was "I do not want to play out the desert crossing at all - let us ride the centipede looking cool, avoid any and all encounters and ignore any rules issues related to our ability to actually ride the centipede, despite our ability to do so being integral to my plan."  So every micro objective of the group should be contemplated at the outset to be included in the group template?  Sounds like a very pre-planned campaign (with the players contributing to the railroad design, at least).  I'm not discussing the GM failing to present desired scenes  I'm talking about one player cutting off a scene another player desires to play out.It seems more like "let's have a group of characters with complete tunnel vision" to me, but the length of these focused campaigns would be a big part of that issue.  From your comments, you envision pretty short campaigns, and a three month "focused on the city campaign" followed by a two month "exploration" campaign and a four month "political intrigue" campaign strikes me as comparable to a much longer campaign encompassing three months of "focus on the city" adventures, two months of "exploration" adventures and four months of "political intrigue" adventures, so the two need not be all that different.  In your model, however, an awareness that the PC's will be more focused on the specific challenges will be neeeded to design them appropriately.  Characters in the longer term single campaign will need to balance character abilities where those in, say, that "political intrigue" campaign know that interaction abilities will be important and exploration skills will not, so build accordingly.I prefer the variety, and well rounded characters and character groups, which comes with an acceptance that, sometimes, my abilities aren't the ones best suited for this challenge.But the GM needs to present the desired scenes.  If he doesn't know what scenes you desire and don't, he can't do so effectively.  And it seems like your "not desired" scenes are pretty unpredictable from where I sit - 80+ pages of several of us trying to understand why you differentiate between desert and siege seems to bear that out.  Even now we're getting a "oh, it's not the desert travel I object to but the Ride Skill minutia" clarification, so we're obviously still not clear on which scenes you dislike so much you can't abide to even consider playing them out.Oddly, you consider goals and objectives something the GM should be 100% conversant with, but assume the GM has no idea of party resources.  If I design a desert crossing scenario for characters who have the resources to easily avoid it, then I will design it with that in mind.  I would expect them to say "We will not undertake a Camel Caravan - memorize Teleport".  If I have designed a desert crossing scenario I expect will be played out, then the party will not have the resources to easily, logically and practically circumvent that scene.  I do look at the character sheets - I suspect you do too.  So it's not so much "sure, if you had the resources you could easily circumvent this" as "if you have the resources to circumvent this, I would design it with the fact you likely will in mind".  IIf you were 15th level, could you have blown by the Grell with no problems?  I suggest the answer is yes.  I further suggest that the choke point at 15th level would be guarded by something more challenging than a single Grell.  And if your resources allow you to ignore the desert travel, the desert travel scene would be created with that in mind.I come back to the rules statement that there is no guarantee your belief is correct.  All we know is that the character believes this.  He could believe that he can cause the sun to rise in the west, but my guess is that the dice roll will be pretty tough, so good luck making that belief turn into reality.Yup.  One read is "I am deluded, but my faith in the fallacy is unshakeable."  A lot of people believed the world was flat and the sun revolved around it.  Their unshakeable belief did not make it so.As long as you accept that the resources of the King may well be adequate that those dice will fail you.  Just like dancing on the mists is unlikely to have a result other than plummeting to a grisly demise on the rocks below.There must be some backstory reason for your belief, mustn't there?  And if you are correct, there is history in that regard.  That it has yet to be discovered in no way means it is not backstory.  If this were simply a statement in the player's background notes in another game, nothing stops the GM deciding he'll see how things play out, or even deciding some time into the game that maybe it would be more interesting if it turns out the player is wrong, or right, after all, despite his first inclination (and play to date) differed.The history will be important to whether he is or not.  Whether anyone has made an advance determination in that regard does not change the fact that you are writing in some backstory.  It seems perfectly legitimate to ask why your character believes this.I believe you said this could be vetoed as well.  So what happens if we establish, pretty early on, that royal bloodline is required, and your possession of that trait is voted down?  I'd say any GM, in any game, who accepts a character for whom a central characteristic is a belief he is the rightful king, and then immediately disproves that claim categorically in play, is doing a poor job.  Having accepted this as a central theme of the game, it would be good practice to provide for both possibilities.What if the player manages to ascend the throne without definitive proof of the veracity of his claim being determined?  Was that a good campaign or a bad one?  We never did resolve that belief.  Maybe we find that definitive proof, but it persuades no one and the character dies perceived as a lunatic peasant with delusions of grandeur?  Your belief says nothing about whether he will ascend to the throne, only that, by right, he should.I clipped it, but didn't you say above that the belief could remain when the truth of the belief had been established?  Now you say this being established renders the game unplayable.  Which is it?</blockquote>

Verification