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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chaochou" data-source="post: 6113569" data-attributes="member: 99817">Hi again JC. Nice situation! Some thoughts which may or may not be useful.Do you remember my example way back, with the character trying to cross a busy street to go to a shop? I asked if there was a difference between a street gang on the corner and a crime scene at the shop with bullet holes and spent cartridges and whatnot.Okay. Let's start the example 10 blocks from the shop now. And I describe police cars whizzing past in the direction you're going, sirens blazing, officers starting to cordon off the street further down, SWAT teams moving into position, black FBI cars, snipers on the rooftops.Is this making 'the streets around the shop' relevant? It's debatable. What I'd say I was doing was foreshadowing the crime scene at the shop. What's relevant to the player is the shootout at the shop, but instead of jumping straight there I'm giving advanced warning that something's up.I believe you're doing the same in Situation A, if I've read you correctly. It accepts the seige as a viable complication and is now warning of the seige. The desert only 'matters' in the sense that all human interaction happens 'somewhere'. We could interchange desert for jungle, mountain, boiling lava pits, frozen tundra. The city could be over the next rise or still 75 miles away. The 'where' in this encounter is simply a necessity of our reality. The 'what' in this encounter is 'the city is under seige.'What this offers is a chance for players to enjoy the seige in advance. And react and adapt. This kind of foreshadowing is powerful, generally regarded as quality GMing irrespective of playstyle. But I don't see a distinction here between desert and seige. It looks, to me, like a choice between seige and pre-seige.However, I agree with your conclusion that this desert/seige split is at best a tenuous indicator of player empowerment in the way that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] describes. I think questions like 'Who authored the need to go to the city - GM, player or group?' would reveal those authority structures more directly.</blockquote>

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