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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6113632" data-attributes="member: 6681948">EPIHANY!  Emphasis added to a very key statement.  Isn’t the crux of much of the bad GMing suggested on this thread,  not to mention many others, that the GM refuses to accept possibilities falling outside his vision of how the game will play out?  How is the refusal to weigh, in an objective and unbiased manner, the possibility that the desert could very well be relevant, interesting and a legitimate pat of the game any different from a GM refusing to accept an outside the box approach (“we will hire mercenaries to assist us”; “we will ride the Bound centipede across the desert”; “we will take an action not directly addressed in the rule book/scenario book in order to resolve this challenge”) without assessing the merits of the approach in an objective and unbiased manner? Emphasis added. OK, you as a player will assume being 100 miles away was a misfire.  I, as a GM, will tell you to go and read the spell description.  There is not “a slim possibility of a misfire”.  There is not even “a slim possibility you will arrive on target”.  The spell will, with 100% certainty, deposit you between 5 and 500 miles away from your target destination.  If you did not know that going in, it is because you failed to read the spell description.  Assuming this was an NPC resource (I think someone mentioned an NPC having the spell in this case), what stops the NPC saying “yup, that’s the problem with Plane Shift – you always arrive miles from your destination.” Knowing that this was not a misfire of the spell, but a 100% certain result of the spell, precisely as written, why would that side effect not be assumed to be the intent of the GM (who gave you a reason for planar travel and one resource capable of accomplishing it, which resource comes attached to that 100% certain side effect).Could you “know in advance”?  Maybe – but do you have the resources to know, or discover, what awaits you on the other side, well in advance?  If you do, did you have the time to use them?  If I know you are capable of divining what will be on the “other side”, and can then prepare to mitigate same in a manner that will harm the scene I intend to set, why would I not add some time pressure?  “The orcs are at the gates – we can’t wait!”; “the Portal will vanish in another few minutes and will not be accessible again for 10 generations”. It seems perfectly legitimate to expect the players can intuit that the GM planned for this certainty, or even a real possibility, and that he will either present interesting, relevant encounters or resolve the matter with limited play, and will not force you to waste time traveling a desert just to get to the damn place the DM/Plot said you had to go.</blockquote>

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