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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 6113914" data-attributes="member: 2656">Finally! It's taken me days to read this thread of mutual incomprehension and slack-jawedness.So my bystander's perspective of desert vs siege.To me the player a desert is a mostly empty hostile environment where any encounters are likely to be wandering monsters i.e. random encounters with no treasure, no useful information, merely extra risk and drain of resources, and some or all of these encounters can be reasonably avoided. From the PC's perspective any encounters are probably just obstacles on their journey to their goal in the city, and are preferably avoided.So it's entirely understandable to me that players would avoid as many encounters in the desert as possible, having their PCs sneak, fly, teleport or simply flee every encounter offered in the desert. I've been in a number of mission-oriented games which permitted PC agency with journeys like this. The more degrees of freedom the PCs have to avoid encounters, the more the players and PCs need to be actively hooked into engaging with optional encounters such as those in the desert.Whereas to the players the siege likely isn't a wandering monster, it's a planned event that may have a severe effect on the mission and the PCs. Even if the PCs bypass the siege somehow, it's reasonable for them to gather information about what's going on, and maybe interact with the situation between the cities inhabitants and the besieging force.So to me that's what stands out, the players and PCs, given their lack of information, have every reason to avoid encounters in the desert, but could reasonably gather data on the siege and decide to interact with one or more of the factions involved.And on the "skipping a scene" issue, what stands out to me is that demanding players have the minimum system mastery to know to have the plot coupon required to skip a scene(e.g. teleport or wind walk), or have to endure a monster-filled trek through the desert can act to discourage and drive away players lacking this system mastery, or those who deliberately skip the relevant powers because they don't fit their character concept etc.  I can see that allowing a wider range of justifications/excuses for skipping a scene might work very well in a variety of games, right down to a simple request from a player.</blockquote>

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