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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6115557" data-attributes="member: 42582">He has set foot in it. The GM has described a desert; the GM has not described anything that relates to or is leveragable as a resource in relation to the city as a goal;       [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has therefore decided to deploy a player resource (centipede summoning) to create a fictional state within the game that will permit, at the metagame level, the resolution of this scene with a few minutes of narration for colour and continuity.The complaint against the GM is that the GM insists on resolving the scene in a more detailed fashion - ie has rejected the player's attempt to offer up a device within the fiction that will permit resolution of the scene via a few minutes of free narraion. This, indeed, is how the example got into the thread in the first place: Hussar surprised the GM by offering up such a device, and the GM - instead of following the players' cue - has pushed back hard against it.No, as I replied upthread to       [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION]: depending on system details and table conventions, a lot of time can be spent on ride checks, use rope checks, animal handling checks, tracking consumption of food and water, etc.There are ways of illustrating this without making the players live through the experience.The PCs are in a desert heading to a city that they know about. So I would think some assumptions are viable - eg we're not talking about an elven forest village. (I also think you're taking the world "buildings" too literally - your dwarves and elves still have built environment, even if it is not in some literal sense buildings.) No doubt the GM could set up a siege by ants who are resistant to the druid's animal control, and whose siege has no impact upon the inner workings of the uninhabited, unbuilt "city". In such a case, I would object to it on the same grounds that I object to the irrelevant desert.Yes, the siege can be set up as a tedious, irrelevant roadblock. I happen to think that the typical GM who rolled up a siege on his/her "city complications chart" would be more likely to put in siege with soldiers, commanders, siege engines etc, but perhaps I'm wrong and the typical GM would default to a siege with no fictional elements that the players can leverage in pursuit of their interaction with the city.The desert having stuff the players know about is less tedious than the actual situation that Hussar described and complained about. It is still different from the city under siege, because it is still not clear that there are any elements of the fiction that the PCs can leverage - unless the game has fairly tight conflict resolution-style rules for exploration (eg a skill challenge), the players still have to wait upon the GM to narrate the discovery of what they're looking for.But that would be better than what Hussar actually complained about, yes.If you are talking about nomads, sandstorm etc outside the city then it is not in dsupte that these create the same opportunities, in general terms, as does the siege. The are functional equivalents of the siege - a complication overlaid on top of the city (as Hussar put it upthread, all are examples of "yes, but").There is nothing magical about a siege compared to a sandstorm (although I happen to think that at many tables the former might be more gripping than the latter). It is the overlaying of the complication on the goal that is significant.The repartee may be boring. But I can still leverage him as a player resource - eg I can have my PC attack and kill him, and then dump his body in the town square, in an atempt (as my PC) to impose my will upon the city via sheer violence. Or I can send out a message saying that anyone who wants to treat with me can meet me at noon in his inn. The inn and inkeeper are established elements of the fiction. My PC has fictional positioning with respect to them. As a player I can leverage that. Whereas, when I am standing in the desert with nothing visible but wasteland, the only thing in relation to which I am fictionally positioned is sand. The GM may have conceptions of hermits, nomads, what have you, but none of them are established in the fiction, and in standard D&D the player has no authority to establish them. Hence my PC is not fictionally positioned in relation to them. Hence I can't do anything with them until I wait for the GM to lead me to them.That is not the case once you tell me I am in an inn talking to an inkeeper, no matter how boring your actual narration.There are two ways I can see to interpret this.One I easily agree with - the choices made by the players shape the content of the subsequent fiction. Hence, if the PCs teleport across the desert, or speed across it on their zippy centipede, then - by definition - the subsequent ingame events will reflect that fact that they did not interact with anyone in the desert, nor explore it in any but the most superficial way.But the idea of "critical goals" that a GM will ensure can be accomplished in multiple ways, and the idea of "skipping" ways, I'm less sure about. This suggests to me GM authorship of both means and ends. And I'm not really much into that.Here is a summary of an episode of play from my own 4e game:<ul style="margin-left: 20px"> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The PCs had come to a town ruled by a Baron, and were ingratiating themselves with the Baron. The city and Baron were GM-authored; the players' choice to have their PCs ingratiate themselves with the Baron was their own - they wanted to build up their PCs' political standing within the town. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The PCs learned that the Baron's niece was missing and decided to go looking for her. That the Baron had a niece was GM-authored; that the PCs learned of her disappearance was primarily GM authored (as an adjudication of consequences in the course of resolving a skill challenge); that the niece resembled very much her grandmother whom the PCs had recsued from a trapping mirror when they briefly travelled 100 years into the past was GM authored also, but the inclusion of that connection past exploits was a response to the prior player engagement with the time travel scenario, and in particular their interest in the rescued woman. The decision to go and look for the niece was made by the players, based on their desire to have their PCs ingratiate themselves with the Baron, and on their interest in the connection to the woman they had rescued in the past. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Through a series of adventures the PCs saved the niece from Kas and brought her back to the city. As an adventure this was fairly standard site exploration, but the inclusion of Kas was in response to the PCs' prior discovery of the Sword of Kas, and the fact that one of the PCs is something of a Vecna affiliate. In their negotiation with Kasn for the life of the niece, the PCs learned the (GM-authored) fact that he had been trapped in a coffin by the rescued grandmother; the PCs worked out that this grandmother was, like the Baron's niece, probably a necromancer, and negotiated a deal with Kas whereby they would track her down on his behalf, and let him know when they found her. Mechanically, these negotiations were resolved via free roleplaying; the outcome was therefore jointly authored by the GM and players - in effect, I mostly "said yes" to what they wanted - a promise to Kas in exchange for the life of the niece - but there was an element of "yes, but" - they had to swear oaths to Kas that they otherwise would have preferred not to swear. Kas would have let them leave without so swearing if they had handed over the niece, but the PCs (as chosen by their players) wouldn't go back on their promise to the Baron to return her to him. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The PCs returned the niece to her uncle. They also reported to him that they had learned that she was a necromancer, and that they felt she should suffer some consequence for this. Via either simple skill check, or skill challenge (I can't now remember) the players got to impose upon the fiction their desire that the baron agreed to this. (In the fiction, for various reasons I haven't elaborated, he has become too politically dependent upon the PCs to refuse them on this matter.) </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The niece, learning of this, flees her uncle's palace, killing several handmaidens and guards in the process. (That is all GM-authored.) The players decide to have their PCs chase her. I frame the chase scene - she is escaping down the river behind the palace, on a boat. The players decide, for various reasons to do with both morality and expedience, that their PCs will kill her rather than try to capture here. Which, being 5 against 1, they do. When they return to the Baron to tell him what has happened, I have the player of the PC's leader - who is doing the talking - make a Diplomacy check. He fails. I narrate that the Baron collapses in horror and nervous shock. (I think there were then more checks, including a Heal check, used to resolve the situation. The upshot was that the Baron was ailing but conscious, the PCs remained in his good graces, and didn't lose any political standing in the town.)</li> </ul>That's an attempt at a description of play with reference to player/GM authorship dynamics. It's incomplete, partly due to brevity and partly due to my failing memory a year or more later.The authorial role of the GM in what I've described is important, and probably larger than in       [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION]'s game. But it was the players who chose to build up political standing in the town (they didn't have to - as paragon level heroes they could easily have treated the town as beneath their notice), and hence to take appropriate steps to do so. I led them into the hunt for the niece via a fairly obvious play upon an earlier event in which they had been invested (the rescue, in the past, of the grandmother as a young woman). But they were the ones who chose to negotiate with Kas rather than fight him. They were the ones who decided to make an ally of him and thereby, in effect, an enemy of the woman they had rescued in the past. They were the ones who decided to push the Baron to hold his niece to account as a necromancer, thereby (fairly predictably) triggering her escape attempt. And they were the ones who chose to kill her, even though they knew that the Baron was already under emotional stress and would not take the news well. (Their hatred of necromancers goes very deep; they seemed far more sanguine about Kas's vampirism.)If the players had not chosen to have their PCs hunt down the niece, I suspect I would have brought her and Kas into the picture some other way, but it might all have turned out quite differently. (I certainly had no anticipation that the players would decide to have their PCs ally with Kas, and in other circumstances they might not have.) Had the players not chosen to have their PCs kill the niece; or had the Diplomacy check upon telling him the news been a success; then events with the Baron may have been different too.There are no GM-authored "critical goals" here, and hence no concerns about the PCs "skipping" them. I am doing my best to use my authorship to make the players make choices that they care about, in virtue of their investment in the situation; and not because they just want to see how things turn out (in which case tossing a coin would do as well as making a choice) but because they (the players, not just the PCs) care that things turn out one way rather than another.</blockquote>

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