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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6115613" data-attributes="member: 6681948">OK, first the trip through the desert arises only because the players have chosen to leverage the city.  They could instead choose to stay where they are, but their goals are presumably better served by whatever action they wish to carry out in the city.  Getting through the desert is a challenge the PC's must accomplish to access the city they have chosen to leverage.  Just like, say, getting to the siege leaers requires getting past the initial line of soldiers.   [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] attempted to use the centipede as a means to address the challenge of crossing the desert.  The GM adjudicated the success or failure of that effort.  Plenty of reasons that the centipede might assist in the crossing, but would not resolve, eliminate or circumvent, the desert were provided.  Similarly, a player might say "I use my Intimidate skill to impose my will upon the entire besieging force to depart".  That does not mean the PC is so very intimidating that the besieging force's morale shatters and they flee in disarray into the desert.  No, not even if he rolls a '20'.  Not eve, in my opinion, if he glares at the GM and intones "Say yes or roll the dice".  The GM "insisting in resolving the scene in a more detailed fashion" seems, to me, perfectly reasonable."We can make the process tedious and meaningless" does not mean "the process will be made tedious and meaningless".  I don't believe anyone objects to a table style where his aproach is not used.  At the same time, if the rules show that riding the centipede would require a DC 20 Ride check to remain mounted for 2 minutes, and the best Ride check in the group is +5, I think the GM is within his rights to rule that the players' solution is not viable.  Riding the centipede is simply not reliable.  This is no different from the players deciding to scale the city walls, and having it pointed out that a +3 Climb Check will not allow the PC group to readily scale the sheer city walls."I do not like this challenge so we should autosucceed" is certainly one way to run a game.  I do not agree that it is mandatory, nor that it is the best way to run the game.Just as the desert can be set up as a tedious, irrelevant roadblock, and just as many of us feel that the GM who places a desert would ensure that the desert includes ineresting and relevant encounters.  No matter how interesting interactions with the soldiers, commanders, siege engines etc. may be, if the ultimate purpose of interacting with them is simply to gain access to the city, then those encounters, interactions and challenges are no more, and no less, relevant than the encounters in the desert which are resolved in order to permit the players to achieve their goal of entry into the city.  They could be designed to have more, or less, relevance once the PC's have entered the city.  This is true of both siege and desert.  The players must wait for the GM to narrate the discovery of the siege.  They must then engage the soldiers.  Perhaps that front line of spearcarriers greets them with "You shall not pass.  We were hired to prevent anyone from passing.  That is our sole purpose.  When the siege is ended, we will take our payment and leave.  We have no personality, backstory or future existence beyond our role as Spearcarriers # 1 - 3,627.  This is our purpose.  It is all we are.  Begone, or we shall stick our pointy sticks in you."  By the way, how did the players even find out about the city, and whatever valuable objective awaits within, in the first place?I am uncertain how the goal in the city, whatever it may have been, was set.  However, Hussar had been quite clear that this was the goal on which the players were focused.  However it was set, this was a "critical goal" to the players.  Can they accomplish it without entering the city?  If not, then they must resolve whatever challenges stand between them and the city.  They could, as at least one poster has noted, look at the desert, say "no way!" and abandon their goal of accessing whatever it is they want in the city.  But they cannot achieve their goal in the city without getting to the city, and that requires passing through the desert.  Their in-game resources determine their options for travel through the desert, and their efforts to leverage those resources to that goal are the actions the GM must adjudicate.<ul style="margin-left: 20px"> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"></li> </ul> So far, so good.  The city, whatever was rumoured to lay within and the desert between us and it were GM-authored.  The players' choice to travel to the city was their own - they wanted to do something which we don't know what it is in the city.  Therefore, they chose to travel to the city.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"></li> </ul> <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"></li> </ul>The decision to travel to the city was player-authored.  Everything else was GM authored.  I suppose we could resolve the travel across the desert on a centipede with a skill challenge (although this having been 3e, I don't believe this would have been an option in the specific game in question), but that would require rolling such things as Use Rope, Animal Handling and Ride checks.  It seems reasonable that the resolution of the skill challenge would set the time required to cross the desert, and the longer that takes, the more food and water would reasonably be consumed.  How fortunate that 4e brought us such a clearly superior replacement for the tedium of onride checks, use rope checks, animal handling checks, tracking consumption offood and water, etc.[lost the bullet - oh welll]So you had the players exploring an unknown area (which could be a desert) in search of a desired goal (which could be a niece or a city).  Within this, you set relevant encounters tied in to the interests of the players  which were linked to PC backgrounds and prior events in the campaign.  But [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] assumes his GM will do none of these things in their desert explorations.  With no context, selecting relevant desert encounters is tough, but I see no reason that a rival faction to one favoured by the PC's (Kas vs Vecna), a character linked to a prized possession (Kas and the Sword of Kas), an old enemy or an old friend, or any number of other matters that link to past experiences and aspects of the PC's could not be integrated into the desert encounters, to occur during the efforts to travel to the city.  By the same token, you could have made every encounter between the PC's an locating the niece a random wilderness monster.  At the outset of the "series of adventures", what prevents me glaring across the table and saying "Our goal is rescue of the niece.  Story Now!  I summon a giant centipede for us to ride directly to the location of the kidnapped niece - sue, it's not perfect, but it's a plot coupon to avoid the doubtless tedious intervening encounters you have set and GET TO THE ACTION.  Say Yes or Roll the Dice!!"  OK, so let us assume the negotiations with Kas and rescue of the niece were our "goal within the city".  We negotiated, swore our oaths, got the niece, you tossed out this unesired complication she is a necromancer, back we go to the Baron.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"></li> </ul>Let us assume that the players previously rejected every adventure hook offered which would enable them to gain that political clout.  Would they still have it, or did they have to accomplish things to obtain it?  I'm removing the chase scene, as it (like the above) consists only of the players reacting to what the GM dropped in their path.  A Necromancer niece (they could not choose to leverage that into consequences until it was presented by the GM), chasing the niece (possible only when the GM plopped her escape down), the boat chase (the PC's can't leverage the boats until the GM narrates them and the river), etc.In other (and fewer) words, I once again do not see the huge difference you seem to perceive between pemerton's game and a standard & game, deftly planned and run by an experienced GM and tailored to the players and their characters.  Nor do I see why the journey through the desert could not have been planned and executed in an equally meaningful and relevant manner.  Rather than just rolling up a Wandering Siege on the Random Complications table.On to your summaryAgain, tough to assess [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s game without the context.  However, perhaps we may assume the players decided on the goals which lead them to wish to travel to the distant city, across the desert, to fulfill some broader goal.  In an AP, I assume that this goal would be consistent with the goals and motivations of the PC's, broadly set in advance for party cohesion as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has suggested in prior posts, and as many AP's seek to do now.  Their goals have lead them to want something in the city, so they need to get there, led into the desert by that desire.  They will choose how to react to events in the desert (fight, negotiate with, ignore or flee from a group of nomads, or mercenaries, or refugees, or what have you).  They will choose where to proceed after resolving matters in the city.  Maybe they will even choose to forego the trip to the city at all, or delay it until they can obtain resources needed to cross the desert, just as your players could have chosen not to rescue the niece, or to maintain the secret of her necromancy, or to blackmail her with that secet, or what have you.  But those choices did not exist until you dropped the niece in their path, and later until you both decided and dropped the clues that she was a necromancer.If her escape attempt was so predicatable, why were no efforts made to prevent it?  If the players choose to ignore the desert and the city, presumably any important elements of the desert encounters (like Kas and the niece) could later arise in some other manner.  The players' actions, and their successes or failures, would also dictate the outcomes.No "critical goals"?  Then why will the niece and Kas show up later?I think one difference is the AP.  If the GM is using a published resource, he has more of an incentive to keep the plot on the rails.  However, nothing prevents the GM playing out the story differently because the players take unexpected actions, even to the extreme of abandoning the story (and the AP) to seek different adventures.  But I can certainly see an AP suggesting "if the players do not seek out the kidnapped niece, here are some other ways she and Kas can be introduced to allow them to play their inevitable roles in the storyline" - and the simple fact you say they would show up later suggests a certain inevitability - and contemplating the possibility they will negotiate with (or battle, or evade) Kas, and kill the niece (or capture her, or have her escape, or never reveal her necomancy) as well as successes or failures in subsequent interaction with the Baron.  However, given the limitations of a published AP, I suspect most will re-rail the plot so the next three books reamain plausible, not create a separate series of "Pats 7, 8  and 9" for each permutation and combination.  You only have to pen the results of one combination of player choices and successes/failures, so you can't say what would happen had they chosen differently, or at least not too far forward, nor do you need to.Again, not seeing anything revolutionary in the above, nor any necessary huge deviation from [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s game, other than the fact that you know all the relevant context leading into the encounters and choices to be made.I note that the PC's "as paragon level heroes" could ignoe the town.  This implies that lower level characters could not.  At some level, the characters would possess the power and resources to ignore the desert, but it appears [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s group (and the AP assumed power level group) could not.</blockquote>

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