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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JamesonCourage" data-source="post: 6115928" data-attributes="member: 6668292">Which kinda amazes me, but okay. I can accept that.Then you need to give the ability to frame things to the players. Not just ask permission, or give you implicit cues, but actually frame things. Otherwise, they cannot act until you frame things. Which, by the way, I am okay with groups playing this way. But it does not strike me as your style of GMing in any strong sense. Yes, you've had a paladin say "but she made me not a frog" and it was true. So, it's not absent from your game. But that's not scene framing. Again, that depends on the context of the siege. I had just established that.And, of course, as soon as the GM describes the nomads / refugees / mercenaries, there's stuff for the players to leverage. But Hussar doesn't want to deal with it. Yes, to skip the desert because "nothing can be too terribly relevant" to his goals. I'm disputing this.This same wait occurs with the desert encounter. The player summons the centipede, the GM quickly narrates crossing the desert until they see the nomads / refugees / mercenaries, with some shouting out to them.Neither the siege nor the nomad encounter is framed by the players, other than it came up on the way to their goal. They did not act in a way that set the siege up; no, the GM just dropped it in front of them, like the desert encounter. Both are in response to the player decision to cross the desert to get to the city, and both can be used as "leverage" by the players. And yet, to Hussar, the siege is okay, but the desert encounter isn't. And that's why I'm still struggling to understand his wants.It's not about him needing to encounter something in the desert. No, it's about Hussar's assertion that nothing can be relevant in the desert before he even interacts with it. I don't mind nothing going on in the desert, and the PCs just skipping it. I do not think, however, that the statement that "nothing too terribly relevant" can happen in the desert somehow follows. That doesn't make sense.Okay, true. But that's not what I'm addressing, even if you keep bringing it around to this. I'm talking about Hussar's claim that "nothing can be too terribly relevant" to his goals in the desert. And I bring it up because that's just untrue, as it depends entirely on context.But, don't we need to know the challenge first? That's what I'm objecting to. Hussar doesn't know what's going on in the desert before he judges it as boring and irrelevant. I mean, what does he expect it to be? Random encounters the whole way? If he does, why is he playing with someone who doesn't fit his style by such a huge degree?No, I feel like Hussar is saying "nothing can be relevant in the desert (because he has said that) so I don't want to deal with it." Which is fine, except that stuff can be relevant in the desert. Yet, he doesn't want to deal with it. And thus I'm curious about his reasoning.Hussar has said in this thread that the siege is a little contrived, that he'd ignore and walk past the nomads / refugees / mercenaries, and that he has no interest in the Vecna tomb. He may not have posted in this thread (about surprising the GM), but I think he'd have been irritated.I suppose because the GM needs to have some idea what their player wants, without being told at each point as the game progresses. And Hussar has made it very hard to get an idea of what is acceptable and what's not.Not to Hussar. He'd walk past them. He's not interested in that type of game. But, he's tentatively okay with the siege, even if it's a little contrived. And I can't figure out why, yet.Well, I don't know what his GM did. But, I do know that in this conversation, he doesn't accept the nomads / refugees / mercenaries, but he does accept the siege. And I haven't heard the difference yet.This isn't even what's happening in Hussar's desert complaint. They players have their own reasons for heading to the city, based on the rest of the game thus far. They head to the city. The GM interjects a relevant complication (a siege, the nomads / refugees / mercenaries, etc.), giving it context. The players deal with the complications, "leverage" it with mechanics, and continue play towards their goal.This is the same as yours in that, the Baron didn't exist until introduced, and neither did the niece. Nor did anything, really, until you introduced it to the players. But, hopefully, when you introduce things, they're set up in a relevant way. This is what I'm saying can happen in the desert, but this doesn't seem good enough to Hussar. Without context, he rejects all encounters as not being "too terribly relevant" to his goals. But the siege is acceptable, if a bit contrived. And for the life of me, I can't figure out the difference.Well, the desert encounter might be the consequences of the players' decision to use Plane Shift and then crossing the desert. Or, like your Kas example, it might just be fun. It can be a number of things. But "relevant" (to player goals) is something that it undoubtedly can be, and Hussar's statement that "nothing [in the desert] can be too terribly relevant [to my goals]" is just untrue. And that's what I'm taking issue with. As always, play what you like <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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