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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6117986" data-attributes="member: 42582">This has been answered - the place to introduce complications is in the city, at the point at which they interact directly with the players' immediate goal, and provide both threat and oppportunity.Well, yes, we could just declare the campaign resolved and all go home, or go out to the movies. But presumably the players want to play an RPG - just not one that involves exploring a desert.The answer lies in the players' evinced preferences. If the players have made it clear they want to get to the city, and if there is nothing about the city that makes it hard to make things interesting there, and if there is nothing about the desert that is essential to framing the city, then why would the GM nevertheless insist on trying to run encounters in the desert? What is the GM trying to achieve, or to prove, by doing that? That s/he can entertain Hussar in spite of himself? Fine, go for it, but don't complain if it backfires!You keep coming back to the role of the GM in making things entertaining. Whereas that is not what we're talking about. The siege could be narrated in the dullest way imaginable, but it is still there, in the fiction, waiting for the players to leverage it. The GM doesn't need to make it engaging - it is engaging in virtue of being a tool that the players can directly leverage in pursuit of their goal.To put it another way, the players don't need the GM to make it entertaining. They can create their own entertainment out of it. All the GM has to do is not actively rain on their parade.You say this as if it is nothing. The city is the setting wherein the goal is located. The players are committed to doing something in the city, presumably (given Hussar's evident enthusiasm for the siege) something that involves interacting with the city, treating the city as both chalenge and resource.How do you know? This is like your characterisation upthread of the goal as a McGuffin? How do you know?But even if the city is just a plot device, it is still a city - an urban location that is, by definition, replete with NPCs, and all the opportunities for good and bad things that NPCs bring with them. It's very different from a deset. Apart from anything else, it creates much richer fictional positioning for the PCs, and hence much richer opportunities for the players.There are a range of different approaches to prep. For my own part, I can't remember the last time I had trouble knowing what would engage my players. If they're not interested in deserts, they tend to make that pretty clear.</blockquote>

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