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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6118258" data-attributes="member: 42582">Between the teleport and the city are probably a dozen or more unrination breaks, too, but we don't bother with them.There is a well-known playstyle in which pacing, at the table, is dictaed by the fictional geography. Hussar has made it very clear that that is no his preferred playstyle. If you are trying to understand or make sense of his preferences, it's no help to begin from assumptions about playstyle - like the importance to pacing of citional geography - that Hussar has expressly rejected!All I can say is that they are perfectly straightforward to me. And seem pretty clear to a number of other posters as well.What makes me take the city to be relevant to the players? Because the players are expressing their eagerness to get to the city. They are coming up with plans about how they will inflitrate the city. They are speculating about whom they might meet in the city, and what they might do when they meet them. They are saying things like "If we summon a huge arthropod then we can barrel through this desrt right fast and get to the real action in the city!"Huh? I'm not talking about a police interview or a cross-examination. I'm talking about working out what the players are entuhsed about, and what they want to pass over, by a combination of their words, their facial expressions, their deployment of player resources, etc.If a player says to the other players "Let's summon a huge centipede so we can get through this desert and on to the city," I don't need to worry about the nuances of the player's choice of words. I know that the players' goal is the city.Everything in your posts makes sense to me. Particularly the bit that I've quoted.************************And having another go at the more detailed questions.First, Hussar may know this because he knows his GM.Second, Hussar may not know this, but he may know his own preferences, and hence know that, whatever is in the desert, it is something that he doesn't care to spend play time on.I am using "explore" in the sense of "interact with as some element of the shared fiction for more than a few minutes of colour narration".I mentined upthread circumstances in which a good GM might cut straight to the temple. But given that Hussar has made it clear that he wants to get to the city, I might take that as a useful baseline.I and Hussar have pointed out, multiple times, that the siege - as a piece of the fiction narrated by the GM - is in and of itself a resource that players might use to engage the city and realise their goal there. Do you deny this? Do you not understand how this is so?If the former, then you have a very different approach to RPGing from me. In my game, if I (for instance) mention to the players that their PCs see a rock, a player can then say (in character) "OK, I pick it up and put it in my pocket." And if I mention a siege around the city that they are heading to, the players can say "OK, we scout around to ascertain the general disposition of forces and their leadership", as the first step in coming up with a plan to get what they want from the city.This is also the answer to the second point - the siege is a player resource. It is a piece of the fiction that the players can leverage. A desert does not have that character. Nomads might, but as I've asked both you and Jameson Courage - if you know your players want to get to the city, why would you both trying to get them excited about some nomads instead? Why not follow their lead? What is to be gained by pushing against them?The GM doesn't have to make the siege relevant to the players' goals. The players can do that. That's (mostly) the point!The siege is situation; and a good city is situation too. That's partially why "city adventures" have always been called out as a special category of adventure since the dawn of the hobby. A city is situation because it contains NPCs with goals opposed to those of the players and the PCs, which the players can engage in a range of different ways, and very proactively.The siege is not "between us and the city". From the point of view of game play the siege is part of the city - perhaps the most interesting part. It's part of what makes the city not just setting but a situation for the players to engage.And assuming that the temple is a building in the city, the siege is intimately connected to the temple, and from the point of view of play is a complication at the temple. Of course, as I mentioned above and upthread, if the temple is a dungeon beneath the city and the players are revved up for dungeon crawling, then the siege would be an irrelevant distraction much like the desert.</blockquote>

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