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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6118629" data-attributes="member: 6681948">I find your approach limited.  You decide "We wish to seek the blessing of the High Priest".  The GM tells you the High Priest resides some distance away.  Your response is that you must immediatey be fast forwarded to your audience with the High Priest.  Now, you are going to say no, some elements of getting to see the High Priest are fun, so we should play those out,  but others are just mind-numbing exploratory time and should be skipped.  So JamesonCourage and I are left scratching our heads wondering which elements of achieving your goal to secure the blessing of the High Priest are, in your view, worthy of play and which are not.  If the goal is to secure the blessing of the High Priest who resides in a temple in a city across the desert, achievement of your goal seems to require achieving several smaller objectives, including crossing the desert, entering the city, locating the temple, securing an audience with the High Priest and persuading him to give you his blessing.At any stage of these proceedings, complications could arise.  There are dangers in the desert, walls around the city, wining streets through which to get to the temple, temple functionaries to persuade you are worthy of an audience, and the High Priest himself to convince.  To me, all of those complications flow organically from your set goal of securing the blessing of the high priest.  By setting that overall goal, you have opened up all of these complications.  But you are only willing to consider some as valid, with the diferentiating factor being unclear.By the same token,  If the GM sets up the desert in such a way that it has zero relevance, then that's just poor GMing.  If the GM is solely using the desert to roadblock then, sure, that's crap GMing, same as forcing the players to interact with the siege. Exploring the deset is not essential.  But you are rejecting my explicit statement that I do not want to discuss "exploring the desert", aren't you?  You must cross the desert.  You don't have to interact with it?  Maybe, maybe not.  If your car breaks down (a complication) you must now walk - you interact with the desert.  If the highway is unergoing repairs, you must take another route - an interaction with the desert.  Now, it is more reasonable to say you interact with things in the desert, just as it is more reasonable to say you interact with things in the city.  To get to the city, you must pass through the desert.  You could choose to go a different city - but you will not fin the Las Vegas strip in a different city.  It is in Las Vegas.If nothing of note will happen in the desert, then narrate away the trip through the desert.  If the only thing of interest in the city is the temple, then narrate that the party arrives, finds an inn and in the morning goes to the temple.  If there is a Djinn-Efreet skirmish in the desert, then that is where we move out of narration.It seems like there are two different issues here.  The first is whether, and to what extent, it is OK to put extraneous encounters in the players' path.  Here, I think we simply prefer a different play style.  You want to get straight to the persuasion of the High Priest, where I'm good with having other matters come up along the way.  Simple enough - we play different games.  While I do not agree that your way is to be preferred, or that you have any right to call a GM who prefers a different approach a "bad GM" due to having a different preference, at the core I can at least understand you want the game to progress in a straight line to the next step of your goal, with no interruptions or delays along the way.But then we got the siege.  The siege strikes me as an interruption or delay along the way.  You said "I want to get to the city and pursue my goals right now".  Dropping a siege in your way, or locked gates and an officious guard, or what have you, is not, to me, bad GMing, any more than nomads or refugees in the desert, or anything else in the desert, are.  But, for some reason, the siege is viewed as an acceptable interruption or delay along the way, unlike every other possibility.What if it's not a siege?  Its a blockade - the force is not surrounding the city walls in close range - they are 50 miles out, in a series of encampments, blocking all travellers from going to (or departing from) the city.  50 miles puts them in the desert, so now they are a desert encounter.  Their actions seem akin to the siege.  Good encounter or bad encounter?  I don't know because I cannot fathom what differentiates it from any other desert encounter (which cannot possibly be relevant, you tell me) or from the siege (which is highly relevant, and at least an acceptable encounter).  So here we sit, me and Schrodinger's army, waiting to see if Hussar "gets shirty" when his desert journey is interrupted by this blockading force.You can skip the whole goal if you want to.  Now the city and the temple are irrelevant.  "Screw this" says my character "I will cease this endless journey and take a wife amongst the nomads, living out my days in peace and harmony in the desert".  Oh look - city, siege, temple and test all irrelevant.   But, if I want to take this test, dealing with the consequences of setting that goal becomes relevant - test, temple, city, siege, desert and all.I also want to write the grell and the city off as colour.  Is that also OK?  We're not debating whether something that is just colour should be written off as colour.  I'm not telling you that the GM should insist on playing out weeks of desert travel in painful detail.  I am saying that you have no way of knowing, at the outset, that the encounters in the desert are irrelevant, that they are boring (or at least more boring than the city/temple encounters - maybe you are bored by fantasy gaming in general, or by social interaction, or by puzzles, or by tactical combat) or that drudgery is your fate if you cannot escape the GM's next words by cutting the desert out.  That is, you do not know, at the outset of the travel, that the desert is "just colour".  If it is, the GM should treat it as such without needing your instructions or permission to do so.  If it is not, he should not. Yes, we must always assume the worst of the GM and the best of the players.  Let's say you have the option presented of taking this Test at the Temple or just going straight back home.  A Fiendish being defeated in combat bows, and says "Spare my life, oh mighty one, and I shall return you whence you came - you need not stay on these blasted plains, nor undergo this dangerous test - here, Mighty One, take this scroll of Plane Shift, return to your home, and spare my life and leave me in mine!"  So, since your goal was to get out of this wasteland you take the scroll (kill or free the fiend) and Plane Shift back home.  Should you now demand that, since you skipped the test, you should have all the benefits and/or detriments of completing the test, or did you forego those benefits in deciding to forego the test?  I say the latter.  I also say subsequent encounters have not become more difficult - you have become less prepared.  If you lose a PC or two, and don't go back to base to recruit more party members, then I suspect subsequent encounters will pose a greater challenge.  That result flows directly from your decisions - that the encounters are "more difficult" is on you.  Making them easier to compensate for your choices robs those choices of any meaning.Now, if the intent is that you will have certain resources gained in the desert when you arrive at the city, and I rely on you digging 10' down in the sand throughout your journey to find the buried treasure, I find that "bad GMing".  If, on the other hand, a band of nomads or refugees crosses your path, and calls out to you, but you choose to ignore them, then I do not think it is bad GMing that you lack any resources they may have shared.  You chose not to encounter them.Why do you assume you won't just skip it again?  Once you meet your goal at the city,  now you will suddenly be interested in interacting with other NPC's?  Don't you have any new goals to pursue?  And the question has been how you can judge the desert as boring and irrelevant sight unseen, and demand the GM just ignore the rules and let you skip it with resources you don't have since, after all, if you  had the resources you could just skip it.  While we're at it, if I were 25th level with a Spell of Omniscience, I could easily know what the  Test of the Smoking Eye entails and easily accomplish it, so how about we just take that as given as well.OK, let's slap down a real gaming example.  This is a Supers game.  For several months, the players have had an NPC on the team.  One of the PC's is depressed - he accidentally hospitalized a fellow (and he's one of those boy scout Supers - he's playing out a real sense of guilt).  For some reason, that NPC super approaches him and tries to talk him out of his depression and guilt.  We're handing a note book back and forth, the player is chatting in a side conversation when he looks at the book and goes dead silent, his eyes wide.  [spoiler]The NPC has just unmasked, and it is his brother, an NPC who has appeared as a non-Super on many prior occasions.[/spoiler]Complete surprise to the player (not to another player, actually, who had ferreted out the secret some time ago).  Should he have walked out?If the GM uses the backstory to screw with the player, expect them to work to remove those elements.  But, as Celebrim points out, if the GM uses those elements to enrich the game, adding challenges and rewards, benefits and detriments, then these become positive, rather than negative, aspects.  For myself, I often write elements in that I expect will work to the character's detriment.  That is part of the enjoyment.  A Scottish berserker, for example, from a remote location, believes every possible old wives' tale, normally mixing them up.  "Och, 'tis a pixie - let's pull his wings off and make him take us to his pot of gold".  I believe I note earlier his encounter with an Umber Hulk.  "How am I attacking it?  I look it straight in the eyes, as any TRUE warrior would, so he can see I have no fear of him!"I would probably have been disappointed if he made the saving throw I was expecting would not be offered (he played true and rolled a 1).  I would have been equally disappointed if the GM had simply killed off the character (or the group as a whole) because the PC had a personality which included strengths and weaknesses, and adhered to it when it disadvantaged him, not just when it suited him.  The GM did not disappoint.  Funny thing, as I consider - he also plays that Super noted above.I would call killing off a character "screwing with it".  It sure changes the character.  Do you force the players' survival and success, or is there risk in combat?Agreed - and this applies to most of this thread.  I trust the GM not to screw over my character when he messes with my character.  I trust him to present interesting, entertaining challenges.  I trust that the game is going somewhere, even if I can't see it right now.  And, as I think about it, if that trust is lost, I'm not interested in playing with that GM any more.Another Supers example.  The PC was a legacy character.  When I read the background, I noted, regarding his father, "so you didn't actually see the body".  The player acknowledged that his character had, in fact, not seen the body.  Never got around to bringing back Dear Old Dad - the player's schedule got erratic later.Last anecdote for the post - a Pulp game, in Hero system.  My character is a sort of Tarzan riff.  He is recently returned to civilization and has an uncle.  The character sheet notes him as a complication "DNPC or Hunted".  Why?  As I told the GM, he looks like the classic helpful relative, or the classic relative pretending to be helpful but really looking to take over your inheritance.  You decide.  I'm not sure what, or even whether, he has decided, but the game is young.</blockquote>

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