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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6123487" data-attributes="member: 42582">Everything being equal, the PCs want a quiet life with no headaches.The players, though, want their PCs to encounter headaches, because that's what makes for a fun game.The key to the sort of GMing that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] and I are describing is identifying headaches (challenges, complications, . . .) that have player buy in, in virtue of their "story proximity" to known player goals.As I've said multiple times upthread, if you think you can pull this off, more strength to your arm. To me, it seems like an attempt at cleverness with little underlying rationale.The siege is easy to narrate, it's connection to the city is plain, it's existence in the fiction as a possible point of engagement for and leverage by the players unequivocal.The refugees and nomads, on the other hand, almost certainly require more narration from the GM to establish their place in the fiction and the stakes (are they liberators? captors? etc), and more investigation by the PCs (ie reactive play, seeking more backstory from the GM, rather than active play actually engaging and transforming the situation). If the players (and their PCs) already knew about the siege, and about nomads helping the refugees, it might be different - but that was not the case in the episode of play that Hussar described. If one of the PCs was an Unearthed Arcana-style barbarian with a class ability to leverage wild hordes, things might be different too - but there's been no indication from Hussar that that was the case in his group.This is mostly a red herring. It's about fictional positioning, not geography. The fictional positioning of the siege in relation to the city, and the players goals, becomes clear from the moment the GM decribes it. For the nomads and the refugees, this is not the case (for the reasons I've just given).</blockquote>

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