Inconvenience

This wasn't a thing when the game was being run thirty years ago, but nowadays you'll find yourself as a DM coming up against something call "story inconvenience."  This is described as something that happens during the campaign that fails to move the story ahead or engage the characters, largely because they are more interested in doing something specific and your choices as DM are getting in the way.

There is plenty of legitimacy for this perception.  If the DM has sufficiently whetted the players' appetites for an adventure resolution, and is now jacking the players around for no reason, in order to spin out the adventure to keep it from ending, that's a bad thing.  If the DM decides there are going to be three crevasses that need to be crossed, one after another, because three sounds more troublesome than two, that's a bad thing.  Any time players are forced to repeat actions or experiences without acknowledgement by the DM that something needs to be done to maintain momentum through the experience, there's a danger the players will feel "inconvenienced" rather than challenged.  I have seen, and often heard, of DMs who gain gratuitous pleasure from making players fight six or seven randomly generated wandering monster groups between every narrative advancement.  So yes, I get it.  A game narrative should not play like a shaggy dog story.

At the same time, it is a failing to think that an RPG should function like a constructed play, following the strict principles as laid out by Chekhov's gun.  Not every element of game play needs to be necessary.  There is no requirement that every gun needs to go off.  A play, or a film, is constructed in a bottle, where only the cast members of the story exist.  An RPG's narrative does not need to be resolved and wrapped up with a bow in 120 minutes.  Loose narrative threads in an RPG are a positive feature, not a bug, because they will allow the players to pursue other potential adventures without needing the reset button of a particular home base or quest-giver.  Situations that exist for their own sake can be fun, unexpected, terrifying or highly beneficial ~ and can insert themselves anywhere into the player's activities without being either boring or excessively time-consuming.

For no reason at all, once I interrupted a party's narrative adventure by dropping them through a gate into a completely different game world, with no connection whatsoever to the events that had been ongoing.  The players had to adapt to the new world and solve the puzzle of escaping it, while participating in two or three adventures along the way.  This went on for three months, about 12-13 sessions, before they were able to return to Earth, and then complete the tasks that had formerly concerned them.  No one was bored; no one considered the deviation unreasonable.  Shit just happens.  The game's momentum was maintained and the players enjoyed the change of pace.

But ... inconvenience arises if I ever did it again to the same players.  Once is fun.  Twice is sadism.  The cruelty does no lie in the form of the adventure, but in its repetition.

We should beware thinking that inconvenience is anything more than the identification of some DM's tactic that was simply a bad idea.  To generalize all "actions for their own sake" as inherently wrong, because they suspend the pre-determined story line, is to misunderstand the artistic foundation of RPG-design.  Some car-chases inserted into movies are bad.  Some car-chases are awesome.  The determining factor is not "all car chases in movies are bad," though some think so; but that "only good car chases should exist in films."

An inconvenience is whatever the players think is inconvenient.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with what actually happens, or how relevant it is to "story."  We should not suppose that by implementing Chekhov's gun restrictions on adventure-planning, that we will rid our games of bad moments.  Many, many people react to sitting through a Chekhov play as an "inconvenience."