This paper focuses on the design of tasks that situate teachers in the work of mathematics teaching. We examine a simple, yet fundamental feature of pedagogical content knowledge tasks: the extent to which pedagogical warrants are necessitated by the pedagogical context. We argue that this feature has implications for the design of tasks, as well as implications for understanding how pedagogical content knowledge is used to reason about these tasks. To develop this argument, we use representative cases of interviews of teachers and mathematicians to analyze how the pedagogical context of the tasks shaped opportunities for eliciting pedagogical content knowledge.