Annotated 47-39
Ah, I’d forgotten that the guards were never going to have Lia and Chrissie arrested over this. Makes sense. It’s not worth the hassle to run in two people who show no sign of being dangerous. Most people are inclined to do what is easiest, which can work in your favor, sometimes.
(I’m not gonna tag Fred and Jeff or…Barry here, described in the script as “Booth Guy.” Even we have our limits. Sometimes I think about rewriting a scene to have fewer character names in the dialogue, just so nobody starts thinking of the wrong characters as important…but there are some places, like here, where avoiding names would be much more awkward than including them.)
John handles so much in this chapter with skill and grace, but I’m particularly fond of how realistic his egg-splotches look. Seriously, that is a lot harder to get right than you would think!
FB: Would you like some salt with that egg?
Hah….as a DM, I relate to the ‘trying to avoid making people think this is more important than it is’. Or, alternately ‘OK, that’s important, but…totally not for the reason you think’.
(Of course, in a TTRPG, that’s AKA ‘an accidental sidequest’.)
Ohhhh yeah … first time I DM’ed, I tried to lay out the scenery through which the group was traveling: “Big mountains, some trees hugging the slopes, here and there a mountain goat, and you hear an eagle cry somewhere above”
…the group insisted on finding that eagle, following it to its nest, and …then what? No idea. They were just traveling through to another destination, but they spent a bit over a day in-game time chasing that stupid eagle. I moved its nest to a place where you can’t really climb, had it peck at the party a few times and then fly off.
Later in the same adventure, they completely failed to get the really quite-obvious hints they were *meant* to get, accidentally managed to hold the Bad Guy’s son hostage (before they knew who he was), and ended the whole thing without figuring out what was even going on.
Some of that was probably my fault and could have been prevented, but some of it was also due to the fact that I had spent 5 years in a group obsessed with story and world-building, and the group I was DM’ing just wanted to collect XP, and was *very* pragmatic about it.