I'm just saying that while Joshua is the more charming (mechanically) his view is rarely the view of the party

and he doesn't feel entitled to force them to see things his way because that would be tyranny.

On my availability:

I got the job. Today I really need to do some pre-job errands. I will post today (I've almost never skipped a day), but it'll probably be toward late afternoon or evening.

Once my job starts, I'm hoping that I will still be able to post daily, but I probably won't be able to post many times in a day, like I have at times.

Congratulations! Jobs are hard to come by.

I second that emotion. Congratulations North Wind.

I don't know about that. I've played him with a very strong friendship focus. His devotion to those he thinks of as friends has been largely his counterpoint to the baser tendencies of his make-up. What you suggest here turns that on its head, and really doesn't fit the reality of his past relationships.

It's a good point though, that without this I have to find some other way to balance his alignment. I hadn't thought of that.


That's not a way I'd considered it, but you do have a point. What you describe as a really successful formula has been quite frustrating for me, much of the time. It's interesting to hear Gordon say the party tends to agree with Morlan most of the time rather than with Joshua. I hadn't got that feeling at all. I've felt that I have had to continually coax and fight to keep this party going, and that others were getting to resent those efforts.

This change is largely an attempt to find a way for Morlan to be less pushy with the other party members, both to respond to their dissatisfaction and to make the game feel less like cat-herding for me. It is not intended to have unpleasant "revenge-like" consequences for them.


I'm not sure what dynamic you mean here. I can't see myself becoming a back-seat player in this game. I do hope to be less of a party spokesman and more of a Morlan spokesman, allowing the rest of the party to speak for themselves more. I think disloyalty is heading too far in the other direction. I was going for a reduction in loyalty, and hoping to explore a bit of personal inner conflict between his new belief (let 'em get on with it regardless of the consequences) and his old feelings of caring about his friends (and jumping in in an attempt to save them from themselves). I hadn't seen it as being the cause of party conflict; in fact quite the contrary. I hoped it would reduce the current level of party conflict.

I have a doubt now, because of your reaction. Some of what you say hits close to the mark, and I wonder whether I might have misinterpreted how the other players are feeling about Morlan and his behaviour. I wouldn't want to fix it if it isn't broken, but I had thought because of their reactions in the game (and out of it) that it was a bit broken and needed a bit of fixing.

Nothing is set in stone. I am happy to hear opinions from others and adapt the plan as necessary.

It seems to me that whenever we propose two radically different directions it is because Morlan and Joshua disagree

and it seems that the path the rest of the group think is the sensible one is usually Morlan's

I don't resent that because Joshua is pragmatic, not sensible.

To clarify this bit, I didn't mean to say that Morlan has been superficial in his relationships, but that being raised as an aristocrat he's always been surrounded by sycophants. Extrapolating out from this previous experience, it's easy to understand his developing a (presumably incorrect) suspicion that his current party mates don't care as much about him as they might claim.

I don't think the belief that we're all ultimately alone is at odds with his experiences. We've seen, what? Three months of his life?

It's been a hell of a three months too.

I do treat the first 180 years of his history in a diffeent light to the past three months, certainly. That was really his childhood, his adolescence and the foundation for the man he is. The past three months has been his adulthood, his experience of 'real life', and it has been a roller-coaster ride. He has been battered by emotions and experiences and his personality is very much in flux as he strives to make sense of it all and determine who he really is.

That is why I resisted coming into this game with beliefs already in place, preferring for his beliefs to grow organically out of the game. This is part of my attempt to do just that.

I know I don't post often enough to take advantage of even close to every character moment, but I've always tried to play Dunn as very warm toward Morlan, to the point of being myopic about Morlan so Dunn can justify his feelings for someone who's life philosophy so radically differs. Dunn plays pranks in a spirit of mischievious affection, not trying to goad. Even such phrases as "Let's do whatever Morlan thought was a bad idea" is an indicator of the depth of feeling Dunn has for Morlan. I'm thinking I have not been nearly as clear as I thought I was.

I'm not trying to stop your idea. It will be interesting to see how Dunn takes his buddy's emotional distance, particularly if it means stretching to its limits Dunn's half-willful blindness to Morlan's occasional self-advancing or ruthless actions. That Fated pin does more to shake Dunn's worldview than all the plane-hopping does.

I don't recall the exact context of Morlan leaving to begin his grisly exploration of Delhumide (you mean the part where Morlan was looking for Ark, right?), but I think the plan was to go as stealthily as possible, right? Dunn's about as stealthy as a goat, so volunteering to go would have been volunteering to get Morlan and himself killed. It wasn't realistic to say we could go out in a mass and start hacking demons left and right. We aren't so martial a party as that.

We've got a lot of different expectations in this group, from what we should be doing and why we should be doing it in-game, to how often we should be posting, to what makes a realistic/acceptable group dynamic, and these different expectations have rubbed wrong here and there. I just don't want us, as players, to boil up a mess of drama and misunderstandings and hurt feelings. I don't want the game to get ugly, but more than that, I don't want us, the players, to grow bitter toward each other over something so minor as a game. To what degree are real-world feelings leading to in-game consequences, and vice-versa?

I have to wonder what would have happened if our other sneaker had gone to find Ark...

I have to imagine that the situation would not have looked identical to him.