Here’s the full conversation that happened between the panels of this week’s page:
Guy lifted his eyes from his character sheet the moment he heard her say “secured for the night”.
“Wait, wait.” This was a crazy idea, Rotem should know better than that. “That’s crazy talk, we can’t stay here for the night.”
Rotem turned to him, and he could see in her expression that she not only thought this was a good idea, she was committed. She felt passionate about something. Maybe that NPC, what’s her name? Rotem likes to play the protective type. Well, good for her, but he was just as passionate on the subject of not dying on the first night of the adventure.
This can quickly become an actual argument between them, if not defused.
“Actually,” He coughed, and leaned forward, switching to his Mac voice, “That’s crazy talk.” He said again – but this time, it wasn’t a challenge, it was roleplay.
She stared at him.
He stared at her.
It was quite clear she wasn’t sold on the idea of just roleplaying it; she cared too much about whatever it was she was passionate about. She needed a reason to be passionate about something else.
“Rotem,” he switched back to his regular voice, “I had a thought. Are you interested in maybe having a bit of a leadership crisis here?”
Rotem’s eyes lit up. The whole point of playing Muna, for her, was going through “the journey of a leader”, dealing with various hardships along the way. She was looking for obstacles, so she could have Muna overcome them.
“Because I’ll tell you right now,” he continued, quite pleased with himself for coming up with this angle, “Mac is really not into staying here for the night, he’s worried the forest is too dangerous. And also, he’s into pushing forward on the Crystal lead.”
Rotem turned to look at her character sheet, probably going over her Hindrances, Guy thought to himself. “We can make a thing out of it.” She said and turned to Lily. “You think the same?”
Lily shrugged. “I’m always propelling* if I can. So yeah, let’s go back to the village.”
Rotem nodded. “Okay, let’s argue then!” She seemed excited – finally a chance to fail at leadership, yay!
Guy leaned back into his Mac posture. Figuring good drama requires no holding back, he decided to start by targeting the NPC Muna cared about. “This woman gave us nothing but superstitions,” he groaned, “we need some facts.”
*From a wonderful title in the D&D 3.5 DMG, ‘Propelling the Game Forward’, now a common verb in our gaming groups.
