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Message: <blockquote data-quote="El Jefe" data-source="post: 3143271" data-attributes="member: 19990">ajanders - I would not dream of asking anyone to leave at this point, especially not Michael.  If anything, I'm just trying to give us all an opportunity to cool down and reconsider a few things.Without nitpicking this to death, I felt just the opposite about this.  In reading over the paragraph that you posted (the first sentence of which is quoted above), all you've done is restate some assumputions you (RA?  Zaeryl?  I really can't tell in this particular instance) made back during the encounter about the soldier's goals and motivation.  OoC, all I can really say is that you're reading the soldiers wrong, and that their actions make very good sense to me within the context of those goals and motivations.  I agree, if this had been a simple case of "There are these 6 people attacking us, and we have to deal with that", then those actions would have made no sense and the 3 soldiers would have done something completely different.The fact that Zaeryl's action wasn't triggered was purely an accident of the asymmetrical tactics of Zaeryl and the soldiers, and was neither an IC goal of the soldiers nor an OoC goal of mine.  The soldiers certainly didn't know that Zaeryl had a readied action, nor did they know what powers he had.  OoC, I thought the encounter would be more enjoyable for everyone if Zaeryl did not attack, but was resigned to just "playing it out" if he did (see previous posts on how I viewed Zaeryl).  It turned out to be a pleasant surprise for me that what I saw to be the logical response of the soldiers ended up delaying Zaeryl's attack through no plan of mine or theirs.The key point is at that time, the soldiers saw Zaeryl as an annoyance, not a threat, and saw the rest of the party as neither.  Between the effects of Michael's spell wearing off, Zaeryl's IC actions (which the soldiers misunderstood and misinterpreted), and Hulgyr's actions, Private Stander had an "Oh, Sugar!" moment, where he realized that he'd really screwed up.  But his screwup was in misunderstanding the threat to the three, not in anything that he did while he was operating under that faulty understanding.Well, in my perception, one led to the other.  It's not so much a matter of morals as of assumptions.  Given certain assumptions, Zaeryl's actions were the "right" ones to take, and given certain other actions, Michael's were.  What happened here was that all the chickens that had flown the coop during the "ant" encounter (recall when Hulgyr started to ride off to attack the ants and had to be restrained?) came home to roost, in spades.  And that greatly contributed to my OoC frustration.  It was possible to handle that entire encounter without ever entering combat, but I had to deal with one character plotting (and starting to implement) a surprise attack while simultaneously another character was planning a parley.  I'm sure you see the absurdity of pursuing both strategies at the same time.  OoC, I was hoping that both the players and the characters would resolve that before approaching the soldiers, but when that didn't happen, I felt the only way I could resolve it was to have everyone just roll initiative and play it out.And the party worked at cross purposes on several occasions during that encounter.  Individually, all the PC's actions made sense for that PC.  But a group is capable of functioning as more than the sum of its parts, and during that encounter the party functioned as exactly the sum of its parts, no more, no less.When you started getting frustrated and losing faith with me, you started micromanaging and bringing up rules issues.  I felt you were being adversarial.  But because I'd made a couple of genuine rules mistakes, I felt it was only fair to give your character his due and to allow him to do whatever the rules allowed.  Just the same, all the retconning interrupted the flow of what was already becoming a complex and confusing encounter for everyone else, and my frustration was mounting.  Moreover, I couldn't really blame you or anyone else for my mistakes, could I?I think we reached the height of absurdity late in the encounter, when you suggested that the encounter was basically over and that since everyone in the party was doing exactly the same thing, we could just arm-wave the conclusion.  After over a dozen turns of tracking detail after detail, I was all too ready to do exactly that.  And then, just as I was prepared to step out of combat time, two party members who had agreed to do exactly the same thing proceeded to declare that they were moving in opposite directions.I need to go, and don't have time to properly finish this post.  But I do want to say that I don't consider Zaeryl to be an idiot, or that he acted like one.  From a spoiler block marked for "everyone but Ironwood":"Now that the party has started running out of things to argue about and has clumped together somewhat, things are getting much simpler. Everybody but Ironwolf is in a small clump in the middle of the woods. Everybody is mounted. Hulgyr has Private Squatter draped over his horse. Michael is leading Ironwolf's horse by the reins. Ironwolf is nowhere to be seen, but judging by the sounds coming toward the party from the direction of Duvik, he is probably about 30-40' away and about to pop out of the trees at any moment."At that point, I felt that if Zaeryl wanted to count noses, he had the perfect opportunity.  And OoC, if you wanted some clarification, you had a golden opportunity to do likewise and bring it to my attention.  But previously (just a couple of posts earlier), you had posted to the effect of (paraphrasing) "Zaeryl wants nothing more than to ride away from the camp at the earliest opportunity)."  Again, I'm not a mind reader.  Zaeryl had mentioned attrition and had studiously dragged a soldier through the woods himself.  But I honestly couldn't tell if your concept for Zaeryl was "let's make sure we have at least one soldier to interrogate" or if it was "let's get as many as we can but still get out of here quickly" or "let's make sure we get every last soldier and scoot".  I took the actions and posts of the group at face value, and maybe that was a mistake.</blockquote>

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