eponymous-rose:

One of my favorite things about this show is how great at storytelling the players are as well. You’ve got these self-contained little arcs going on alongside the big DM-led moments, and that adds so much depth to what’s going on and really speaks to the improv skills of everyone involved. Like in last night’s episode:

• In the middle of battle, Nott spots a coinpurse on Shakäste’s belt.
• When Shakäste’s distracted in familiar mode, Nott steals the coinpurse.

  Shakäste notices but opts not to say anything to her right away.

• Completely taking everyone by surprise, Nott is the one to sneak up to the manticore’s nest and kills her cub in front of her.
• At the end of the battle, Shakäste creates a fog cloud and looms out of it to tell Nott that she’s probably earned that gold, but that she should watch where she puts her fingers in the future.
• …and on their way back to town, when a traumatized Caleb grabs Nott’s hand, she sneaks the coinpurse into his pocket and tells him she got him some money for books.

It’s just such a great little narrative thing that intersects obliquely with the main plot and adds so much depth to the characters and their interactions, and it just keeps happening again and again (and man oh man did Khary Payton ever take to that rhythm, can we have him back all the time please, thank you for listening to my TED talk). It’s hard to put a nice narrative bookend on a little mini-story like that when you don’t have full control over the flow of the story, but they pull it off week after week. What a good.