he actually equipped Quen on this one
May. 31st, 2020 02:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/36NQp7x
Let me set the scene for you, in the household where I’ve been riding out this isolation period. DF, my Doctor Friend, with whom I attended university as an undergrad (I met him on his 18th birthday completely prostrate under a table having had two whole beers on his own) works in the local hospital. MM, MathMom, his wife, has been my friend since high school; we met in 1995, as near as we can remember. She is an engineer by training, a math teacher by experience, and is at home currently with their two children, Boy, who is 7, and Girl, who is 5. When schools closed, I grew worried that the children would go even more feral, and would eat MM while DF was stuck at work for endless shifts during the pandemic, so after I got furloughed, I came out here (about an hour’s drive away from my house) and have been here mostly ever since.
So there’s the recap; I just felt like I hadn’t gone over that for a while and there’s some new folks and Tumblr doesn’t make searching the tags easy. Or, like, going through someone’s archives in an organized fashion.
Anyway– the scene. In the family room is a big television, and the couches are arranged in a kind of L around the square of the room. DF has a rolling chair for gaming that he keeps quite close to the TV, and pulls it out and sits up there with his feet propped up basically on the entertainment center. And then MM and I sit on the couches and usually do embroidery or bullshit on our phones or whatever while he’s playing.
But, for the first however long it takes the kids to fall asleep, DF will play a fast-paced FPS shooter called Warframe, and a lot of time Girl keeps coming down the stairs for an hour, an hour and a half, oh i need a drink, mommy can you help me find this stuffed toy, mommy i was going through your closet but i can’t reach your good jewelry can i have it, mommy i am worried that a platypus might sting me, mommy – in short, i don’t want to go to sleep and am resentful that i’m not allowed to just be involved in everything you adults are doing. SO, we have to sit there and watch the Glitter Robots Game (it’s horribly gory but all the “gore” is robots and looks like glitter so it’s not as obvious even though I think it’s scarier than the Witcher if you pay the slightest attention to the worldbuilding– but the kids don’t, and he plays it with the volume really low so the gunfire’s not so jarring when they’re around, so it works fine.) until the little pitter-patter-feet down the stairs stop happening.
Sometimes though he gets kind of sucked in to a mission or something– it’s multiplayer and he doesn’t want to leave a mission in the middle of it and so on, so it can be hard to get everything to line up. Some nights we despair, as it get super late and we’re still Glitter Robots-ing. But, on nights when he’s just launched into it, inevitably a child will come down and be like “WHAT IS THAT.” Boy now asks every night if we’re going to “play the scary game” after he’s in bed. …. so glitter robots it is.
So tonight we didn’t get much Witchering time, but, we did a bit.
All this is prompted by my having copy-pasted my notes on Friday night’s gaming session into this window and it opens with
ah it’s the witcher 3 loadscreen, all is not lost
We opened with a little scroll through the inventory to see what we needed to look for and what we could make now. We’re only bisongrass and bear fat short of Enhanced Beast Oil, which maybe we don’t need for gameplay but we absolutely need for inside jokes. This led to a rumination on whether it’d be better to go hunt down a bear, or buy bear fat somewhere. Sometimes you can dismantle things you already have into other components, but you have to go to a blacksmith’s shop and be in the shopping interface to do this. The things you can dismantle into other things don’t always make sense, either.
“Well,” MM said, explaining the blacksmith thing, “obviously, you need an anvil in order to make linen into silk.”
(Throughout this, DF was eating a bag of Cheetos and kept missing the buttons he was pressing because he was trying not to use the Cheeto-powder fingers. It was the most Gamer thing he has ever done and it was hilarious, but hard to recap. For further scene-setting, he is actually not a stereotypically gamer-looking dude, not that there’s really a particular way that gamers look, but y’know. It was just funny because he was doing this delicate sort of pinkies-out Cheeto eating with the xbox controller carefully held out of the way, and was completely failing at keeping things tidy. In the morning I found the empty Cheeto bag on the floor in the family room where food isn’t allowed (I’m sure he’d left it on the coffee table), and told Boy, who was watching keenly, that clearly the mice had dragged it in here, as no adult would ever violate the sanctity of not eating in the family room.)
DF realized that potion stocks were low so he had Geralt meditate to replenish them. I hadn’t really considered it; of course in any kind of storytelling, Geralt would meditate in a carefully-chosen situation, but in-game it really doesn’t matter, so Geralt meditated in the middle of the street at an intersection in Novigrad, right on the cobblestones. He stood up and there was a guardsman kind of standing there watching him bemusedly (not really, he was an NPC and thus was totally vacant and running an idle animation but it really looked like he was watching in bemusement as this odd sword-bedecked man sat in the street staring at nothing), and he was like “What” and ran off.
basically the first thing that happened is this halfling was like “pssst you wanna buy contraband magical stuff?” Geralt was like “what have you been looting the homes of burned mages?” and the halfling’s like “yeah you want some?” and Geralt was like “you’re a ghoul” and the halfling’s like “can’t have unsecured magical shit just lying around, right? anyway do you want some?” but then the guards show up and he’s like “ah shit tell no one you saw me!” and runs away. The guards come over to Geralt and are like “why did that halfling run away, tell us!” and I was like oh fuck the police but for some reason DF was like, no, I’m gonna snitch, that guy was a ghoul, and told the cops the guy was selling contraband. WTF man, I thought you were cool. And we had JUST been saying “ah we need to find someplace to buy magic shit” so like. I don’t understand this decision, but you can’t really play a video game by committee.
We had been killing time so we could go back and do fencing lessons with Rose var Attre, in the hopes of that being a useful plot-related quest, but the quest thing stubbornly didn’t update. “Go to Rose Var Attre’s residence tomorrow,” it still said, even though it was now 8 in the morning of the following day, and no arrow to guide us to her residence appeared.
So we wandered a bit, picked up a weird little one– a halfling and a man were arguing and a guard was super fed up of their shit and was like “oy just hire that witcher, he’ll figure it out”, “it” being, apparently, that there was a monster in the warehouse. Geralt was like “fine” and went in, and there’s a nekker in the warehouse. He despatched it handily, but like… those are monsters that live in nests and tunnel underground and are always in packs, wtf? A little searching uncovered a cage, which the creature had clearly been transported in. Also, the cage bars had been recently cut, freeing the creature.
So Geralt went back out and reported all that to the guard, who was like “ok i don’t care, we’re arresting both of you and torturing the truth out of you” and Geralt was like welp my work here is done, took his like $20 and left.
(I genuinely have no idea how much the coins in this game are supposed to be worth. I also don’t think anyone really does. I’m just making up what the amounts are, I don’t really write it down.)
As Fencing Lessons still stubbornly refused to update, we hared off into the countryside. DF has a kind of little personally-assigned quest, where he checks all the noticeboards he can see on the map– once you’ve checked them and taken anything Witcher-specific, they disappear from the map, and only light up again if something new spawns for them. So if he’s got a spare moment among Plot, he goes and clears out noticeboards.
We went to one in a little hamlet called Cunny of the Goose, which is weird nonsense– isn’t a cunny a cunt?? I don’t object to the word, it’s a fine old English word of Germanic origin and venerable heritage, but as an experienced poultry slaughterhouse worker I am here to inform you that geese, like all birds, do not have cunts, so I do not understand the name of this village.
Anyhow. We picked up some weird little quests and went through the inventory tab again. The endless cycle of this game is, like– ok. We need albedo as a component to this potion we need. We can craft albedo, but we need White Gull to do so. To craft White Gull, we need both cherry cordial and mandrake cordial. Shit, we had cherry cordial but we sold it. Well, can we buy more? Inns have cordials, sure.
Ha, the inn at Cunny of the Goose does not have any kind of cordial but it does have fisstech, so now we know where to get that. (We have fisstech, we have a lot of fisstech, as we can neither consume nor dismantle it. DF has decided to save it, along with his purely-decorative swords; he has those all tucked away in the stash. And that’s it. Which is hilarious to imagine– someone finally opens up Geralt’s stash to find out more about this creature of legend and it’s just low-level but cool-looking relic swords, and like ten kilos of fisstech. Which, if you’re new to this game, is literally just cocaine.)
Geralt is now four points (out of 1000) away from level 15. We finally just Googled where Rose Var Attre’s house is and went there, since the quest wouldn’t update. Talking to the guards gave a small handful of XP and so he leveled up to 15 just from basically saying “hi is the lady of the house in” “no she’s taking a walk but she said if you came by you should go find her there” “ok” *big choral “aaaahhhh” noise, Level 15 appears on the screen* Amazing.
Anyhow, Fencing Lessons was kind of dumb– Rosa is a spoiled-brat noblewoman who wants to play games, makes Geralt fight her with live steel even though he really doesn’t want to do that and isn’t prepared for it; DF got hung up on the controls and really wasn’t prepared for her to just attack him so she hit him three times and then it went into a cutscene where she was like HA I HAVE BEAT YOU, and Geralt was like listen lady this isn’t really how you learn fencing? also I could have killed you, maybe don’t? and she’s like turn around i gotta fix my undies, and he’s like what but turns around, and then she runs away for some reason? is he supposed to chase her? Fine. He tracks her across the bridge to a village where the villagers have accosted her and are like “oh we’re going to murder this Fancy Lady from a people who are trying to subjugate us” and Geralt has to Axii them into submission to save her. She’s like ah when Nilfgaard takes these lands I will personally have those men killed and Geralt’s like why you gotta be such a jerk about this and she’s like clearly you do not understand how our honor and morals work! and he’s like damn right, go fuck yourself but politely, and that’s… it. That’s the whole quest.
So… fed up with Novigrad, we went back to take care of a Velen quest, Swamp Thing, which was level 12 and had to be take care of before we level up inappropriately. Of course, we picked it up so long ago we no longer remember anything about it, but whatever. It’s a… ah, it’s a foglet, so we checked and discovered that we did indeed have moon dust bombs. OK sure.
DF actually equipped Quen for this one, which he rarely bothers with, but like, foglets are insubstantial and materialize and hit you hard too fast for a parry, so Quen is basically required for this.
With Quen, though, it turned out DF is twitchy enough and Geralt powered-up enough that the foglet was actually not terribly difficult to defeat, so we never did use any of the moondust bombs. Just– hit it a bunch of times, and put Quen back on periodically, and that was that. It wasn’t terribly difficult, though I clearly remember the first foglet a while ago with wee precious flower prince Geralt at like, level four, and how it killed us over and over and over again.
So. Something to be said for leveling up, as it happens.
We rode around Velen sort of aimlessly after that– not really aimlessly, trying to clear up the map. We found a bunch of under-leveled stuff that would’ve been good to have found at like, level 6 or whatever, but interspersed with it were things like… oh here’s a Guarded Treasure, let’s see what we find. Ah, a chest full of goodies. Picked up the loot, and wandered for a moment, and then abruptly a Biglhag materialized. Level 20. Run away! Run away from the big ol’ hag! I mean. maybe we could take on a level 20 something. But like, why? We already have what she was guarding.
(We abandoned any thought of going back to Novigrad for Plot because the next Plot is Sigi Reuven’s bathhouse, and MM got sleepy and went to bed and we could not possibly take Geralt to a bathhouse and be treated to his lovingly-rendered bare chest without having MM along for the ride.)
One thing about Velen, the fight music there is this guy just sort of hollering, and we had sort of forgotten about it, and kind of hadn’t missed it…
We found the big central encampment of the invading Nilfgaardian forces and cleared out two semi-little quests for them. There was a cutscene where a soldier updates us on the injured woman from the intro level– the griffin at White Orchard had injured a woman and as a kind of eases-you-in-to-potion-making, the quest kind of guides you through making Swallow (healing potion) for the first time to give her some to see if it helps, and now this guy updates you that it kept her alive but she’s catatonic. He says he doesn’t know whether to bless you for keeping her alive or curse you for denying her a death with dignity, and Geralt’s like you think I don’t think about that shit all the time?? and that’s that for that encounter.
Anyway. we also wandered around in the swamp, and lied to a mother and said her dead son had died with honor instead of deserting and being executed for it. We also found that a Nilfgaardian patrol that had vanished had been killed by a wyvern, which was what the quartermaster was paying you to find out, and so we had to fight the wyvern, but then we also found out– well, it was confusing, we followed a bunch of signs around and were like okay obviously we’re meant to be making a deduction here but what is the deduction, and I finally Googled it and was like oh, this is the deduction, so we went back to the camp and in the dialogue options Geralt’s like “so that patrol was out there executing prisoners of war”, and that’s what we were supposed to have been realizing.
Anyhow, needing to google it to figure out what the fuck was supposed to be going on also meant that I could advise DF that it only meant that either Geralt could get all high-dudgeony and refuse to take the guy’s coin for having done a job of work for him– what, we don’t make war criminals pay their freelancers?– and get a handful more XP but not much? or we can say “fuck you, pay me” and get money and almost as much XP from this guy we’re so mad at.
So we did that, because taking money from war criminals to pay you for work you’ve already done for them seems more ethical to me than just saying “no, I’m so mad at you I did your work for free”. like, wtf man. no. get paid, honey.
Anyway, it was time to put the controller down for the night.
Let me set the scene for you, in the household where I’ve been riding out this isolation period. DF, my Doctor Friend, with whom I attended university as an undergrad (I met him on his 18th birthday completely prostrate under a table having had two whole beers on his own) works in the local hospital. MM, MathMom, his wife, has been my friend since high school; we met in 1995, as near as we can remember. She is an engineer by training, a math teacher by experience, and is at home currently with their two children, Boy, who is 7, and Girl, who is 5. When schools closed, I grew worried that the children would go even more feral, and would eat MM while DF was stuck at work for endless shifts during the pandemic, so after I got furloughed, I came out here (about an hour’s drive away from my house) and have been here mostly ever since.
So there’s the recap; I just felt like I hadn’t gone over that for a while and there’s some new folks and Tumblr doesn’t make searching the tags easy. Or, like, going through someone’s archives in an organized fashion.
Anyway– the scene. In the family room is a big television, and the couches are arranged in a kind of L around the square of the room. DF has a rolling chair for gaming that he keeps quite close to the TV, and pulls it out and sits up there with his feet propped up basically on the entertainment center. And then MM and I sit on the couches and usually do embroidery or bullshit on our phones or whatever while he’s playing.
But, for the first however long it takes the kids to fall asleep, DF will play a fast-paced FPS shooter called Warframe, and a lot of time Girl keeps coming down the stairs for an hour, an hour and a half, oh i need a drink, mommy can you help me find this stuffed toy, mommy i was going through your closet but i can’t reach your good jewelry can i have it, mommy i am worried that a platypus might sting me, mommy – in short, i don’t want to go to sleep and am resentful that i’m not allowed to just be involved in everything you adults are doing. SO, we have to sit there and watch the Glitter Robots Game (it’s horribly gory but all the “gore” is robots and looks like glitter so it’s not as obvious even though I think it’s scarier than the Witcher if you pay the slightest attention to the worldbuilding– but the kids don’t, and he plays it with the volume really low so the gunfire’s not so jarring when they’re around, so it works fine.) until the little pitter-patter-feet down the stairs stop happening.
Sometimes though he gets kind of sucked in to a mission or something– it’s multiplayer and he doesn’t want to leave a mission in the middle of it and so on, so it can be hard to get everything to line up. Some nights we despair, as it get super late and we’re still Glitter Robots-ing. But, on nights when he’s just launched into it, inevitably a child will come down and be like “WHAT IS THAT.” Boy now asks every night if we’re going to “play the scary game” after he’s in bed. …. so glitter robots it is.
So tonight we didn’t get much Witchering time, but, we did a bit.
All this is prompted by my having copy-pasted my notes on Friday night’s gaming session into this window and it opens with
ah it’s the witcher 3 loadscreen, all is not lost
We opened with a little scroll through the inventory to see what we needed to look for and what we could make now. We’re only bisongrass and bear fat short of Enhanced Beast Oil, which maybe we don’t need for gameplay but we absolutely need for inside jokes. This led to a rumination on whether it’d be better to go hunt down a bear, or buy bear fat somewhere. Sometimes you can dismantle things you already have into other components, but you have to go to a blacksmith’s shop and be in the shopping interface to do this. The things you can dismantle into other things don’t always make sense, either.
“Well,” MM said, explaining the blacksmith thing, “obviously, you need an anvil in order to make linen into silk.”
(Throughout this, DF was eating a bag of Cheetos and kept missing the buttons he was pressing because he was trying not to use the Cheeto-powder fingers. It was the most Gamer thing he has ever done and it was hilarious, but hard to recap. For further scene-setting, he is actually not a stereotypically gamer-looking dude, not that there’s really a particular way that gamers look, but y’know. It was just funny because he was doing this delicate sort of pinkies-out Cheeto eating with the xbox controller carefully held out of the way, and was completely failing at keeping things tidy. In the morning I found the empty Cheeto bag on the floor in the family room where food isn’t allowed (I’m sure he’d left it on the coffee table), and told Boy, who was watching keenly, that clearly the mice had dragged it in here, as no adult would ever violate the sanctity of not eating in the family room.)
DF realized that potion stocks were low so he had Geralt meditate to replenish them. I hadn’t really considered it; of course in any kind of storytelling, Geralt would meditate in a carefully-chosen situation, but in-game it really doesn’t matter, so Geralt meditated in the middle of the street at an intersection in Novigrad, right on the cobblestones. He stood up and there was a guardsman kind of standing there watching him bemusedly (not really, he was an NPC and thus was totally vacant and running an idle animation but it really looked like he was watching in bemusement as this odd sword-bedecked man sat in the street staring at nothing), and he was like “What” and ran off.
basically the first thing that happened is this halfling was like “pssst you wanna buy contraband magical stuff?” Geralt was like “what have you been looting the homes of burned mages?” and the halfling’s like “yeah you want some?” and Geralt was like “you’re a ghoul” and the halfling’s like “can’t have unsecured magical shit just lying around, right? anyway do you want some?” but then the guards show up and he’s like “ah shit tell no one you saw me!” and runs away. The guards come over to Geralt and are like “why did that halfling run away, tell us!” and I was like oh fuck the police but for some reason DF was like, no, I’m gonna snitch, that guy was a ghoul, and told the cops the guy was selling contraband. WTF man, I thought you were cool. And we had JUST been saying “ah we need to find someplace to buy magic shit” so like. I don’t understand this decision, but you can’t really play a video game by committee.
We had been killing time so we could go back and do fencing lessons with Rose var Attre, in the hopes of that being a useful plot-related quest, but the quest thing stubbornly didn’t update. “Go to Rose Var Attre’s residence tomorrow,” it still said, even though it was now 8 in the morning of the following day, and no arrow to guide us to her residence appeared.
So we wandered a bit, picked up a weird little one– a halfling and a man were arguing and a guard was super fed up of their shit and was like “oy just hire that witcher, he’ll figure it out”, “it” being, apparently, that there was a monster in the warehouse. Geralt was like “fine” and went in, and there’s a nekker in the warehouse. He despatched it handily, but like… those are monsters that live in nests and tunnel underground and are always in packs, wtf? A little searching uncovered a cage, which the creature had clearly been transported in. Also, the cage bars had been recently cut, freeing the creature.
So Geralt went back out and reported all that to the guard, who was like “ok i don’t care, we’re arresting both of you and torturing the truth out of you” and Geralt was like welp my work here is done, took his like $20 and left.
(I genuinely have no idea how much the coins in this game are supposed to be worth. I also don’t think anyone really does. I’m just making up what the amounts are, I don’t really write it down.)
As Fencing Lessons still stubbornly refused to update, we hared off into the countryside. DF has a kind of little personally-assigned quest, where he checks all the noticeboards he can see on the map– once you’ve checked them and taken anything Witcher-specific, they disappear from the map, and only light up again if something new spawns for them. So if he’s got a spare moment among Plot, he goes and clears out noticeboards.
We went to one in a little hamlet called Cunny of the Goose, which is weird nonsense– isn’t a cunny a cunt?? I don’t object to the word, it’s a fine old English word of Germanic origin and venerable heritage, but as an experienced poultry slaughterhouse worker I am here to inform you that geese, like all birds, do not have cunts, so I do not understand the name of this village.
Anyhow. We picked up some weird little quests and went through the inventory tab again. The endless cycle of this game is, like– ok. We need albedo as a component to this potion we need. We can craft albedo, but we need White Gull to do so. To craft White Gull, we need both cherry cordial and mandrake cordial. Shit, we had cherry cordial but we sold it. Well, can we buy more? Inns have cordials, sure.
Ha, the inn at Cunny of the Goose does not have any kind of cordial but it does have fisstech, so now we know where to get that. (We have fisstech, we have a lot of fisstech, as we can neither consume nor dismantle it. DF has decided to save it, along with his purely-decorative swords; he has those all tucked away in the stash. And that’s it. Which is hilarious to imagine– someone finally opens up Geralt’s stash to find out more about this creature of legend and it’s just low-level but cool-looking relic swords, and like ten kilos of fisstech. Which, if you’re new to this game, is literally just cocaine.)
Geralt is now four points (out of 1000) away from level 15. We finally just Googled where Rose Var Attre’s house is and went there, since the quest wouldn’t update. Talking to the guards gave a small handful of XP and so he leveled up to 15 just from basically saying “hi is the lady of the house in” “no she’s taking a walk but she said if you came by you should go find her there” “ok” *big choral “aaaahhhh” noise, Level 15 appears on the screen* Amazing.
Anyhow, Fencing Lessons was kind of dumb– Rosa is a spoiled-brat noblewoman who wants to play games, makes Geralt fight her with live steel even though he really doesn’t want to do that and isn’t prepared for it; DF got hung up on the controls and really wasn’t prepared for her to just attack him so she hit him three times and then it went into a cutscene where she was like HA I HAVE BEAT YOU, and Geralt was like listen lady this isn’t really how you learn fencing? also I could have killed you, maybe don’t? and she’s like turn around i gotta fix my undies, and he’s like what but turns around, and then she runs away for some reason? is he supposed to chase her? Fine. He tracks her across the bridge to a village where the villagers have accosted her and are like “oh we’re going to murder this Fancy Lady from a people who are trying to subjugate us” and Geralt has to Axii them into submission to save her. She’s like ah when Nilfgaard takes these lands I will personally have those men killed and Geralt’s like why you gotta be such a jerk about this and she’s like clearly you do not understand how our honor and morals work! and he’s like damn right, go fuck yourself but politely, and that’s… it. That’s the whole quest.
So… fed up with Novigrad, we went back to take care of a Velen quest, Swamp Thing, which was level 12 and had to be take care of before we level up inappropriately. Of course, we picked it up so long ago we no longer remember anything about it, but whatever. It’s a… ah, it’s a foglet, so we checked and discovered that we did indeed have moon dust bombs. OK sure.
DF actually equipped Quen for this one, which he rarely bothers with, but like, foglets are insubstantial and materialize and hit you hard too fast for a parry, so Quen is basically required for this.
With Quen, though, it turned out DF is twitchy enough and Geralt powered-up enough that the foglet was actually not terribly difficult to defeat, so we never did use any of the moondust bombs. Just– hit it a bunch of times, and put Quen back on periodically, and that was that. It wasn’t terribly difficult, though I clearly remember the first foglet a while ago with wee precious flower prince Geralt at like, level four, and how it killed us over and over and over again.
So. Something to be said for leveling up, as it happens.
We rode around Velen sort of aimlessly after that– not really aimlessly, trying to clear up the map. We found a bunch of under-leveled stuff that would’ve been good to have found at like, level 6 or whatever, but interspersed with it were things like… oh here’s a Guarded Treasure, let’s see what we find. Ah, a chest full of goodies. Picked up the loot, and wandered for a moment, and then abruptly a Biglhag materialized. Level 20. Run away! Run away from the big ol’ hag! I mean. maybe we could take on a level 20 something. But like, why? We already have what she was guarding.
(We abandoned any thought of going back to Novigrad for Plot because the next Plot is Sigi Reuven’s bathhouse, and MM got sleepy and went to bed and we could not possibly take Geralt to a bathhouse and be treated to his lovingly-rendered bare chest without having MM along for the ride.)
One thing about Velen, the fight music there is this guy just sort of hollering, and we had sort of forgotten about it, and kind of hadn’t missed it…
We found the big central encampment of the invading Nilfgaardian forces and cleared out two semi-little quests for them. There was a cutscene where a soldier updates us on the injured woman from the intro level– the griffin at White Orchard had injured a woman and as a kind of eases-you-in-to-potion-making, the quest kind of guides you through making Swallow (healing potion) for the first time to give her some to see if it helps, and now this guy updates you that it kept her alive but she’s catatonic. He says he doesn’t know whether to bless you for keeping her alive or curse you for denying her a death with dignity, and Geralt’s like you think I don’t think about that shit all the time?? and that’s that for that encounter.
Anyway. we also wandered around in the swamp, and lied to a mother and said her dead son had died with honor instead of deserting and being executed for it. We also found that a Nilfgaardian patrol that had vanished had been killed by a wyvern, which was what the quartermaster was paying you to find out, and so we had to fight the wyvern, but then we also found out– well, it was confusing, we followed a bunch of signs around and were like okay obviously we’re meant to be making a deduction here but what is the deduction, and I finally Googled it and was like oh, this is the deduction, so we went back to the camp and in the dialogue options Geralt’s like “so that patrol was out there executing prisoners of war”, and that’s what we were supposed to have been realizing.
Anyhow, needing to google it to figure out what the fuck was supposed to be going on also meant that I could advise DF that it only meant that either Geralt could get all high-dudgeony and refuse to take the guy’s coin for having done a job of work for him– what, we don’t make war criminals pay their freelancers?– and get a handful more XP but not much? or we can say “fuck you, pay me” and get money and almost as much XP from this guy we’re so mad at.
So we did that, because taking money from war criminals to pay you for work you’ve already done for them seems more ethical to me than just saying “no, I’m so mad at you I did your work for free”. like, wtf man. no. get paid, honey.
Anyway, it was time to put the controller down for the night.
