Dorothy said she needed five negotiation assistants. That was obviously a way of telling the newbie players to hurry up and choose representatives to join the proceedings. Naturally, Mud Truck and his two companions, who had started this "debt-collecting operation," were among them.
Add Taipal, the honorary knight and captain of the Riptide Knights, and Ge Bao, the student faction's leader, and that made five.
The veteran players knew all five of them by reputation, so nobody had any objections.
Of course, not all the newcomers were happy about having someone speak for them. But they'd only just started the game and hadn't even figured out the basics yet. With a major decision that would directly determine the direction of the story on the table, even the others—
They didn't trust themselves with it, either.
Still, there were 214 players here, and reaching a consensus wasn't easy. Hog, chieftain of the Bloodclaw Clan, was currently escorting his cargo toward the abandoned tollhouse. At most, the players had twenty minutes to discuss things. Time was tight.
This was when the difference between an organized group and a disorganized one became clear.
The eighty-odd members of the Riptide Knights had all come, and they gathered in one place to collect everyone's opinions in a thoroughly professional manner.
They might be a player-run knightly order, but their role-playing experience in other games had given them a chain of command that extended all the way down to squad leaders. As a result, Taipal needed very little time to consolidate his members' opinions.
The other unaffiliated players, by contrast, were a chaotic mess. A few hotheads even started arguing about it.
The veteran players watched all of this closely.
They didn't have a long, in-depth discussion about whether to accept the Bloodclaw Clan. They'd already