I have to preface by saying I hold absolutely no resentment towards marisha for her character choices — murray is without a doubt one of my favorite characters of the campaign. I think it makes total sense to be suspicious and fully think through what might happen at the theater, given that thousands of innocent people would be attending. But I also think the bird watching mission being short-staffed falls heavily on her shoulders, because she was the first person to bring up the possibility of something terrible happening on opening night, and she aggressively defended the idea from the very first moment it was challenged.

It’s that refusal to let go of her theory that really intrigues me, mostly because I’m not sure if it was intentional or not. Brennan dropped quite a few hints that the theater ritual was going to be a positive thing during the last few episodes, but it kinda seemed too little too late because the mindset that the theater was “ground zero” was deeply ingrained in the party by that point, which makes it hard to tell if murray’s insistence was purposeful.

Assuming it is intentional, I think that’s a really interesting character flaw for a character that hasn’t shown all that many glaring flaws as of yet. As an academic, she should know how important it is to consider all angles of a theory, especially angles that could disprove it. However, given the way she grew up and her role at the Penteveral, it stands to reason that murray has had a lot of her ideas shot down by muckety-mucks that didn’t really give a shit about the merits of what she was positing.

Is it less than they needed to successfully or semi-safely infiltrate Obrimus Manor? Quite possible--they weren't doing great last episode, and Brennan indicated he thought they'd underestimated the risk, so it felt like they were horribly short on fighters (I wish in hindsight that they were the 5-PC party and had brought some of the spell glyphs and healing potions), but I don't think it was obviously undersized for a stealth mission deliberately scheduled for when the most dangerous people were gone.

The total forces allotted to Team Theater were massively oversized for what has happened so far, but that was mostly NPCs who wouldn't have made much sense to be on Team Bird Watch* (the nameless Magpies, Varen, and Hannan, plus the fae showing up and pitching in).

thought about this because it's so frustrating when people argue that 'dying in childbirth' is a historical sort of event that doesn't happen nowadays (false) and therefore is irrelevant to the legal status of abortion, since it's not a real danger.

except it super is, and i think a lot of people haven't noticed that this argument in addition to simply being incorrect is basically the same as when people say we don't need vaccines for deadly diseases because no one gets those now anyway.