Re: Lobby - OOC
Just a note about NPCs in the game. In general, NPCs are competent at their jobs, but don't expect them to be more than they are. NPCs not involved with player activities learn painfully slow, which is why the NPCs you've encountered don't all have amazing skills. The long-time veterans have some, but most of the younger guard members just know how to use their equipment, and that's it. NPC skills also tend to degrade over time if they're not practicing them regularly, so most are specialists.
The game world functions according to typical game rules, where NPCs will make decent enough decisions but it's generally the job of the players to push things along if there are directions the players want events to take. Right now everyone is mostly following the same quest chain because you've been doing the things the NPCs have asked in order to get training. At some point you're going to want to drive things in different directions.
That won't all happen in character, we can talk out of character about where you want things to go and we'll work out what scenes to play out. That doesn't mean you'll lose your training opportunities, just that you'll start to have input on events as you start to exercise your player agency.
All that to say, don't be afraid to deviate from the quest chain if you've got better ideas about what needs to happen.
