No, of course in hindsight what you propose is a better idea, and I might Ret-Con it exactly that way. I guess I was so desperate for a perfect Game Ending setup for Franky’s character that my inner Storyline Quality Assurance completely fail to pick up the hints that this wasn’t all that a good idea.

Some of thing that could have been done to prepare the encounter given more time:
-Have the truck load of info given by a source the player thrust before meeting the magnificent bastard (MB).
-Don’t have the MB enumerate the acts that he did against the player interest or keep it on a need to know basis.
-Have him give something that the player will recognize as something they need.
-Let him meet the player in a position of obvious strength (and not threat).
-Have the MB cameo a few encounter and establish his modus operandi to the player so they can better understand his motive.

That brings up a point that is one of those overarching faults of gaming architecture. Metagame a blatantly unrealistic situation or not. Sometimes your character would have absolutely no motivation to trust this person, go along with the obvious clue, or take the plot hook. So, in the game world, why the heck would they. Out of game the players know that this is a plot hook or story element and it is what is leading them to the next adventure. Often it just gets waved off or breezed past, or it goes the other way and characters rail against whatever it is in an attempt to be realistic. I’ve never observed much middle ground. I’ve also found that the bigger the story with the more detail or intrigue, the harder it is to drop in plot hooks, which is what it sounds like Phil was trying to do. I see a lot of fertile ground for intrigue and plotting in this plot hook.

We’re a pretty lenient group and tend to go with what Phil as prepared. Obviously he usually prepare something in accord to what was discuss as potential path in the last game.

We are first and foremost friends that like to hang out and roleplay together. We’re conscious of the extra work DMing requires and as such make it easy for him. Hell, most of us are happy as long that there is something to beat…

This time though Phil had finished is NPC “monologue” and we where still waiting for the thing that would convince us to go with it… Like Phil said in is description the thing that bother me the most of it was that, this was an untrustworthy/undefined character that present a truck load of non verifiable info on which it base it’s argument to convince us to help her in her scheme to destroy the city we lived in…

At which point we where looking at each other trying to justify how we could present these fact so we would go along with the plan… Weird moment…

That being said we still had a good evening that is what matters and we did establish some new rule of conduct around the table… (men is Eric going to hear about that for a long time… )

Of course I think you can lay some of the blame, valid or not, on having been mooned previously. That will throw anyone for a loop :).