Hello
I am writing this because I am at the moment kind of frustrated of my multiplayer experience, and maybe some of you can give hints what I do wrong.
Me and 2 friends started playing this game last Friday. Me playing rogue (for stealing and stuff), friend #1 plays polymorph, friend #2 ranger. fane as NPC and cleric. also we play without teamspeak or discord, so just with ingame chat.
Till the scene where the boy get the party out of fort joy it was all more or less good. Note here, we needed to do the scene twice, because first time I spook with the boy and asked if he want to drive the boat, and while still speaking one of the friends triggered the boat, let me + fane behind. 2. attempt and while I was still there to loot again the boxes, my friends advanced to story of the boy outside on the beach and just got ahead. and thats mostly the case in all important dialogues since then. friend #1 + #2 runs ahead advancing one story part while I either try to follow them and catch up while they are fighting or I try discover new things, and steal stuff from NPCs.
So question #1Is it my fault that I taking so long because I want to talk to NPCs, stealing (which does sometimes takes time) or other stuff which is not directly linked to a quest?
Equipment distribution is another big fact where I also cant determine, if I am the bad person here or maybe just a more broad communication problem. Lets take stealing here as good example. When I steal I mostly look first for gear what we need (in the sense I look mostly on the stats +1 polymorph f.e.), after that for skill books, and if there is nothing in specially, then I take as much gold or other handy stuff (res scrolls f.e.) as possible. Now like I wrote above, to steal from some NPC it takes some time because I need to distract them with fane especially in big areas like driftwood. maybe there is a faster way to do it, but dunno. Because it takes some time my friends mostly wander of to more exciting stuff. Except from friend #1 which needs a new 2h weap or at best a spear, I get no word to hear what they need.
So question #2Is it my fault that something like
these is the result of this? My and fane's char good equipped, the others less so. the best item of the ranger is a white lvl 12 crossbow

Also note, that nobody ever asked me if I could give them gold so that they can buy stuff or that they wearing white lvl 2 pants. There were tons of possibilities which at least blue rarity. At the moment I am at ~7,8k (again after buying a breastplate for 2,5k gold). Besides the equipment we are in a lvl 14 area and on explorer mode.
ConclusionI know that these topic is kinda unnormal, but I am not the type of person who puts the first blame on others (especially not friends) but look more what I could do better. But on the other hand I cant find anything which I could do better

Also in this particular multiplayer session, I no more care about main story and co. I dont know, why we killed the dude with the big void worm before boarding the ship, why my friend writing as "witch" in chat nor what the main story is about. Such things I'll discover in a seperate soloplay. so would be nice to not spoiler too much here. =)
So thats it, maybe some of you has tipps for change some of the above writting stuff.
Thanks in advance
EDIT: also why dont I see the colors in the text?