To your issue about tadpole urgency, Piff, youre right that it's ultimately not AS urgent as it's initially presented. The problem I've found is that the way they present that revelation that it's not so urgent. It's given through little bits of context clues scattered throughout act one. Hints and things that you can find out. And the issue with this in my opinion is that given how the urgency was built up at the beginning, the game needs to give some kind of definitive moment of catharsis where we can actually feel the tension come to an end, as opposed to scattered hints that it's possible to not internalize, or to miss entirely.
With the fact that characters not present at an event can approve or disapprove, I think that's just a matter of abstracting the fact that characters woul hear about stuff when the group meets up in camp again. Otherwise you get a situation where you can do a bunch of evil things and still have good characters be totally okay with you just because they weren't there. It's not perfect, but I don't know what would actually be a better approach.
