The Order of the Stick: T-Rex, Troll Sex and Will Checks

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > The Order of the Stick: T-Rex, Troll Sex and Will Checks

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

CoolCab posted:

Posthumously just means after death. There is a resurection clause there.

Oh, snap, a D&D-based twist. I'm 95% certain now that this is exactly the way it will play out.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2007 09:27

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 16:45

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Ferrinus posted:

Yes, he's always had a pension for the dramatic.

Penchant. A pension for the dramatic would be something rather different. :eng101:

# ¿ May 10, 2007 20:41

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Heresiarch posted:

Yes, this meant that the rogue glowed in the dark. I didn't stick with this group for very long; I was playing a human fighter and somehow he managed to be the most dangerous character in the game purely by choosing highly effective combat feats, and by not insisting on being "cool" and avoiding the crippling level adjustment penalty literally everybody else in the group had.

Then that was an unusual situation. Unfortunately, the most combat-effective characters do tend to be ones with bizarre and often times hideous templates and races. I've noticed myself that this fact tends to turn games into galleries of freaks when such things are allowed.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2007 02:21

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

greatn posted:

Wait... what? Flaws? You can take flaws?

It's a variant rule. A flaw allows you to take another feat, but generally a flaw is 1.5 to 2 times as bad as an equivalent feat.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2007 15:28

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

bgaesop posted:

Their base attack bonus is equal to one half their level, so 0 at level 1, 3 at 6 or 7, and so on. The three standard base attack bonuses are 1/2, 3/4, and 1. There's also 0 and 5/4 but those are rarer.

Hold on, what gets 5/4? :confused:

# ¿ Aug 1, 2007 21:44

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

SuperKlaus posted:

I don't think D&D vampires need to be invited into houses.

And yet, behold!

quote:

They are utterly unable to enter a home or other building unless invited in by someone with the authority to do so. They may freely enter public places, since these are by definition open to all.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2007 02:47

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Altamir posted:

Strickly by D&D 3.5 Core rules, your spirit can't earn XP while dead. Generally, I believe Rich sticks to that.

Strictly by D&D 3.5 Core rules, there's no rules given for how being dead differs from being alive. There are many, many mostly-joking arguments that characters can die, and then just keep on fighting, since nothing describes the ways in which being 'dead' hinders your actions.

But traditionally, being dead means you're out of action, so you don't get XP.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2007 01:36

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Ashcans posted:

Yea I thought that too. One moment he's being pretty sharp and capably tossing around snarky illusions, and the next he's clueless as a post again. On the other hand, it was probably the best possible way to deal with that confrontation, so maybe he was actuallly being pretty canny.

Perhaps he's been faking being dimwitted all along.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2008 18:13

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Gyges posted:

Only the sucky sword masters can even see. Blindness makes the best fighters, and deafness probably would make you an epic level bard.

Worked for Beethoven.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2008 23:27

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Captain Oblivious posted:

Honestly he's probably more proud of the facts that his son is both A) A protagonist and B) Knocking boots with another protagonist. Secondary character love interests are worth far less points.

Plus, more likely to die to add pathos.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2010 18:28

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

tylertfb posted:

dragons can fly, so they don't need mounts, so they can't be dragoons

They don't need mounts, but they can still ride them if they want to be dragoons.

Ashenai posted:

A true neutral druid might join the local barony to put down a tribe of evil gnolls, only to drop out or switch sides when the gnolls were brought to the brink of destruction. He would seek to prevent either side from becoming too powerful. Clearly, there are very few true neutral characters in the world."

True Neutral: always making sure your own actions cancel each other out!

That's not really as bad as you're making it sound. It's talking about a broader conflict than just one battle; the idea of someone fighting a group that's marauding against nearby settlements, but then defending it if the last of them are literally about to be exterminated, isn't exactly absurd.

Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Aug 16, 2010

# ¿ Aug 16, 2010 22:24

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Speedball posted:

Huh, you know, I never really hated Thog as a villain until this arc. His comedic sociopathy has gotten decidedly less comedic.

Come on, Roy, kick his rear end!

Maybe you missed where Roy broke his tusk?

Guy deserves whatever happens to him after that.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2011 23:32

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

I may be missing something really obvious, but why does she call him "Wrong-eye?"

# ¿ Jan 22, 2012 21:16

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Wili posted:

It is a reference to events in Start of Darkness.

Redcloack had a brother who was missing his left eye, and so was nicknamed "Right-Eye" by Xykon, who couldn't be bothered to remember his actual name. The brother was killed in the climax of the book, in a series of events that I won't spoil but were quite traumatizing for Redcloack. Calling him "Wrong-Eye" is something that Xykon knows is good for pushing Redcloack's buttons, and reminding him that he is nothing but Xykon's little bitch.

Ah, I see. Thank you.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2012 00:31

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

JosephWongKS posted:

Can you cast a secondary Contingency spell to cast your primary life-saving Contingency every X number of days?

Each contingency spell can only fire once.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2012 04:28

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Hm. I'm pretty sure the spell as it's now described would have scoured the planet clean of, at the very least, all human life.

I mean, say Tarquin's one wife had given him a child. Not only would the child have died, but Tarquin himself would have died - along with all his children, and all the wives he had children with. And then any and all of his siblings, and their children. And their spouses. And the siblings of their spouses...so on and so forth, and this calculation apparently applies to every one of the multitude of people we know were affected by the spell. It doesn't appear that it would stop anywhere, save perhaps for some totally isolated community which never interbred with outsiders.

If it couldn't go up a family tree - or, perhaps, if it could only go up once, to the 'top' of the black dragon tree, and then down forever after - then the damage would be limited in scope. But if it can freely track down to children and back up to spouses, then we're looking at a total cleansing.

Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Mar 6, 2012

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 00:02

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Mystic Mongol posted:

What, no, that's dumb.

There are three tiers of effect.

First tier is the dragon--the root of the spell. He lives.

Second tier is anyone who is a blood relative of the dragon and alive--ancestors, descendants, siblings, cousins. They all die.

(We know the dead are not affected by Familicide, because if they were, one of the dragon's blood relations would have been an ancestor to the entire race, and then all black dragons would die at once.)

Third tier is anyone who is a blood relative of any member of the second tier--again, ancestors, descendents, siblings, cousins. They all die. Tarquin's wife died because she was a mother to someone in the second tier (a random Draketooth). If she had another child, it would have been a brother or sister to a Draketooth, and would also die. But even then Tarquin would not be killed, because he wouldn't be a blood father to a Draketooth, just mommy's new friend.

A cousin is anyone with whom you share a common ancestor. That isn't limiting - that's what kills off all human beings.

Presumably you think it's restricted to first cousins, which is not demonstrated in the text. But the images also do not support this - particularly, look at the third panel in the second, uh, grouping. It appears to be an entire family there being killed, including an older woman and an older man. Unless all but one of those are siblings to a draketooth (and the one who isn't is the parent), it doesn't stop where you're suggesting.

The text even explicitly says that it kills the siblings and cousins of anyone who bore a child with a Draketooth - such people are not ancestors, descendents, siblings, or first cousins to anyone in what you call the second tier. They are 'cousins' to people in the second tier only in the broader sense that they share at least one common ancestor, and again, this is the 'wipe out all life' condition.

edit: Hell, by your analysis here, the draketooth family wouldn't even be in the second tier. Unless the black dragon on which V cast the spell was actually the one to found the draketooth line...(it wasn't, was it?)

Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Mar 6, 2012

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 00:22

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

CapnAndy posted:

It doesn't go above the dragon on the family tree, though. So there's an upper limit to how high up the chain this thing will go, and the secondary family effects are limited to direct blood relatives; parents and descendants.

It explicitly calls out cousins. :confused:

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 00:32

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Zereth posted:

I'm pretty sure it requires a solid line of alive direct relatives to jump to, otherwise yes, it'd get out on the first human/dragon relation and then go up the ancestry tree until it hits a common ancestor of every human on the entire planet. And all half-elves and elves. And orcs. And and and and.

Well, it can't require living people all along the chain, or else it couldn't have passed from the black dragon founder through the already-deceased draketooths to the currently-living draketooths.

Also, (I edited this into the last page, but it bears repeating here, since people are probably not going to see it there), the draketooth family wouldn't even be in the 'second tier' as described, unless the family was actually founded by the dragon on whom V cast the spell. Which I don't believe is the case?

Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Mar 6, 2012

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 00:36

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Bobulus posted:

Silly D&D world solution: Gods created world with people preexisting on it, so there isn't a common ancestor.

Unfortunately, permitting the connection to freely pass both up or down the family line undoes that. As long as the disparate groups once interbred, it still passes to them.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 00:45

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Niton posted:

We don't know for sure - it could also be the daughter or grand-daughter of an older, still-living dragon who was the progenitor of the Draketooth Clan. I think it's quite plausible that the Draketooths had some very close relation to that specific dragon.

Mystic Mongol described a second tier made up of, essentially, the directly-connected - direct ancestors, direct descendents, plus siblings and first cousins. The draketooth line is obviously not direct ancestors of the targeted dragon, nor are they siblings or first cousins. I suppose if the draketooth founder was a descendent of the target dragon, that could work to make the draketooth family all descendents as well...but chronologically, it seems very unlikely.

Otherwise, the draketooths would only be in what Mongol called the third tier, and their partners would not be affected. Since they were, it cannot be limited in the way he described...even apart from the fact that we know the spell kills the families of those partners, which implies a still wider scope.

Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Mar 6, 2012

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 00:53

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Alchenar posted:

Jesus people it's not a global genocide spell that would be a dumb spell to create and test.

Well, obviously. It's just far from clear why it's not a global genocide spell, since the descriptions of what it does all have global genocide as their logical consequence.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 01:35

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

farraday posted:

people who share blood with people who have the black dragons blood.

This is everyone. That's the problem.

I mean, it really gets accentuated when the spell is indicated to kill the other parent of a child of someone affected. Genealogically, that's crazy. Such a person would never be considered to be 'of the same bloodline' as the original target, as such things were reckoned - and yet they apparently die anyway. As do other children of that parent, with still less connection to the original target.

Once that's established, we've already blown past all logical barriers for where this thing would stop, and global genocide looks like the only plausible outcome.

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 02:44

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

farraday posted:

No it isn't, you're being pedantic.

The Draketooths are the bloodline of the original dragon,

How so? They're not descended from the original dragon. They're descended from some other black dragon related in some unspecified fashion to the original dragon. You have to bounce around already to get to the Draketooths.

quote:

the parents and half siblings and on down of the men and women they seduce for new blood are the secondary bloodlines. It travels no further. You want it to continue pinballing back and forth to meet some silly made up expectation that you should have given up a long time ago when we found out it didn't even kill all the black dragons.

Parents and siblings and cousins, yes, all the same things it affected of the original target. It's been pinballing around for a good long while to get the people we see it affecting, and there's no clear reason it would suddenly stop.

I didn't expect it to work that way, originally. I thought it was a perilous idea, but if you just track up X generations (maybe just along the male parentage? I don't know if dragons use a matrilineal genealogy) and then down to all direct descendents, well, that could be plausibly said to kill 'a bloodline' without killing everybody, or without even killing a species. But getting the other parents (and cousins of the other parents!) throws a spanner in the works, and makes the whole thing have no clear stopping point.

Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Mar 6, 2012

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 03:07

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Rumda posted:

just in case some one does

Note what I said originally: (item in italics added)

quote:

I mean, say Tarquin's one wife (penelope) had given him a child. Not only would the child have died, but Tarquin himself would have died - along with all his children, and all the wives he had children with.

If Penelope had a child with Tarquin, then that child would fall into the Dead side. That, in turn, would drag Tarquin over across the Dead line, by virtue of being the father of someone on the Dead side. Which would then kill Elan, Nale, Anel, Lane, Lena, Aeln, Nela...et al, as well as their mother. And supposing that Anel married and had a kid in some other family, the spell keeps on killing.

Yes, the specific Penelope-Tarquin connection we see would not carry the spell. But it is illustrative of how voracious and all-consuming the spell (again, as described) would be - given how many babies tend to get made, there are enough connections out there that all life would be doomed.

edit: But I commend you on the diagram. Spot-on.

farraday posted:

The problem is by your understanding of how it works it is either useless or genocidal with no middle ground. Since it is obviously neither you should be questioning your understanding of how it works instead of insisting the person who came up with it is wrong about what it would do.

I think it's fairly obvious that I'm saying there's a disconnect between what the spell is seen to do in the world and how its functionality is described. Familicide is not a real thing that exists, so it's perfectly possible for it to 'function' in a way that logically wouldn't result in what it 'actually' does.

Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Mar 6, 2012

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 07:56

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Move on? But, but...I have so many charts to make demonstrating the logical impossibility of the D&D-based world...

Yeah, it's not a big deal or anything. Hell, you could rectify it without too much trouble just by saying that the tracking of targets can only change direction (ancestors vs. descendents) so many times. It just struck me reading this one that 'Huh, it sounds like that would kill everyone.'

# ¿ Mar 6, 2012 08:06

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

DaveWoo posted:

FYI, Rich finally gave an official explanation to how Familicide works:

Step 1: Kill everyone with the original target's blood. This is a simple yes/no effect: Is a creature (the secondary target) related by blood to the original target at all, in any way? If yes, kill it. If no, move on. Number of generations or percentage of blood or direction doesn't matter.

Aaand that's back to killing literally everyone, since the Draketooth family provides a connection between a sizable number of human beings and the original target.

Oh, well. Comic strip.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2012 23:29

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

NihilCredo posted:

It's certainly not a big enough flaw to make me stop caring about OotS's plot, but I do think only the most wide-eyed of fanboys can read #901 without realising how savagely contrived it is.

Heh, guess what you're right in the middle of a nest of. :banjo:

# ¿ Jul 26, 2013 03:11

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

I liked Malack. He was such a reasonable vampire.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2013 10:23

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

But yeah, I think the root lesson here is that even if you're really skilled with magic and have a nice protective spell, you still shouldn't be that cavalier in exposing yourself to something that can utterly destroy you in approximately six seconds. It just opens up possibilities that you probably don't want to face.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2013 09:28

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Yeah, I don't feel like it really makes a lot of sense for Tarquin to do this. The lowly stock thing doesn't work for someone who isn't actually of noble extraction - he wasn't born into his position, he clawed his way up to it, so it's bizarre for him suddenly to be thinking like a blueblood. And in the past, he's taken "being a member of an adventuring party doing something important" as the effective demonstration of personal capability that, in fact, it is. Framing her dad as a test of her "worth" is kind of stupid when she's already in the middle of a saving-the-world plot.

In three strips, he's going from offering them resources to help them tackle the Important Problem faster, to tossing another obstacle in their way. Which is weird.

Strudel Man fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Aug 30, 2013

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 03:17

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Kajeesus posted:

It's not "your dad is a commoner," it's "your dad is a dick." Rich likes to show off similarities between people of conflicting alignments and goals, and Tarquin distrusts Haley for exactly the same reason Ian distrusts Elan.

He literally says "lowly stock." That doesn't mean 'dick,' it means 'commoner.'

Cat Mattress posted:

Clawing one's way to the top through ruthless intrigue and brutal conquest is exactly what defines a first-generation blueblood.

There's no such thing as a first generation blueblood - someone who earns or takes their position does not have the same mindset as someone born into it. The whole thing of nobility, of the idea of 'stock,' is the notion that you're special and deserving because of who your parents were. Tarquin's descendents a couple generations down the line could easily be nobility and think like nobility, or at least they could if he actually kept his children around to give powerful positions to and didn't kill them. But Tarquin himself is a common person who seized power, so it makes zero sense for him to consider 'common people' to be inferior as a class.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 22:00

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Mortanis posted:

Sabine grabs him, then uses her shapechange to take his form and systematically dismantle his glorious reputation, forcing him to watch as his legacy is reduced to ash. Only then is he allowed to die, reduced to nothingness. Anything less lets him bask in how sweet his ride was.

He still can, though. The thing about living the high life for a couple decades is that it's in the past, and it can't really be taken away from you. I mean if you stole his memories or something, maybe, but even then, it's kind of only a philosophical victory.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2013 23:26

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Mortanis posted:

While nothing short of a memory wipe can take away his "well, it's been a sweet ride" death-bed monologue, Tarquin certainly is the man who wants to become immortal by leaving behind a legacy on the world. Dismantling the legacy is probably the only way to actually wound the character in a meaningful fashion.

Eh, I don't really know that that's particularly true. I'm uncertain to what extent Tarquin really cares about his legacy or his legend or whatever. He certainly mentions it to Elan, but the first thing he talks about is just the simpler goal of living in comfort and ruling the roost. And much of his plan seems pretty incompatible with wanting personal glory. He's got a few statues of himself, but he's not officially anyone too important, and from the sound of things, he's not planning to make himself anyone too important at any time in the future. They're not even planning on uniting their three puppet empires into one grand less-puppety empire. Whatever "legacy" he would leave would probably not actually result in many people remembering him specifically, or even particularly anything he did.

Really, it doesn't seem like we can take his "I'll be a legend" bit as referring to anything that would make it into the historical record. Rather, it almost has to be something that practically breaks the fourth wall - that the story about him is or would be pretty awesome, even if the people in the world aren't going to know about him.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2013 09:33

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Cliff Racer posted:

You'll be full of disappointment to hear that you still have to breathe the air in the bubble then.

Not for the ioun stone, you don't.

That's not how the prophesy will be resolved, though.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2013 08:02

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

ikanreed posted:

Ugh. I think I reached a breaking point on the Deus Ex Machina discussion. Does it actually matter if it is or isn't? If it is, is this a bad twist because of it? I mean, it was fun, it was surprising, and it happening doesn't tell us plot resolution will immediately happen in a specific way. Who actually cares?

The quality of a story is a direct function of the predefined categories into which you can slot its elements.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2013 01:28

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# ¿ May 4, 2024 16:45

Strudel Man: May 19, 2003; ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

Why are all of Julio's puns about his carpet.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2013 07:01

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > The Order of the Stick: T-Rex, Troll Sex and Will Checks