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Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

ASMR Yodeling posted:

Hmm... any chance that Sabine will get Nale "raised" as a some kind of demon? It would follow the same arc as Durkon- revive a boring, "done" character with some serious power-up and a more direct connection to the lower planes. It feels to me that Nale will still have story usefulness as long as Sabine is involved; all those "we'll be together... forever" hints that Rich has been dropping about them.

Nale's character arc is basically defined as wanting to play with the Evil big boys but not having the skills or cunning to back it up. What exactly do you think is going to happen to him in a world filled entirely with centuries old Tarquins except they respect him even less? Hell is not a kind place to a wannabe, and powerful fiends earned it in the exact same way that Nale has consistently failed at in life.

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Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Lurdiak posted:

I think it's kind of clear by Nale's final words that what he wanted all along was to be free, but that's kind of difficult to do when your dad's a lawful evil control freak.

If he wanted to be free he could have just, you know, not come back to his father's empire. Or not started a coup in the first place so he wouldn't become a wanted criminal. Or not tried to kill Malack for no adequately explained reason. He doesn't just want to be free, he wants to prove to his father that he's worth taking seriously. And he got his wish.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Rand Brittain posted:

I mean, Tarquin gave Nale every chance to live the life Tarquin wanted for him.

Nale could've just run away and lived on another continent. It's not like Tarquin was actively chasing him down, other than putting up wanted posters. Nale chose to come back and get involved in this. Because Nale's life revolved around Tarquin more than Tarquin's ever revolved around Nale.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
How is necromancy any different from Dominate? You're just dominating a disembodied soul and shackling it to a corpse. It's still a being that you're enslaving with magic. It's not like you're just telekinetically moving bones around in some morally neutral manner. And if you were, then why would the spell even need a corpse in the first place? It would be just as easy to animate any non-living object. ...Which is literally what a golem is, except even golems involve enslaving earth spirits.

I mean, it's fantasy so you could easily imagine a corpse-puppeteering style of magic that doesn't mess around without souls or anything, but that's not really necromancy at all, as D&D imagines it.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Roland Jones posted:

Yeah, the idea is that none of the doors have the real gate, and are just there to kill or infinitely delay people trying to find it. Serini was a Rogue, after all.

That's fair, but putting it in the statue in particular would be dumb because that just draws attention to it. It's the first thing someone would think of as soon as they get sick of the tunnels, as demonstrated by the fact that everyone in this thread thinks it's so obvious. If it's at that general location at all (which it probably is since her diary has been accurate so far) it'd be a better idea to just have it actually under the mountain but not connected to any of the tunnels. Just a totally sealed underground chamber with no marker.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
TBH I'm a little shocked that we haven't spent the last 3 pages arguing about exactly what kind of monster was just summoned and how the team can fight it at their assumed level.

Well, I guess this isn't quite the community that would do that.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
I'm too late.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
A general-purpose alignment chart:

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Fuego Fish posted:

In the list of problems with Goblins (and Thunt), the drawing doesn't even make the top three. Unless you count "holy poo poo why is there so much unnecessary body horror" as coming under the umbrella of "drawing", but I'd say it's more to do with awful narrative (the number one problem Goblins has).

I don't know anything about Goblins or its author, but from what I've heard from other transgender writers, body horror and transhumanism are both pretty common as ways to express/cope with the general feeling of being uncomfortable in your own body at all times.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

MonsterEnvy posted:

Magic the gathering made that mistake once.



It's actually the same word: the animal is named after a Latin word for spirit or ghost. I guess the people who named them thought their big eyes were spooky.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

SlothfulCobra posted:

I think it's weird to think of yourself as blackwater in a fantasy setting, since what's notable about blackwater isn't that they're an amoral band of people who kill for money and have a tendency to make whatever they're involved with worse. It's that they're all that in an era where that is no longer considered acceptable in the mainstream.

Specifically, if you go back just 400 years, not even all the way to the medieval period that most fantasy settings nestle in, Europe was crawling with mercenary groups making war for paychecks, and for whom it was standard practice to extort villages for loot just while passing by, to say nothing of what they did when actually on the offense. Armies in those days would have to forage for food wherever they went, which meant just as much stealing from locals as it did hunting or gathering. People didn't like it, but that was the deal with war, and modern concepts of peaceloving or pacifism did not hold much political sway over the romanticism of war and combat. That's how the classic RPG murderhobo party is plausible in the first place.

And speaking of the classical romanticism about war, a lot of that went into D&D, and without even getting into the particulars of how natives would've been depicted in media during Gygax's formative years, the base concept that there are people out there where the best solution is just to murder them dead without even building up a narrative around it is a fairly loaded concept. The concepts of "these are bad people so they must be killed by the heroes" and "these people were killed by the heroes, therefore they must have been bad" are closer than you'd think.

People hated mercenaries back then too. The word "mercenary" even means "amoral and self-interested" when used as an adjective.

Throughout history most cultures have treated mercenaries as no better than bandits, because that's what they were. You're right that "that's how it was" but that doesn't mean it was "acceptable." It was just another sucky thing that they had to deal with.

Blackwater's big innovation was simply to stop calling themselves "mercenaries."

Clarste fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Nov 5, 2019

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Some Guy TT posted:

Unlikely. Remember that the Oracle's unfinished prophecy implied that V is going to die in a way that can somehow be convolutedly tied to an action taken by Belkar.

Belkar's question for the prophecy was a poorly thought out string of "will I get to kill X or Y or Z?" The Oracle answered "yes" which logically means that at least one of those things will come true, and Belkar had no way of knowing which one. The fact that he ultimately killed the Oracle completely fulfilled the vaguely worded prophecy, so it provides no more specific insight into the future.

Clarste fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Dec 1, 2019

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Some Guy TT posted:

I was referring to this strip-

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0567.html

We don't know what the complicated logic was going to be for V's death, since Belkar interrupted the Oracle before she could finish. Although I only just noticed that the wording here is pretty cagey. Being trapped in the afterlife could just mean that Belkar caused V to make the deal with the Fiends and/or create the circumstances that would cause them to activate it. I'm still expecting V to not get a happy ending in any case, since whatever her moral culpability now that she realizes what was going on, Familicide was still an unforgivably evil act.

The whole point of that strip was that the Oracle was making up bullshit in order to prove the prophecy had already come true and therefore that Belkar wouldn't need to kill the Oracle to fulfill it. Which wouldn't even make any sense if the prophecy required required him to kill all of them somehow.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
Every species has a Drizzt.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
Re: TvTropes

I'm another immigrant from there and honestly all the horror stories about awful tropes and awful tropers I hear here surprise me probably more than they did you guys over here. It seems to be a function of digging into the deepest darkest corners of the site, rather than anything representative of everyone there. I mean, SA just recently had the whole FYAD scandal ourselves, didn't we? A big enough forum or wiki will always have functionally multiple distinct communities that rarely interact. And sometimes those isolated pockets are awful.

Re: The Comic

The punchline left me wondering for a half-a-second if this was just Eugene pretending to be Julia through some kind of illusion or something.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

I think when I first read about them in some source book of wiki way back, it mentioned that the process of willingly becoming a baelnorn was as strenuous as that of becoming a lich, except instead of big spell slots and expensive components, you had to do a bunch of meditation and rituals. Either way, the posting seems to come with a preternatural disposition towards living the rest of your eternal life as a sort of mountain hermit.

I'm now imagining that it's like the self-mummification of Buddhist monks.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Raenir Salazar posted:

There's something funny about the thought of Redcloak retreating to become a Luke Skywalker style hermit using hit and run attacks to keep fighting a war that was lost 30 years ago like some of the Japanese soldiers that didn't get the memo that the war was lost.

Just for the record, those Japanese soldiers did get the memo, but they thought the memo was enemy propaganda.

Which might perhaps be relevant to Redcloak's state of mind too.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
You'd think an omnipotent, omniscient deity would be able to take birth control into account.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
That is exactly the visual effect Rich used last time Redcloak cast implosion. I think it's supposed to look like space is starting to warp.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

He did task Tsukiko with trying to figure out what exactly Redcloak's part of the ritual entailed. I have a hunch he knows a lot more than he lets on about the actual ritual, as is his MO.

That's because he's a sorcerer, not a wizard. He's never studied magical theory, so he needed someone else to actually analyze the ritual.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Colonel Cool posted:

I think it's possible to do some interesting things with a setting where there's intrinsic Good and Evil metaphysical forces at play, that aren't necessarily the same things that we mortals think of as good and evil. It can be fun in a bizarro world sense to have characters like the necromancer that's willingly tainting his soul with metaphysical Evil raising zombies in order to achieve good ends. Or the rear end in a top hat paladin that holds strictly to the letter of Good specifically in order to keep his powers, while caring nothing for the morality behind his actions.

But I don't think most people using alignment care about exploring the weirdness inherent to such a setting, which is where alignment loses all value. In my opinion, anyway.

In Touhou there's this thing called the Ministry of Right and Wrong which governs the afterlives, but they aren't like an intrinsic part of it, they just sort of took over the planes that souls drift to when they die and decided to sort them out manually. And their morals are kinda weird like "it is Good for humans to die, for if humans do not die then their souls can never be judged. Therefore it is Evil for humans to extend their lifespans" or "it is Good for monsters cause mayhem, for that is their Purpose and to go against their Purpose is Evil." Mostly it gets played as this bizarre bureaucracy where Heaven is refusing to accept new applicants because it would lower their property values and Hell had to vacate and move elsewhere because they went bankrupt.

Like, no one in the series actually believes in that morality, but those are the people who decide where your soul goes, so...

Clarste fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Aug 11, 2020

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
When I was applying to law school I wrote in the essay that I liked Magic the Gathering.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
Even if you could destroy the phylactery with Disjunction, that wouldn't actually destroy the lich because the lich is only destroyed when both the phylactery and the skeleton are destroyed at the same time. So it'd be no different from just destroying the phylactery normally. Practically speaking, it seems to be less that the lich's soul is always stored in the phylactery and more like the phylactery acts a beacon to draw the soul in on death, preventing it from passing on to the afterlife normally. And then the body regenerates and the soul returns to the body or whatever. As mentioned earlier, a lich only feels a vague sense of dread when the phylactery is destroyed, and can make a new one given enough time.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

PMush Perfect posted:

He’s a Sorcerer, he’s got spell slots for days.

It's been a while since I actually played D&D, but I thought Sorcerers got less spell slots in exchange for the flexibility of not having to prepare spells?

Edit: Now that I think about it, maybe that was less total spells known.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
It has been noted that the color/shape of the cloak is quite similar to the random hole-worshiping cultist the Order of the Scribble fought in their flashback. Who has appeared in... exactly one panel.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Len posted:

It's a cloak that isn't the same color or billowing? That seems like a stretch

I mean, I wouldn't bet on it, but if we guess everything we'll eventually be right!

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
Well, barring some huge twist that changes everything, I think it provides enough context that we don't need to see a full flashback to understand it or anything.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
It would certainly make sense for Serini to befriend the bugbears who live in her gate-fortress.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Raenir Salazar posted:

He did forget the exact significance as to why Greenhilt is the larger threat than the Paladins.

There is literally no reason why Greenhilt should be a larger threat to him than the paladins, other than the fact that he's one of the main characters we've been following and the paladins are not. It wasn't a misdirection, what the MitD said was absolutely, 100% correct.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Raenir Salazar posted:

I'm not sure what a misdirection has to do with anything; the point was to point out that while Redcloak remembered that he really should kill Roy for some reason he couldn't when prompted remember why when trying to convince Xykon. The point being that Redcloak isn't that detail oriented to remember Nale.

Well, my point was that there actually is no particular reason why he should kill Roy. It's not that he forgot, he just realized on thinking about it that Greenhilt wasn't as important as he thought.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Vizuyos posted:

It's basically the same as why Redcloak tried to murder Durkon on sight and had to be talked down before negotiations could even get started: anyone he can identify as definitely working to thwart their goals, he wants to murder on general principle. Even if they're not a huge threat, he sees no reason why he shouldn't take a few extra minutes to exterminate any potential obstacle. He's always giving it his all to kill whoever threatens his personal goals. He knows the Order is trying to keep Team Evil away from the Gates now, and that's all the reason he needs to murder them, whether they're strong enough to be a serious challenge or not.

Xykon, on the other hand, has no problem letting someone go if they're not in his immediate way, he doesn't feel like they're a serious threat, and he doesn't feel like it'll be particularly fun or amusing. When he met Roy at Azure City, he straight-up told Roy to come back later when he was high enough level for a proper climatic boss fight.

Yes, Redcloak has a GENERAL reason to kill Roy, same as he has a general reason to kill anyone in his way, but no particular reason.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

GlyphGryph posted:

How old is this? Because I forget the setting but I literally played a tabletop game where dwarves worked that way like a decade or two ago.

It's a tumblr post from August, 2019. I doubt it's a repost of anything older since this guy posts weird tabletop RPG ideas on his blog like every other day. He's even turned a few of them into actual weird RPGs with rulesheets. Since I guess that's his job or something.

Clarste fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Apr 26, 2021

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Acerbatus posted:

I think rich said traquin is just straight 20 in fighter or something.

I think his "warlord" aspects are just a joke about how in older editions the character advancement for fighters was them accumulating their own small army.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Gynovore posted:

Nah, Tarquin knows that Xyxon and/or the Snarl are the main villains. He's an optional sub-boss.



No, he just thinks that the party needs to beat all their Act 2 enemies before coming around to defeat him for the climax of Act 3. He wants them to deal with him last because he's the final boss in his mind. And any other adventures Elan has in the meantime are simply to help prepare him for that confrontation.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
Is it just me or was Durkon's accent a little thicker than usual this time?

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Geshtal posted:

Pandas do. Every panda on earth hates every other panda and will only breed under the most begrudging of circumstances.

IIRC, the problem is specifically breeding them in captivity. Turns out they don't like having sex in a cage with researchers watching, who knew? Out in the wild they do whatever, but the main problem is the loss of habitat.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.
While we're derailing anyway, I've been thinking a lot recently about how Patriot from the mobile game Arknights is sort of a more sympathetic take on Redcloak, in that he is an antagonist who fights for an oppressed group and is motivated almost solely by the sunk cost fallacy ("I can't stop fighting, or else all their deaths will have been in vain"). The basic thrust of his character is that he's a living legend, an ancient general from a long-lived race (he's ~200 years old), but with every battle he's won he's lost more and more soldiers and loved ones, until all he has left to fight for is the fight itself, which he is determined to win at any cost. And he no longer trusts anyone else to accomplish anything because he's seen too many young people die for nothing, including his own children. Which is what puts him in conflict with the protagonists.

He also has a sort of similar thing going on where he is working with another antagonist whose motives are much less sympathetic, and he plans to get as much use out of her as he can before killing her himself. Although it's more tragic since she was sort of a daughter to him until she jumped off the deep end, but the fact that he's willing to kill her anyway just shows how brutally determined he is to sacrifice everything in order to justify all the previous sacrifices.

I get the impression that there isn't much overlap in the fandoms for these works, so I'm not expecting much of a conversation to emerge from this, but I thought they were an interesting comparison.

Clarste fucked around with this message at 22:09 on May 23, 2021

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

YggiDee posted:

Koalas are easy to dunk on, but just for some clarification, many small mammals have smooth brains, including rabbits, squirrel monkeys, rats, and opossums.

This is more of an indication that you can't measure intelligence by how smooth the brain is. Rats at least are plenty intelligent, because you need to be to be an omnivore who has to adapt to changing food circumstances.

Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Gynovore posted:

...then how do you explain the dinosaurs???? Checkmate!!!!

You mean the completely modern, living animals used as mounts in the desert empire?

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Clarste
Apr 15, 2013

Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Android Blues posted:

To be fair, Girard's plan would have worked really well if he hadn't failed to account for the possibility of an elf wizard he'd never met being a complete monster and wiping out his entire bloodline, with a single spell, by accident.

Speaking of which, both Girard and Soon had set up organizations that could continue the work of protecting the Gate after they died, but does Serini have anything like or is she just planning to live forever?

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