The Answers Post (#9)

Hey kids, it’s a new set of Questions & Answers, submitted by Patreon supporters but readable by anyone—even you!

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1.) Trying my best: Will all the impressive capabilities shown by the Monster in The Darkness be mechanically (3.5 wise) explained by the reveal, or are some of them simply narrative tools to demonstrate how powerful he is / jokes?

Yes, at least as much as any other character’s capabilities reflect their game mechanics. Which is to say, loosely.

2.) Ace: Wikipedia lists your author credits on Monster Manual III, etc., but other than your work for WotC, the Physical OotS books I already own, and the blog section of GiantITP.com, is there any other places where I could find your written work? Have you ever put anything else out for the public I could peruse, or better yet, buy?

I don’t think so, at least not yet. I did not consider myself a writer when I participated in the Fantasy Setting Search, which lead to my work for Wizards of the Coast and subsequently to creating Giant in the Playground. So there’s nothing out there that I published before that time, and I haven’t written anything but OOTS of one type or another since I started the comic. I do hope that will change, possibly even before I reach the end of the story. But don’t worry: If I do publish something else, I will relentlessly shill it here and on the website so there’s no chance of you missing it.

3.) Ciekawe Czasy: Would you consider developing/outsourcing sourcebook for the OotS world, either as DnD product in whatever edition you see fit or some kind of weird system neutral style (I have no idea how that would work exactly). Ive recently finished campaign and we discussed next ones with friends. I think playing in your world with self aware characters may be fun.

I think I’ve already talked in a previous Q&A before about how I was planning to work on a D&D sourcebook for 3.5 Edition and then scrapped it when 4th Edition was announced. But the truth is, the OOTS world isn’t really interesting or different enough to warrant such a sourcebook. Instead, I want to focus on the idea of playing with self-aware characters and say: You can already do this! Any game in any setting can be an OOTS-style game if you follow these guidelines:

• For players, everything you say at the table is actually coming out of your characters’ mouths. All the jokes, references, system talk, analysis of tactics, etc. The only exceptions are descriptions of your physical actions, and if you accidentally refer to one of the other players by their real life name (in which case it is automatically translated to their character’s name). Consider your character’s situation when talking, too, so that if you’re in melee, maybe you’re out of breath as you discuss your attack roll.

• Likewise, for DMs: anything you want to say to the players that’s not a description (either of the scene or someone’s actions) should come out of the mouth of an NPC. So if you need to tell a player that no, the rules say they can’t move past the skeleton and then attack in the same round? Have the skeleton say it, indignantly. Feel free to use familiars, henchmen, or even spontaneously appearing imps to get your point across. Intelligent weapons are great for this, by the way.

• And then for both: nothing anyone says can get them in trouble, unless they really mean it. Comments and jokes can happen in the middle of 6-second combat rounds without the clock running out. NPCs have the remarkable ability to let mildly insulting nicknames slide with little more than some grumpy eyebrows, and they never hear whispers or asides. Players can make a joke about doing something stupid and funny without the DM immediately bringing consequences—there’s always a chance for another player to intervene before it pops off. Basically, you want to remove the negative consequences of saying whatever pops into your players’ minds so that they don’t overthink it.

That’s basically it. Everything else is down to developing a sense for comedy, which I can’t teach you. Wait, no, I should bloat this up to 120 pages and charge $30 for it! Pretend you didn’t read that!

4.) Travis: Any plans for an "Art of OotS" book or just a space to post cutting-room floor material? Would also love to see scripts or how you outline.

No such plan, sorry. A lot of the existing compilations have that kind of stuff between the chapters, but honestly I don’t generate a lot of unused material. When I cut something, I usually cut it in the script stage anyway.

As far as looking at my scripts, I can show you one, but I’ll warn you that it’s not very interesting. Here’s the script for #1297 in Scrivener:

Each clump of sentences is a panel, and each row of panels is separated by a solid line. As you can see, I barely include any descriptions at all because I’m the one drawing it and it’s easier to just hold in my head what I want it to look like than to spend a lot of effort describing it to myself. I also don’t tag the dialogue because I know who’s saying it by how I wrote it; my characters all use different enough diction and vocabulary when they speak that it’s easy for me to tell who said what. The script is primarily there for me to figure out the pacing of the panels and the exact wording of the dialogue, each line of which goes through potentially dozens of different versions before I settle on the right one. Even then, you can see I made some little tweaks here and there when I put it onto the page. Probably to account for the word balloon shape, but sometimes also for rhythm or comedic timing.

I do want to take a moment to say something about acts. If you look at my folders on the side, you’ll see that it says we’re in Act 3 of this book. I know a lot of people think in terms of “three act structure” where Act 3 is necessarily the climax, but that’s not how I organize things. Utterly Dwarfed ended up having nine acts; Blood Runs in the Family had ten. So please don’t see that and think we’re on the verge of being done, I assure you we’re not. The fight with Calder is the end of Act 3 and we’ll be moving right into Act 4 shortly, there’s just not a folder yet because I hadn’t started writing individual scripts for it when I took those screenshots (which was right after 1299 posted).

Here’s some of my outline (backing up to Act 1 of this book so as not to include any spoilers for the current scene):

Notice that I break this up by the “beat” not by the strip. Most of these bullet points ended up spanning multiple pages, and in some cases you can see that I didn’t know the specifics of how things were going to play out—just the end result. That allows me to preserve some spontaneity during a combat scene, or to adjust the action to better fit the page.

You may also see that I have “Decision:” written in several places. That’s a reminder to myself when outlining to be certain that the action regularly follows from actual choices characters are making based on their personality, goals, and available information. Specifically, this means situations that could plausibly go more than one way but a character is committing to one and only one path. I find that in my early writing, sometimes my protagonists sort of float along on the tide of events rather than shaping them, so I started doing this when plotting out an act. I feel like it’s helped.

Relatedly, note that the part where Roy and the gang realize something is going on with the cross-over traps isn’t in the outline at the end of Act 1, and that’s because it was originally going to be included later. I moved it up so I could end the act with the Order intentionally choosing a new attack strategy rather than just passively hiding.

The page labeled Scraps is where I put jokes or turns of phrase that I cut from a comic but I think I can use in the future, and the Character Arc documents are where I worked out what each character would be going through in this book. They look a lot like the outline, but there is no way I can show you any of those without massive spoilers.

5.) Erin Brioche: I noticed while reading Good Deeds Gone Unpunished that a lot of the stories had a more bittersweet tone to them compared to the comic, which I quite enjoyed. Any particular reason or is that just what fit?

It’s what fit. Azure City undergoes such a significant tragedy in the main comic that it was practically impossible not to reflect it in those stories, which either lead up to the invasion or show its aftermath. In several cases, I used characters that are already dead in the “present day” of the comic, which makes it difficult to create any sort of suspense. So I opted to highlight the dramatic irony inherent in the reader already knowing how things turn out, which  lends itself to a bittersweet tone.

6.) Johannes Olaf Nordeng: If Eugene was evil, would the blood oath have kept him out of hell?

No, because what’s keeping Eugene out of Celestia is his behavior after having sworn the Blood Oath, not anything inherent about the actual ritual. Since the evil afterlives are generally organized to be punishments, not rewards, no one in the Lower Planes would let little details keep them from claiming the soul of a powerful wizard. A Lawful Evil afterlife would point out that the text of the Blood Oath (as seen in Start of Darkness) says he will not rest until it is fulfilled—and that the endless torment they provide hardly qualifies as “rest” of any kind. Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil afterlives just wouldn’t care. It’s binding in the Lawful Good afterlife specifically because of how they feel about keeping promises.

So yes, Eugene could theoretically have avoided this whole problem if he had been willing to be condemned to the Lower Planes, but he doesn’t want to go there because that’s not his alignment.

7.) Finn the Human: Is there any plans on publishing a digital/pdf version of Snips, Snails, and Dragon Tales onto Gumroad similar to the recent digital Calanders?

Yes! It’s available from Gumroad right now, and I even included 6 extra bonus strips that weren’t in the print edition from the Gygax magazine project that I briefly worked on.

8.) DDL: Is there any major character death you wish hadn't happened?

I complain a lot about the narrative complications that Resurrection magic introduces to the story, but one of the perks is that this will never be a problem for me. Anyone I want to bring back, I can. Though I want to be clear that bringing someone back also does not necessarily imply that I regret their original death, because you know someone will make that argument if I don’t clarify it. Sometimes I just want to get a character out of the way for a little while.

9.) Quicksilver40: When you decided the end of the major story arc for the comic's world, did you roll a dice to determine if it'd end positively (or negatively) for the world?

No. Why would I do that? I don’t roll dice to determine any of the character’s moment-to-moment actions, so I’m certainly not going to leave the overall direction of the large scale narrative to chance.

10.) AJ: Did you know what Calder's role in the main strip would be when you featured them in the 2015 OOTS Calendar?

Yes. I drew the picture because I already had it in my head that the Order was going to fight a dragon in this dungeon, and it struck me that the only way for that to happen was if Serini’s friends had subdued one and trapped it there. I think at that point I hadn’t yet come up with the idea of all the monsters being frozen in suspended animation, though. I added that when I realized that Roy had grown enough that he would no longer barrel through a dungeon killing monsters if it meant disrupting defenses that were meant to stop Xykon.

11.) Petar Tasev: What are your thoughts on AI with regards of its implications on what you do now and your plans for future stories? Do you think we might avoid the looming collapse of shared reality?

Man, I am not qualified to really hold forth on this topic. I guess I’m not all that worried for myself. I have the twin virtues of already having an established audience and being kind of old, so it’s my hope that I can simply keep ahead of any advances that might threaten my ability to continue making a living this way. I’ve got no idea what anyone getting started now is going to do. The technology is not good enough yet to be real competition for most artists, but they’ve already mostly fixed the hand thing that I just made a joke about—so it’s getting better fast. I don’t know. Seems bad. Ominous foreshadowing!

12.) Anonymous (via private message): When did O-Chul find the time to practice Beekeeping? Are his adopted parents Apiarists?

I had to look that word up, but yes, that was the intended implication. His parents own a farm and that farm has beehives, among other things.

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This brings us to the end of another action-packed round of Patreon Q&A. New Question thread shortly.