The Answers Post (#8)

Hey, it’s a new set of Answers! That’s pretty cool, right?

1.) Joseph Meehan: With D&D staring down another (half-ish) edition update, how do you feel about OOTS commitment to sticking to 3.5? Do you worry about the comic losing relevance because the mechanical references are now a decade and a half old?

I’ll tell you this, I feel absolutely great about sticking with 3.5. Not due to anything unique about that ruleset (which has caused me plenty of headaches) but because of the very fact that the current rules have gone through so many overhauls and revisions in the years I’ve been writing the comic. What if I had switched to 4th Edition in 2008, only to have it change again to a completely incompatible system six years later in 2014? And then had to switch again this year? That would have been three complete overhauls of how things work in four books. And to what end? I’m not that interested in making observational jokes about game rules anymore anyway, so I would have experienced a great deal of disruption for practically no benefit.

As far as losing relevance due to the mechanical references being old, that ship has long since sailed. I’m not going to go back and rewrite the start of the comic with updated rules, so new readers already need to power through a few hundred strips of dated jokes regardless. I frankly don’t think it’s any more of an impediment than the early art is. But ultimately, my priority is writing a story, and stories are best served by having clear and (relatively) consistent rules for how things like magic work. That need outweighs any interest I could have in staying up-to-date with the latest developments in gaming.

2.) Leo Once3333: After having worked within the constraints of D&Ds magic system so long, have you considered coming up with your own? What do you think makes a good magic system?

I wouldn’t have much reason to come up with my own magic system without a story to tell that required one. But yes, in the event that I end up writing anything else in the fantasy genre, I imagine I would be inventing my own magic system.

For me, though, the main thing I care about with magic is whether or not it leads to bad storytelling outcomes. I know I said in the previous answer that magic should have clear and consistent rules—and that’s true, but I don’t actually need to know why those rules are the way they are. What’s important is whether the magic the heroes are able to deploy can get them out of the current situation or not. I like my magic like I like my Star Trek technology: Full of nonsense terms that the audience has to infer the meaning of based on contextual clues. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with a more rigorous approach, I’m just personally inclined to not bother.

3.) Will Hawkins: D&D and other tabletop games have gotten hugely popular on TwitchTV. Is there any chance you'd GM, play a PC, or make a cameo in a campaign or one-shot?

Well, I want to be perfectly clear that I have never been invited to take part in any such event. But no, zero chance. I am not a performer, and I have never been very comfortable with public speaking much less acting in-character. That has just never been my area of expertise when it comes to D&D, and I don’t think anyone wants to hear me stutter my way through half a session before I need to excuse myself. I had many great experiences with D&D when I was younger, but one thing they all had in common was that no one but the 4-6 people in the room with me were ever going to hear my mediocre acting skills. I understand that the hobby is changing—has already changed—but I can’t help consider whether or not I would have ever tried D&D if I had thought the games might be broadcast publicly. I sincerely think not. So I will happily leave the streaming to the younger generation, as long as they get off my lawn.

4.) Dylan Roy: With the news last year of Wizards' revision to the OGL, I was wondering if that added any stress and would have any effect on the comic, or if the comic is largely written in a way that the OGL is a non-issue?

It will have no effect. The comic is not a game manual and has never had anything to do with the OGL at all.

5.) Emile: I really appreciate the way you have woven together so many very distinct personalities within the main characters (both Team Good and team Evil). I wonder sometimes if there is a specific character or few characters who most closely resemble your own temperament or ideals? This may be too personal of a question but I've sometimes felt to ask because I really like Elan, and I noticed at one point that you had/have Elan as your avatar here on Patreon.

I talk a lot about how I didn’t really plan out the comic in the early days—how a lot of the decisions just sort of happened and that led to a bunch of weird situations later on down the line because I wasn’t thinking too much about the ramifications when I started drawing dumb stick figures making fun of D&D rules. But one of the common first-time-author pitfalls I did manage to avoid right from the start is that none of the characters are self-inserts. Do any of them have specific personality traits that I have? Probably, though I struggle to isolate one off the top of my head.

As far as why I use Elan as my avatar here and on Twitter: When I was starting the comic, I used an abstract avatar on the message board forum, and more than one early reader assumed I was a Black man based solely on Roy being the main character. So for situations where the character image is going to sit next to my actual given name and possibly be interpreted by newcomers as a depiction of me, I think it’s better for everyone if I avoid accidentally misrepresenting myself and use someone who matches me demographically. Of the main cast, that means Elan or Belkar, and I think Elan is a better indication of the general tone of the comic than Belkar is. (I would use my stick figure self-portrait but I don’t want to frighten new readers away with the soulless gaze of a cartoonist.)

6.) Hunting Horror: How did you pick which Norse Gods made it into the Northern Pantheon?

I mostly worked backwards from how I wanted the vote in the Godsmoot to shake out. I already had a number of gods that had appeared before in the Crayons of Time segment, so I decided how they were going to vote and what their reasoning would be. Then, since I knew that the final result needed to be a tie, I added extra votes to each side to make them even. I wanted each god to articulate a slightly different reason for voting the way they did, and it was also important that the results cut across alignment so that it wasn’t a Good vs. Evil debate. That left me with a list of slots that I needed to fill, and I just cracked open my Big Book of Norse Mythology and started matching names to votes.

7.) Will Hawkins: How did you know that Christoper Walken was going to be in Dune Part 2 when you wrote the dialog for strip 689?

I didn’t, it’s a reference to the music video for Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice, which quotes Dune.

8.) John Spender Alexander: Why was Tarquin so obsessed with Elan and Nale. Given how many women he's been with it seems unlikely they where his only kids.

They are his only kids. In contrast to Julio Scoundrél, who does indeed have many children out there, Tarquin would have been highly aware of the fact that multiple children means multiple heirs. And given how highly he thinks of himself, it would make sense that he would assume that any such heirs would be ruthlessly competent and thus a potential threat to him. Therefore, it follows that he would have been scrupulous with the use of magical birth control (which, I will remind you, exists). Especially after having already hit the narcissist jackpot with Nale, a son who served as a perfect reflection while having little chance of ever outshining him. Elan’s sudden appearance, on the other hand, provides an opportunity he had never considered—proving to the world that he’s so brilliant, the only hero that can defeat him is a mirror image of himself.

9.) Trying my best: How do you feel about the GiTP forums outside of the OotS context? Are you at all involved with them? Have you ever looked at the Iron Chef and the rest of the optimization competitions in the 3.5 forums?

I don’t read the GITP forums at all anymore, either in or out of the OOTS context. I’m happy to provide a place for people to have discussions with each other but it is not helpful for me or my goals (or my mental health) to read any of what’s written there. There was a time when I involved myself more in conversations, OOTS-based and otherwise, but that would inevitably lead to me saying something that I didn’t really think through entirely, which would then be plucked out of context and preserved forever as the Word of the Author. After years and years of doing this, I finally learned the lesson that maybe I should just give the whole thing a pass. These question-and-answer articles are, more than anything else, an opportunity to restore some of that interaction between me and my readers in a format where I can fully consider my responses before committing them to text, which has lead to about a 14% reduction in me saying stupid things I probably don’t mean. Progress!

10.) Jeremy: Do you think readers have a more difficult time connecting with a comic like Order of the Stick when most people have become accustomed to binge watching? Have you ever been tempted to "speed things up" and bring about a denouement more quickly than you had planned previously?

I have no way of knowing whether readers have a more difficult time connecting now than they once did, but ultimately I don’t consider it worthwhile to try to predict that sort of thing. My job, as I see it, is not to try and make all readers happy—that’s impossible anyway. My job is to execute the story in my head as well as I can by my own standards, and if I do that then I’m willing to let the chips fall where they may. This might mean that some potential readers have trouble connecting with my work due to the schedule or the pacing, but that’s OK.

Because yes, early in the strip’s history, I did have a few situations where I cut things short due to in-the-moment feedback from the audience that it was taking too long (the New Year’s Eve scene and some scenes that became bonus material in Don’t Split the Party, in particular). In every one of those situations, I regretted it later. And I care more about how I feel about my work then about how anyone else—how everyone else—feels about it. So the remainder of the comic is going to take as long as it takes, but the good news is that everyone reading this gets to make their own decision on when and how they want to read it, whether that’s page-by-page as it’s published or dropping by periodically to catch up on whatever’s happened since their last visit, or even waiting for the final book to be published.

11.) Joseph MeehanL Are you still working on new AMFES sets or adding VTT tokens to older sets?

Yes, I am already working on the next AMFES one, Autumn 2, the sets just take a long time to finish. As far as the virtual tabletop tokens for the older sets…uh, I kinda forgot I was supposed to do those. I’ll try to get to them after the first of the year.

12.) Ludovic Gelli: In #737, Malack claims that Death gods and their worshippers being necessarily Evil is a misconception and that Neutrality suits them better. Is that your own opinion on the subject (when it comes to world-building, not real-life religions), or just Malack's (assuming he was being honest)? And does it hold true in OOTS-world? We know Hel is evil and Malack planned to carry out daily mass-murders in Nergal's name, so (unless he wasn't aware of it) he is too.

I don’t really have a personal opinion on the subject. What Malack says is entirely reasonable, but so is the idea that a culture could fear death so much that they conceive its personification as inherently malevolent—that they remember the deaths that seem particularly cruel or capricious and gloss over the people dying peacefully in their bed surrounded by loved ones. Either one is viable from a storytelling perspective.

As for Malack, no, he is not being honest in that scene. He is deflecting Durkon’s (entirely correct) initial reaction with a bit of verbal sleight-of-hand. He never actually says that either he or Nergal is Neutral, merely that it would be logically consistent if they were. And it would be! But they’re not.

13.) Ben Wray: Will we ever see art of Laser-Snail?

Obviously, now that I drew that, I put it on a t-shirt.

——————

That’s it for this time. I’ll put up a new Questions thread soon. And remember that I periodically go back and cull older threads for questions, too, so if your submission didn’t get answered, I might circle back to it later. Or maybe I never will, because even if it’s a perfectly fine legitimate question my answer might be something banal or redundant. Who can say? Only those who...

Explore the Promo Dungeon!

As per protocol, letting everyone know about three merch situations without making a separate post:

• First, there's a new holiday ornament and a whole pile of new t-shirt designs over at CafePress. This includes the above Laser Snail shirt, but also some designs that people might want to actually buy.
• Second, there's a 50% off sale on the all the regular OOTS e-books in PDF format over at Gumroad until December 8. Use the code LaserSnail at checkout, because that's apparently the theme of this whole thing now?
• Third, I also put PDF versions of the wall calendars we sold from 2014-2020 up on Gumroad in a big discount bundle (like 75% off for the total). They're not good for telling the date but they're still filled with art and jokes that aren't seen anywhere else.

That's it for real now.