Quote Originally Posted by The Giant View Post
There seems to be some confusion over why Roy is taunting Thog, as well as some people who think Roy should have just jumped out of the way, so maybe I should break this down:

Thog is dungeoncrashing Roy, an alternate class feature for fighters from Dungeonscape (remember that Thog has two levels of fighter). This allows him to bull rush Roy into a solid object, doing 4d6 points of damage plus twice his Strength bonus (which is very high for a raging half-orc barbarian) to both Roy and the object. This is the same technique Thog used earlier on him in the arena.

Roy is using his Intimidate skill to taunt Thog into dungeoncrashing him into three specific load-bearing columns, one after another. The rules are that there is no dungeoncrash damage unless the user successfully bull rushes the target. If Roy dodges out of the way, there is no damage to the column and therefore, no way for the roof to collapse. Roy does not have the ability to damage the columns by himself without a weapon, so he is using Thog's special ability against him. Roy is thus willing to take a beating in order to stop Thog, because he does not have the means to stop him otherwise.

If you think that Roy was just getting his ass kicked until he got lucky and the roof fell, you are fundamentally misunderstanding what happened. Maybe that's my fault, but I was loathe to put in a clumsy speech balloon like, "If I can just get him to bull rush me into those three columns..."
Ah, that should make things more clear. Though maybe it would have been better to mention that Thog had the dungeoncrashing variant beforehand.

Yeah, the speech balloon would have been clumsy, but perhaps if, between the panels of Roy looking at Zzdrti getting carried off and coming up with his idea (Where he has the expression), you could have put in a panel of Roy glancing at the columns. I'm just throwing a thought out there though.