MitD XIX: The Potted Plant Is Starting To Look Reasonable

[Metastachydium]

Because I disagree with you in what constitutes both "simpler" and "contrived". I find the slaad evolution/reproduction cycle too contrived for MitD. I accept this is my personal opinion. But it is also a con, and as such is listed. I do not find the protean steady eye issue as contrived for MitD, but I accept this is not a universal fact, and that it is a valid con, and as such is listed. You are reversed in both of those opinions. Everyone else in this thread will have their own ranking for those two things, as well as for a bunch of others.

What I meant there was "it has yellow eyes is simpler than it doesn't really have yellow eyes, or eyes or whatever and it's just a cosmetic effect for REASONS" in particular, and that's applicable to a whole lot of things (such as "it just has the same Teleport ability that the other one would have had to borrow from something even more obscure"). Otherwise fair, of course.

Just as, yes, I stand by the fact that I divide demons/devils/whatever the neutral ones are called into two groups, "those that look like traditional demons" and "those that don't", and you do not. And once that has been established, it is clearly an impasse and I'm not going to waste time trying to convince you, because I gave it my best shot and it clearly didn't work, so I moved on.

And I'll maintain that's like an extraterrestrial complaining that a weasel shouldn't be recognizable to a biologist as a caniform carnivore (despite being one) because it doesn't look like a hyena (despite that one being a feliform). But okay, moving on.

And you think the plausibility of those is reversed. Which is fine, but the part where you think your judgement of plausibility vs simplicity is somehow a universal yardstick is not.

Again, the argument to simplicity is more about one option just having certain abilities, where the other has to have a varying amount of control over unrelated abilities to acquire and lose the same abilities as above, purely on the basis of story convenience.

And putting back my curator hat, the FBS does not exist to house creatures you personally think are not "stupid". It exists to showcase a range of options of what we have found so far. The way to curate it should be by bringing in even more candidates that fit even better, which would cause me to want to raise the bar to keep the numbers in the 6-12 range. Which is why I do now regret opening the door to just voting the ones we have out, but what's done is done.

[Ugly sarcastic grin (, the FLOWER equivalent of).] Then why don't we put the Dao in there?

You mean *other than* arguing with each other?

Yes. If we are not here to endlessly argue, then why are we here enedlessly arguing?!

The eyes thing bothers me less because I think for the Protean to work in a visual medium you want to have one consistent design element in a boiling sea of changing parts, and the best option for that is the eyes.

Again, he doesn't need that (due to having the darkness and the umbrella), but yeah, this might be a mighty overdiscussed matter indeed.

I dislike the Slaad idea because it's boring. It's like revealing the Monster to be a Beholder or a Dragon, it's an iconic and recognizable D&D monster and the Monster feels like it should be something more esoteric and obscure than that.

Meh. A Beholder or a Red Dragon is boring. An Overseer (a Beholderkin that looks like a massive, many-eyed Roper made of molten tar) or a Spelleater (a Dragon that is basically a big cylindrical maw on four legs that eats spells) isn't. A crazy epic version is esoteric enough for me.

So I'll change my argument to point out that white slaads are large, and that's too big for the umbrella,

Bye-bye, all the candidates in the FBS section, including the Protean!

and white slaads don't have child versions like we tend to assume for everything else.

Technically, they do. Those are just called, say Green Slaadi.

ETA: going to go ahead and clarify I can picture MitD to currently be Large if his species is quadrupedal (or other "longer than tall", which is the case for horses & proteans).

A Protean's Space and Reach are the same. It is very strictly a Large (Tall) rather than a Large (Long) class entity, so that's an argument against it.

Yeah, I got that part. (There's a good story behind the avatar, but also, I could reasonably be said to look like that right now. I need to get my beard trimmed before I travel next week.)

Heh.

That was just the first example I thought of. The point is that you're talking about why an extremely defining feature of a character in a guessing game is not revealed.

I dunno... it's like if I was telling a story where I had a mystery James Bond actor in it who I didn't want to reveal until the end, and you're saying it can't be Sean Connery because I'm not constantly talking about how Scottish he is.

Except, Sean Connery is a fitting option there because he is a James Bond actor, not because he is Scottish. If he would need to be Scottish to qualify, because being Scottish would be one of the ways to meet the criteria (as with the Protean which ios only really a good option because of the shapeshifting), on the other hand… (Yeah, I don't think this actor analogy is really working.)

It doesn't disqualify the Protean if the eyes are the same eyes, though.



I find that there are many reasonable explanations, and I have no idea which one is right, but only one of them needs to be-- or even one Rich came up with that nobody else has thought of. The fact that there are so many explanations I find plausible is sufficient for my standards, given how much better I think the Protean fits everything else about MitD than any other species.

Like I said, it's not even the eyes. It's the "full control over the powers even if that takes deliberate actions when convenient, "no such thing when that's not convenient" (Circus scene), and "has no idea what's even ever going on because convenient". I find that a jumbled mess raising more questions than it solves.

Having said that, after catching up on the thread I see you are going with the Slaad. To the Slaad, I think the fact that Rich has already portrayed one is a big strike against it, since showing us a creature we've already seen wouldn't be much of a reveal.

"We have seen Mimics, so showing us another compulsive shapeshifter wouldn't be much of a reveal."

Plus the cons Grey Wolf listed in his post, plus the ones in the FBS post at the top of the thread. I think these are significantly bigger cons than the Protean has.

Let's go through those!

Tricky reproduction cycle means black/white slaads are unlikely to have a "father" (unless it is of the foundling variety).

I already addressed this one through the Limbo ONS argument. It's right there in the comic.

MitD would have to be over 300 years old, having evolved through green, grey and death slaad varieties. This does not mesh well with his mental characteristics. (unless Rich has bent the reproduction flavor text)

I already addressed this through the Elves in Diapers argument. Also from something explicitly brought up in the comic itself.

It may be Product Identity (listed as such in d20.org, but not in the WotC legal documentation).
Even if it is, it may not be impossible for Rich to use it for free, unlike trademarked creatures.

MEH. We have a Beholder as an important named character and we have already seen a Slaad portrayed (two, if Elan's shoulder Slaad counts).

Can talk common, and thus wouldn't surprise the hunters that he can talk.

Same goes for the Protean.

It may be too recognisable as a humanoid toad to fit the wizard's comment in the circus scene.

It is a vaguely luminiscent, bipedal toadlike creature with very untoadlike teeth, long arms and claws &c. I have seen toads before. If something of this size that looks a lot more like a normal toad stared at me from a stage, I would go all "I've never seen anything like that before", and I'm kinda surprised you wouldn't.

And if you mean recognizable as a Slaad, rather than a toad… There are a lot of batrachian Outsiders that aren't Slaadi and are easier to recognize than anything epic-level, including the Neraph and the Hezrou.

I also can't think of a story-based reason for Rich to choose a slaad, and as far as I know no one has suggested one. Since I think Rich's choice was to serve the story first, the fact that I do think there's a thematic significance in the Protean makes it even stronger in my mind.

Funnily enough, it can even pull the "I can change!" line I praised you for coming up with earlier, through going Black.

And you're not helping by saying things like "no matter how many weird hoops we have to jump through for that." You mean the "weird hoop" of "accessing another creature's powers, which it can do"? Or "we haven't seen its eyes move all over the place, no matter how many plausible explanations there are for that, or that it's just an assumption based on how you think Proteans have to act"? Doesn't seem "many" or "weird" to me.

No, I'm mainly talking about "it can or cannot do its thing as advertised, depending on how convenient it is for the argument you're making". I explained and illustrated that with examples repeatedly.

At this point, you're adding information I didn't include in the bolded. And you're picking traits that are not visually defining in a comic strip.

But that's the issue. I was deliberately trying to make my work harder than it had to be. Visually, A White Slaad in magical darkness is really just two yellow eyes in magical darkness. There's literally nothing one needs to change about it to fit what we see.

EDIT:

For me, the eyes thing would be the equivalent of you actually talking about how irish he was. It seems to me talking about how irish the actor was if he was actually Sean Connery would be crossing a line.

And I think this only works if Sean Connery was secretly part-Irish and people just didn't know about it or think about it. (I guess the metaphor falls apart here, because I'm not sure how "capable of being Irish if he puts his mind to it," or "depicted as Irish for reasons of the medium," or "kept to look Irish by his handlers," would work.)

Okay, I see it now. Think about it this way: makeup/costume is a powerful tool, especially these days. It is possible to disguise an elderly Sean Connery as a young woman. So, if you see a young woman on screen, that's no reason not to suspect that she is Sean Connery and it is entirely fair to make a guessing game about this.