Quote Originally Posted by hamishspence View Post
Probably. Of all the antagonists in the comic, Redcloak seems like one of the most "filled out" so to speak.

And after Miko, he's probably one of the ones who generates the strongest disagreements.

A summary of the two most common viewpoints on him (from TV Tropes- sorry about that ):
Those both sound quite accurate and not really mutually exclusive.


So glad everyone likes that description. You wouldn't believe how many times I had to rewrite it and argue with people in the discussion pages to keep that on the Anti Villain page.

Giant, thanks for that very interesting insight into the possible consequences for the actions of the paladins. It gave me at least a very valuable understanding that otherwise didn't really come across.

Originally Posted by Dilettante:
No, we were both pretty clear that Roy was good, which is why we kept reading. But we kept going back to "but who's defining good" and similar questions.
Originally Poster by SPoD:
The answer is, "You, the reader." Your view of right and wrong is what is important, not what the gods decide. A lot of what happens in OOTS seems designed to provoke the reader into thinking about what makes someone a good guy or a bad guy--and it's not whether or not they're a god or a paladin or a goblin.
Agreed, SPoD. I feel that the last sentence in particular has either always been a central theme, or at the least became one since the comic started turning more to drama than comedy. (And you can argue that the point about how species/color doesn't and shouldn't count for anything is made as early as strip 13, with everyone's reaction to Belkar).

Most of us, (I'd like to think) would be horrified by a game that consisted of nothing more than going around and killing humans with different skin color or culture so we could take their stuff. Yet most players have few qualms about doing that in a game, provided it's a different species. (But hey, they're different and inferior, so it's ok to kill them, just like it was ok for so many cultures on earth to do that to other people they knew to be different and inferior to themselves). OOTS definitely calls that tendency out, and challenges us to think about our attitudes towards sentient beings, regardless of their differences.

I've always thought that one of the neatest things I've read on this forum was one poster talking about DMing his (or her) games, and being disturbed by the implications of OOTS and the attitudes of his players. So he started making the random mooks his players were encountering humans rather than goblins, orcs, etc. Suddenly, rather than just killing everyone, his players tended towards encouraging the bad guys to surrender, healing ones that lived through the encounter, taking them prison/to jail, and so on.

Sure, most of us who play D&D or read fantasy stories do it for a little lighthearted escapism, but those issues and when we decide that a creature life is worthless are certainly worth thinking about. I'm just glad they've been handled by a writer as talented and considerate as Rich.