Results 61 to 66 of 66
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2010-03-21, 02:47 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Apr 2007
- Location
- Tampa, FL
- Gender
Re: SOD debate between me and my friend. (spoilers I guess)
I'm still not sure I understand your difficulty the gods basically being ultrapowerful children is a staple of mythology. Greek, Norse, Sumerian, Chinese, you name it.
OotS at least allows there to be higher principles of alignment that supersede even them.
Has Rich created a crappy world? Yes, and based on multiple indications (including his post above) I feel confident in saying that it was intentional. The thing about good writing is that he can't simply tell us how crappy things are; he has to show us. That means he needs characters that aren't card-carrying villains practicing racism, injustice, and gratuitous violence.
So just hang in there, and wait until you see the end before judging the whole.
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2010-03-21, 03:32 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2006
- Gender
Re: SOD debate between me and my friend. (spoilers I guess)
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.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back it up. Thor has never sanctioned any such thing, and has no power over what the Twelve Gods do with their followers. And we have only tentative data on how much Thor was involved in the creation of the fodder races to begin with, or what rules he might set down for his followers when dealing with them.
It's pretty easy if you have no faith in the authority of gods in the first place.
Except Roy isn't trying to oppress the goblins; they don't even really figure into his decision-making. Roy is trying to stop Xykon, and that is pretty much guaranteed to be the right thing to do. The interesting thing will be to see how Roy deals with Redcloak and his people after Xykon is defeated (assuming Redcloak is still alive at that point).
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2010-03-21, 05:31 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jun 2007
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2010-03-21, 05:58 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2007
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2010-03-22, 12:48 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2006
- Location
- Brazil
- Gender
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2010-03-22, 08:52 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Jan 2007
- Location
- New York
- Gender
Re: SOD debate between me and my friend. (spoilers I guess)
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.
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.Wandering, but not lost
I don't care, I'm still free, you can't take the sky from me
Whenever someone is complaining about the comic violating D&D rules, just open this spoiler.
Spoiler
If you are looking for moment-to-moment rules accuracy from this comic, you probably should stop reading. You are guaranteed to be continually frustrated and disappointed, because I don't care about that at all.
Rules lawyers: rules only matter in a campaign, not a story!