Gobbotopia: Subjective or Objective? Alignment or Morality?

[Lacuna Caster]

Oh, since I missed this-

On the first point, are there many Clerics who can cast that in this world? I emma, remember, we know there aren't many 10th-level Wizards in this world, and i'd imagine other spellcasters are equally rare, especially high-level ones. It's easier to get a sword and slash through a bunch of green things then it is to spend years of your life studying/communing with a god/gaining oneness with nature.

That might be relevant if slashing through green things wasn't a perfectly effective method of gaining spellcaster levels (which is, accordingly to Redcloak, the very purpose to the Gods' making those green things in the first place.) I'm sure 10th-level wizards aren't common, but neither is anything that will give you enough XP to reach epic levels.

As for the second point...Yeah? There's always gonna be some growing pains when a story transitions from being straight comedy to being drama with comedy included. OOTS is far from the first to make that transition. In its case, it did that by taking its main cast's previous comedic quirks, and turning them into actual character flaws that end up screwing them over. I'm not sure exactly what you WANTED Rich to do...

I don't want to get into a larger discussion on other works of fiction, but I will say that Pratchett's tone has actually been pretty consistent from day one, and I'm fairly certain he's never had a character like Belkar as a protagonist, or brushed off an act of genocide as something you'd do under stress and can make up for at a convenient future date.

I can say there are many many things that I would probably have done differently in some alternate universe where I was both writing OOTS and had the professional wherewithal to do so. I'm not a professional writer, so I can't give any particular guarantee the result would be better. But there was nothing chaining Rich to the desk of writing this particular story with these particular characters in any particular tone. It was his own decision to take the physics of Looney Tunes and try grafting on the moral gravity of Berserk, no matter how much they don't fit together.

[TidePriestess]

I don't want to get into a larger discussion on other works of fiction, but I will say that Pratchett's tone has actually been pretty consistent from day one, and I'm fairly certain he's never had a character like Belkar as a protagonist, or brushed off an act of genocide as something you'd do under stress and can make up for at a convenient future date.

Cohen the Barbarian. Who's also a rapist, or at least a facilitator of rape.