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2007-05-05, 07:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Seppuku was supposed to be ritual suicide, but sometimes--like in battle--there wasn't time for any ritual. The term eventually covered these acts as well.
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2007-05-06, 02:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2007
Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
The bouncing ball is a questionable use of D&D rules at best. Rich being the equivalent of a DM playing out a fight between NPC's in his mind, he can do what he wants. Still, he is publishing it to a world full of DM's, so he should expect some criticism for his treating his villains with kid gloves.
The worst thing, though, is that the strip is essentially trying to make cop-killing funny. If outrage is the desired reaction, then I guess Rich succeeded. If he thought that people would enjoy seeing the paladins lose their dignity as well as their lives, well I think he was a bit off. Another 2-3 depressing strips like this and the last one will likely drive me away.
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2007-05-06, 02:51 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Another 2-3 depressing strips like this and the last one will likely drive me away.
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2007-05-06, 02:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
A wizard DID do it—Xykon is a sorcerer!! You can't have sorcerers in your story and not expect them to use magic! You wouldn't read Harry Potter books and get upset because Snape cast a spell—it's what he DOES, he's a WIZARD! And so is every character in that series. In OOTS, only some characters are spellcasters, but those that are, use magic every single day. As long as they use them within the expected rules of D&D, it's not Deus Ex Machina, anymore than it is that Roy knows how to use a sword.
Magic is not inherently a cop-out or a deus ex machina if both sides have access to magic in the setting. Vaarsuvius can disintegrate black dragons or banish elementals, Durkon can control the weather and raise the dead, Elan can create illusions, Nale can control minds, Redcloak can kill hobgoblin leaders with his index finger, Xykon can summon meteors or drive paladins insane. These are all established parts of the setting, whether or not you're familiar with it.
It would have been far cheesier to have every paladin in that room make their Will saving throw just because they were disciplined, regardless of the huge gulf in the numbers. For D&D players, that would have strained suspension of disbelief even more than the bouncing ball trick!
EDIT:
OK, that is now sig'd, with your permission.Last edited by SPoD; 2007-05-06 at 02:57 AM.
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2007-05-06, 02:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Heh, go ahead. That's a pretty high compliment. :P
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2007-05-06, 03:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2006
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- Algarve (The West)
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
I think this was an awesome strip, but I understand the kind of reactions it is getting. I also decided I would stop reading OOTS after Roy insulted and beat Miko after the fall. I managed to keep that resolve for about two hours after I knew a new strip had been posted.
Avatar: ruthless Parson (Erfworld).
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2007-05-06, 04:02 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2007
Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Look at this way: paladins have a fairly well defined sense of Good and Evil. As such, they have a rather concrete notion of the universe and how it works. The downside of this is that people with especially strong convictions have difficulty coping with things that directly challenge their perceptions of how things. Their minds lack flexibility when it comes to certain things because so much of their mental outlook is based on those beliefs; if those beliefs are disrupted or challenged in a manner that they cannot disregard, then their entire self-image is at risk.
An especially traumatic event is going to be perceived differently by somebody who has upheld a particular moral code than somebody who hasn't simply because they don't think such things should happen to them. After a while, they are going to begin seriously questioning notions that are central to their personality. In this situation, the two most likely results are a mental breakdown (how bad can vary) or crippling despair. Some people can deal with it, but most can't... at least not right off the bat.
As a result, we get things like the Guard who commits suicide after she comes to her senses. Did the Gods help her or her friends? Did her paladin training help her in any way? Did it help anybody in the room? That's a lot to deal with, especially when you have blood on your hands.
I could see paladins being adept at resisting temptation because of their beliefs (if they aren't, then the system simply doesn't make sense), but they should be especially susceptible to going insane because of those same beliefs. On the other end of the spectrum, someone with a more flexible mind should be more resilient when it comes to dealing with insanity, but more likely to give in to temptation. It's a trade-off.
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2007-05-06, 04:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2005
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
There were a lot of things Soon didn't think of. He seems a generally stereotypical paladin, close-minded and utterly convinced of his own class and alignment's superiority. Of course, he's not the only member of the Order of the Scribble to share that quality. Dorukan seems equally convinced of his class's sole ability to defend weaknesses in the fabric of the universe (rather reminds me of something Roy says in Origins, and Eugene's amusing response).
But Soon did get one thing right, even if it was for the wrong reasons. There was a reason Roy didn't specify Azure City as a potential target to the Oracle (although I'm not convinced it was a good one), being that it's a city. Serini (in homage to Kraagor) and Dorukan's rifts were each in dungeons, and Lirian and Girard's were in similarly out of the way areas. Adventurers delve into places like this on a daily basis! It'd be difficult, sure, but by no means impossible for an evil force to infiltrate the dungeon and prepare the week long rituals Xykon says are necessary to open the gate in a controlled manner. With a city, you've got to conquer the entire city. It's a bigger and better defended place than your average dungeon, and it's defences can all rally at once rather than being spread out through the long and twisting corridors. Opening Azure City's gate requires a large army. Opening any other gate requires a party of adventurers, and possibly a few minions to secure the surrounding area against any remaining monsters or a ragtag group of unlikely heroes.
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2007-05-06, 04:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2006
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- Kentucky
Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Am I the only one who thought the Symbol of Insanity turned all the Paladins into Miko?
Avatar by Abardam.
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2007-05-06, 05:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2006
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- In the Playground
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2007-05-06, 05:32 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2007
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2007-05-06, 05:37 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Mar 2005
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
I think you're missing the point:
He's complaining that the rules promote a stupid outcome.
It should be easier to kill a Paladin than make him kill his sworn comrade, not the other way around. That's what they are supposed to be LIKE.
It's like the other problems with the rules Rich makes fun of.Gnome-Chucks. \'nuff said. http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=425465
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2007-05-06, 06:02 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2004
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
I'm getting tired of people saying that a "stick-figure comic" shouldn't be taken at least as seriously as a book or a movie. Comics aren't just the Sunday funnies anymore, you know--many serious stories have been told in graphic-novel form. OotS has grown from mainly humor to a serious story with a lot of humorous moments in it, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
Secondly, just because the characters are stick figures doesn't mean we shouldn't care about them. The way they're depicted doesn't really matter... after all, a character in a book has no visual depiction at all; but people don't say, "They're just text characters; you can't take them seriously." Rich chose to use stick figures. That doesn't mean that anything he does with the stick figures is automatically trivial.
Xykon's killing paladins, especially in such a flippant and disrespectful manner, is meant to anger us. When you refer to it as "cop-killing", you're spot on; that's basically what paladins are, in a medieval, charge-and-destroy sort of way. Xykon's the bad guy. He's supposed to do bad things. Actually, I'm really rather glad Rich has decided to do something like this; Xykon in the past has almost made evil look like innocent fun.
I like it that Xykon kills his enemies in a way calculated to destroy honor and hope, rather than the cliched way a lot of people play Evil: Kill people, then play with the guts. Because, eww, it's gross, so it must be more evil than just killing them! No. That's not more evil; it's just gross. What Xykon did was true evil.
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2007-05-06, 06:07 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2006
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- Kentucky
Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Very good point
Secondly, just because the characters are stick figures doesn't mean we shouldn't care about them. The way they're depicted doesn't really matter... after all, a character in a book has no visual depiction at all; but people don't say, "They're just text characters; you can't take them seriously." Rich chose to use stick figures. That doesn't mean that anything he does with the stick figures is automatically trivial.
Xykon's killing paladins, especially in such a flippant and disrespectful manner, is meant to anger us. When you refer to it as "cop-killing", you're spot on; that's basically what paladins are, in a medieval, charge-and-destroy sort of way. Xykon's the bad guy. He's supposed to do bad things. Actually, I'm really rather glad Rich has decided to do something like this; Xykon in the past has almost made evil look like innocent fun.
I like it that Xykon kills his enemies in a way calculated to destroy honor and hope, rather than the cliched way a lot of people play Evil: Kill people, then play with the guts. Because, eww, it's gross, so it must be more evil than just killing them! No. That's not more evil; it's just gross. What Xykon did was true evil.
I mostly posted to back up your first point.Avatar by Abardam.
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2007-05-06, 08:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
Thanks to zegma for my awesome avatar.
Proudly the founder of the Mr. Scruffy fanclub.
We will not let Nessie down! http://www.petitiononline.com/PLEAOSAR/
My DMs' Guild Stuff
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2007-05-06, 09:03 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2006
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Last edited by Setra; 2007-05-06 at 09:04 AM.
Avatar by Abardam.
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2007-05-06, 10:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Thanks to zegma for my awesome avatar.
Proudly the founder of the Mr. Scruffy fanclub.
We will not let Nessie down! http://www.petitiononline.com/PLEAOSAR/
My DMs' Guild Stuff
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2007-05-06, 11:42 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Oh gods i wish i knew
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
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2007-05-06, 11:57 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Wow. Remind me never to let you people read comic books like Sin City, or listen to mid-'90s gangsta rap.
I'm really becoming quite scared by the degree to which people are unable to engage with fiction as fiction rather than reacting as though the characters were somehow real.
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2007-05-06, 11:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
It would've been easier to kill the paladins than to make them kill their sworn comrades. Xykon's plan required that he spend 5000 gp on a Symbol spell and go through the whole rigmarole of bouncing the ball around and seeing if they look.
It would, indeed, have been both easier and cheaper to fly over the throne room and spam Meteor Swarm or Incendiary Cloud or any number of other spells. Xykon probably has enough low-level Fireball and Magic Missile spells up his sleeve to do a Paladin turkey shoot.
Xykon chose to go the more circuitous route of psychologically torturing the Paladins because it's *fun*. And because he's high enough level that he really can do anything he wants -- playing with the Sapphire Guard is, for him, like a kid playing with ants.
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2007-05-06, 12:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2004
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- USA
Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
I'm really becoming quite scared by the degree to which people are unable to engage with fiction as fiction rather than reacting as though the characters were somehow real.
2. Reacting as though they were real is a lot of the fun in fiction. "Suspension of disbelief" is exactly that: While reading, you deliberately forget that what you're reading isn't real; and your intellectual and emotional reactions are the same as though it were real (though not as intense). The mark of a good story is that suspension of disbelief is incredibly easy; characters become friends or enemies, liked and disliked the same way as real people. People come back to the story for the atmosphere--the setting--because it feels like a real place. While you're reading--while you're "there"--it feels like home.
Anyone who's ever been addicted to stories--books, movies, TV shows or graphic novels--knows what it's like to forget you're sitting in your chair and be drawn into a world different from your own. That's the beauty of a story; and I wouldn't give it up no matter how many people told me it was silly.
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2007-05-06, 12:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Good. Then when you feel horror and outrage, the story is doing its job.
2. Reacting as though they were real is a lot of the fun in fiction. "Suspension of disbelief" is exactly that: While reading, you deliberately forget that what you're reading isn't real; and your intellectual and emotional reactions are the same as though it were real (though not as intense). The mark of a good story is that suspension of disbelief is incredibly easy; characters become friends or enemies, liked and disliked the same way as real people. People come back to the story for the atmosphere--the setting--because it feels like a real place. While you're reading--while you're "there"--it feels like home.
It's this total failure to keep the two levels of story separated that bothers me. You can't blame Rich Burlew for doing something bad, because he exists in *our* world and in *our* world this is just a story. When you're in the story, you can find what Xykon did horrifying and shocking, sure, but getting upset about that because it "shouldn't have been possible" makes no sense -- when you're in the world you *know* it's possible because it happened.
I don't understand the attitude that leads one to get mad at a tragic story for being tragic. The point of stories is to let you get caught up in emotions that aren't real so that you can feel them safely. Removing that safety by actually getting angry or indignant or depressed over something that happens in a story destroys the point of fiction.
Anyone who's ever been addicted to stories--books, movies, TV shows or graphic novels--knows what it's like to forget you're sitting in your chair and be drawn into a world different from your own. That's the beauty of a story; and I wouldn't give it up no matter how many people told me it was silly.
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2007-05-06, 01:09 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Redcloak's family had it coming in the first place, being evil cultists. I get the whole desire for gritty storytelling (hell, I'm a fan of Warhammer 40,000; I'd be a poor one if I didn't), but the kind of depravity it must take to actually prefer would-be destroyers of the world over people who literally give their all to protecting people they likely will never know even at the cost of their lives is something I'll never understand.
Actually, no it isn't. Heroic self-sacrifice is held as a high act of nobility in Western culture and has been for centuries; it is not strange in the least that people would feel for characters who did that.
If anyone's accusing Rich of being a murderer I missed it, but I begin to have the sinking feeling that he does have a grudge against the paladin class for whatever reason. It comes out in the way they're treated so cavalierly in the story. Not that there's anything particularly wrong with that; I find it unfounded (a properly played paladin, as opposed to the lawful stupid archetype, shouldn't be irritating to anyone who doesn't have a problem with fundamentally good people in general), but it's easy to subconsciously translate irritation with players to irritation with the class they play, if the same roleplaying flaws are consistent enough.Last edited by Renegade Paladin; 2007-05-06 at 01:26 PM.
"Courage is the complement of fear. A fearless man cannot be courageous. He is also a fool." -- Robert Heinlein
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2007-05-06, 01:27 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2006
Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
I'm getting tired of people saying that a "stick-figure comic" shouldn't be taken at least as seriously as a book or a movie. Comics aren't just the Sunday funnies anymore, you know--many serious stories have been told in graphic-novel form. OotS has grown from mainly humor to a serious story with a lot of humorous moments in it, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
That said, I think the fans of this comic act a little oddly. The Paladins didn't have names. They were extras! They were classic red shirts! I don't know if it's because people are in love with the Paladin class or because every single minor character that appears in the comic seems to manage to get its own personal fanclub or because the whole thing upset the rulemongers (Perhaps it's all three), but the massacre of a bunch of nameless 'elite' guys by the Big Bad in a fantasy setting should NOT come as a surprise to anyone remotely familiar with the genre.
Edit:
If anyone's accusing Rich of being a murderer I missed it, but I begin to have the sinking feeling that he does have a grudge against the paladin class for whatever reason.
It's silly to think that just because you're a Paladin you deserve to die heroically. If you aren't strong enough then, regardless of how holy and upstanding you are, you're still going to be humiliated and massacred by the immensely powerful Lich.Last edited by Grasilich; 2007-05-06 at 01:30 PM.
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2007-05-06, 02:25 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2005
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
Prescisely. Fear effects reach right into your brain and twiddle that little lever labeled "Primal, shrew-being-attacked-by-a-big-scorpion-while-giant-lizards-stomp-around-above- style fear". You need mental strength to resist it, not courage. Courage is not the same as mental strength. Lets take, for example, some cocky 20-year old jock in a barfight. He's brave enough to fight, but dumb enough and easily swayed enough to be easily provoked into fighting. Hell, having courage would make you even easier to manipulate, because your sense of self-preservation doesnt get in the way of you doing really stupid things.
I'm not personally sure that the entire sapphire guard are just palladins. they seemed like a pretty diverse group. look at miko, a palladin/monk. Wind-tossed-hair Girl seemed pretty Arcane to me, as well, and some of those guys could have been Palladin Gishes, or Pal/Fighters, or Pal/rogues. maybe they all had custom MC Stack feats (stuff like Acetic Knight, Devoted Tracker, Ascetic MAge) to support such builds, but my point is that these werent just a bunch of 4th to 8th level Pallies with predictable saves.Last edited by Hyrael; 2007-05-06 at 02:36 PM.
My colors are Blue/Green. I value versitality, knowledge, evolution, and the nautral world. I have a deep fascination with living things, and a natural talent for adaptation. At my best, I am intuitive and adaptive. At my worst, I am isolated and unsympathetic. My symbol is the twisted tree, and my enemy is Red/Black.
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2007-05-06, 02:34 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
That's not courage; that's foolhardiness. Take a nice, long look at my sig.
"Courage is the complement of fear. A fearless man cannot be courageous. He is also a fool." -- Robert Heinlein
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2007-05-06, 02:39 PM (ISO 8601)
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2007-05-06, 02:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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2007-05-06, 02:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
I guess someone picked up several dozen ranks in Knowledge (What You're Talking About) without the rest of us, because we have no information on what the Crimson Mantle is, what Redcloak's family were doing when Miko killed them, and whether Miko's cause was truly righteous. (Miko? Make a snap judgment and let other people suffer for it? Naah...)
Actually, no it isn't. Heroic self-sacrifice is held as a high act of nobility in Western culture and has been for centuries; it is not strange in the least that people would feel for characters who did that.
If anyone's accusing Rich of being a murderer I missed it, but I begin to have the sinking feeling that he does have a grudge against the paladin class for whatever reason. It comes out in the way they're treated so cavalierly in the story.
Not that there's anything particularly wrong with that; I find it unfounded (a properly played paladin, as opposed to the lawful stupid archetype, shouldn't be irritating to anyone who doesn't have a problem with fundamentally good people in general), but it's easy to subconsciously translate irritation with players to irritation with the class they play, if the same roleplaying flaws are consistent enough.
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2007-05-06, 02:48 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Only the honor of a paladin is unbreakable.
By the way, since y'all are referencing Goblins, I'd be amazed if all the people who are moaning and groaning now about OotS could make it through the first few months of Goblins at all. Goblins is way, way more uncompromising about creating sympathetic characters and having them be brutally humiliated and destroyed than OotS is. And that's the main reason I liked it (after seeing the first scene with Kore I knew I had to keep on following this comic).