It would help remind us that the "V is TN" quote came after Familicide, which is relevant to discussions on the alignment of said elf.
That's one example, anyhow.
Ok, I'll put it on the to-do list. It'll take awhile though, so it may not even be done next update... it'll have to wait for me to find a bit of time to do it.
__________________ Thanks, Bradakhan, for the avatar!
A suggestion to improve the list on the first page: Could you please include the date of the Giant's post in the overview?
That seems like a lot of unnecessary work to me. If I am debating a point and referencing Rich's post... I already know when he made the post, since I went to the post itself.
__________________ Official Incense Aroma Specialist for the Vaarsuvius Fan Club!
English isn't my primary language, so please let me know if something I'm saying doesn't make sense!
That seems like a lot of unnecessary work to me. If I am debating a point and referencing Rich's post... I already know when he made the post, since I went to the post itself.
That's what I was thinking. I mean, is it that hard to click the little link provided?
__________________ Thanks, Bradakhan, for the avatar!
Each additional click violates the “don’t make the user work” principle of usability just a little more.
And in this case, it isn’t just one click. Once you have read the post it will take another click to close out the tab you opened it in. And that is not getting into the fact that it winds up adding to a possibly already tab-cluttered window in the first place.
Each additional click violates the “don’t make the user work” principle of usability just a little more.
And in this case, it isn’t just one click. Once you have read the post it will take another click to close out the tab you opened it in. And that is not getting into the fact that it winds up adding to a possibly already tab-cluttered window in the first place.
Uh... but this is the index of the giant's commentary, it is ALREADY set up to merely refer to them and you ALREADY have to click on them to read his actual words...
And pretty much any case where you would ever be referring to them, you would need the direct link to the post anyway.
__________________ Official Incense Aroma Specialist for the Vaarsuvius Fan Club!
English isn't my primary language, so please let me know if something I'm saying doesn't make sense!
How about just noting that it was post-Familicide (and other timing-relevant posts)? I'm not sure most casual readers know specifically when any given strip was published.
To find out, they would need to search the archives to find that Familicide was cast in #639. The comics aren't dated, so they would then have to search the forum for that discussion thread. If the search function messes up, they would then have to dig waaaaay back to page 87, to see that Familicide was cast on 3/20/2009.
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Kaedanis Pyran, tai faernae.
Brain Bleach at the ready? Then roll away!
I can't post on Tuesdays
Each additional click violates the “don’t make the user work” principle of usability just a little more.
And in this case, it isn’t just one click. Once you have read the post it will take another click to close out the tab you opened it in. And that is not getting into the fact that it winds up adding to a possibly already tab-cluttered window in the first place.
For the (relatively) few people who actually know exactly when, say, the Familicide comic came out, I think they can suffer a few extra clicks to open a tab, rather than Phantasm suffering having to do around a kabillion (rough guesstimate) clicks to copy and paste every time-stamp from every post that the said Familicide-date-knower person would be looking at anyways. If clicking the green button to find out the time the post was posted then pressing the X on the top right is too hard, then what isn't?
__________________
Spoiler
Quote:
Originally Posted by Solaris
If it helps, think of me as the Agent from Serenity. Just not that good a fighter. Also, I have a mustache.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kpenguin
I'm probably hilarious far off, aren't I?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Telonius
This is not... the greatest story Tolkien ever wrote. No... This is just a tribute.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Coidzor
Bah. You've got to believe in the you that believes in the heart of the cards to summon the 7 dragon balls to be the very best like no one ever was!
.; Many thanks piled on top of other thanks with a martini on top to Cuthalion for custom avatar.
It seems like a lot of work to do with a very small benefit. I'd be willing to do it if the majority of users in the thread want it, but I'm not here to eliminate the number of clicks you have to make. I can't predict how everyone is going to use each quote, or what they'll be wanting to argue from each quote, etc.
Let me clarify too that you should always click through to see the Giant's exact quote. If you go just by the summary / excerpt, you're bound to miss some nuances and further explanations. I've already seen a few instances of folk in other threads misunderstanding a Rich comment because they only read the index summary and nothing more. I don't want the index to ever be putting words in Rich's mouth. The summary is there to remind you what the quote is about, so that you can find it in the index faster. That's all. The summary isn't there to do all your work for you. This is a resource, not your research assistant.
I think adding the date to each quote would be just overdoing it. For one thing, most of the quotes don't really need their dates to be shown to be useful or understood properly. What I am willing to do is alter the summary a bit for a quote like the "V is True Neutral" one. So here's what I'll do. If someone is willing to find out which comic was last online when the Giant made that comment, I'll alter the link / summary to: "V Is True Neutral, as of #000". Does that sound reasonable? And for any other comments that need this treatment, just leave a post here describing why you think it is important and giving me the exact details of the summary alteration that you want. And then we can all discuss it further.
__________________ Thanks, Bradakhan, for the avatar!
I came here to comment that I'm definitely bowing out of transcribing the rest of the interview for at least 2 weeks.
So if anyone wants to pick it up, in my last post with a transcription is noted the interview time left to finish the work, so that's were you should pick up.
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Proud Owner of a copy of the OotS Game
JESSE: Yeah, I certainly enjoy the alignments for the same reason that you do, I agree that it doesn't have to be super simple. I don't know if you've done this, but have you ever sat around talking about characters in stories and what their alignments were or your friends for that matter?
RICH: Yeah, back in the day. We used to -- it's usually a good way to try to explain to new players of D&D how it works, you pick the sort of archetypical characters. But one of the problems with that is that those characters will be associated forever in that mind with what that alignment is. And I also think there's some naming flaws with the alignment, I think by calling one of the alignments "lawful" they've created thirty years of people thinking it means you have to obey every last "keep off the grass" sort of law. And that's not really what it's supposed to mean, it's supposed to mean sort of an ordered way of thinking, having a personal code, having a set of tenants that is greater than yourself.
JESSE: I think that may come from Elric, and Michael Moorcock having the whole...
RICH: It absolutely comes from Elric. He did Law and Chaos, those were his two. And you know, he didn't have to worry about a billion people trying to interpret what he meant by that, he just needed to present it in the context of his stories. So no negative to him for doing so, but I think it was adopted and has been argued and debated ever since by people playing the game.
JESSE: As someone who works pretty hard at keeping your story twists shocking and such, do you have anyone that you've brainstormed with, or is it just something you keep completely secret until you're ready to do the big reveal?
RICH: I keep a lot of it internal. I write down notes, I think of things, and sometimes I think of things and change them later. Not deeply, I think my main plot points have been the same since I started really thinking about the plot and sort of sketched out things that would happen, but there are certainly minor details that change at the time I'm writing the scripts. Certainly moment by moment actions can change, twist or whatever in a way if I think of something more interesting at the time that I'm writing it than I did five years ago. Then I go with that, but really the big moments have all been pretty close to how I pictured them a long time ago. Sometimes, some of these things are where I would be, I would write down a note like "and then they go to the desert." And I knew that when they got to the desert, Tarquin would be there, and they would do some desert-ey stuff with him before going back, before finding out what they needed to find and then go back out. But I didn't really get too worried about what happened in his empire until I was starting to plot this story arc, because it didn't really, it affected them personally but it didn't change the plot with Xykon and Redcloak so I had the sort of freedom to put that on the shelf until I got to it. Now I would think from here we'll sort of flow more from what I just did than it would have previously, sort of work that back in.
JESSE: The current arc seems to be a lot about family.
RICH: Sure.
JESSE: Actually... I've bounced this theory around, but I wanted to ask you if this was something you intended or if it's just my imagination. For the most part, a lot of the conflicts in the book have been about good and evil, but I felt like in the current arc, it's been more about conflicts between law and chaos, would you say that was intentional?
RICH: Absolutely intentional. I mean, I think good and evil are easily grasped, and I think it's a little less intuitive for people to really understand law and chaos as they are -- if they exist -- as concepts. Because here you have Tarquin, for most of the first part of the story, is evil, is just straight up evil. But he loves his son. He cares about family. He likes his empire running orderly. He doesn't just sort of go around slaughtering people for kicks. He has a plan, he has a goal, which he's sort of executing step by step. He's not Xykon. He's not this sort of crazy force of evil. You can almost picture Tarquin existing in the real world. So I think yeah, absolutely -- and then Ian, Haley's father Ian, is sort of the opposite. He's a good guy, but he's abrasive, paranoid, a little bit crazy, a little bit off the deep end, not really together because he's sort of so chaotic that he kinda can't detach from that. He can't be not chaotic for a moment and see the way things are really kinda going on around him. So yeah, I think there's definitely that undercurrent.
JESSE: Yeah. And I noticed sort of the idea of Girard Draketooth and his real hatred of Soon Kim, the two of them being very lawful and very chaotic.
RICH: Right, exactly. Where you would, I think most people would immediately go "yeah, but-but Soon Kim was a paladin, he wouldn't do something bad," and you have to see that to Girard's point of view, just the sort of organiz-- that a man doesn't create a secret organization of warriors unless he plans to use it for something. You know what I mean, the sort of... expecting the worst in human nature at all times pessimism that says that if Soon Kim is gonna make this sort of legion of magical warriors and keep them secret from his populace that clearly he's up to something. And there's also, I mean there are certain events that happened in that history between Girard and Soon Kim that have not been revealed that will certainly maybe make him seem a little less paranoid than he does right now, but not not-paranoid. But yeah, there's more there going on with what happened with the Order of the Scribble than has been revealed. But that's all gonna be unwound as the story comes towards its conclusion, there's more to learn, I mean there had to go find Girard right now, so some pieces will be found then, I'm sure.
JESSE: Do you think you may do a prequel book about the Order of the Scribble someday, or is that not something you're sure about?
RICH: I wouldn't rule it out, but I don't currently have any plans to and I wouldn't know what I would do with it. I think the main thrust of their story needs to be included in the online strip. You need to know exactly what happened all that time ago that made them so angry at each other in order to understand the main story. So therefore I wouldn't want to shunt it to a side book. When it needs to be told, it needs to be front and center, and then once it's been told, it'll influence what people think about the characters after that. So I wouldn't want it to be I had told much of the story, much of the things that Redcloak revealed to Tsukiko in the recent strip about how he was tricking Xykon was already known by people who had read Start of Darkness. But it didn't sort of change what was going to happen next for them to have known it separately. But anything about the Order of the Scribble isn't really like that. It's important in a way that would change things, and therefore it can't be let out of the bag early. But by the same token I wouldn't object to writing a story of them just fighting Baron Pineapple, or something like that. Certainly wouldn't have any problems with that, but I think the main conflict between them is gonna be in the main comic at some point.
JESSE: Okay. Well, speaking of that, I'm gonna take it back to the kickstarter for just one second.
RICH: Sure.
JESSE: Which was that several people bought stories about characters that they wanted you to write about. And I know you said for a while those had not been revealed to you yet. Has that come about yet, do you know who those characters are going to be?
RICH: Three people have bought them, I've only been contacted by two of them so far. I contacted all of them and have only heard back so far from two of them, they both gave me sort of a spectrum answer of, "I like this character and that character but I wouldn't mind if it was this character." So I haven't nailed down the final list for them, I'm waiting for what the final third person says, because if two of them both pick the same character, then I'm definitely gonna do that one, but otherwise I might pick some of the ones that appeal more to me. So far the ones that have been floated are Therkla, the assassin, the half-orc, the Cliffport police department, do a detective-spoof sort of something like that, and the demon roaches... which I've no idea what I would do, but maybe I'll come up with some idea and throw that out there and then some other options beyond that. But then again, it's that I still haven't heard from the third person, so that could be something totally in left field still coming our way.
JESSE: Cool, cool, cool.
DAVID: I know a lot of webcomics authors say, "well I have a very specific end and that's it." Is Order of the Stick actually gonna have a conclusion, or do you just wanna keep on writing it?
RICH: No, no. It has a conclusion. I know exactly how it ends. I think every single plotline that I've introduced has a definitive conclusion to it that will be in the main comic, it's not gonna be ignored or just left hanging forever. There's definitely gonna be a final book of the main storyline. But that being said, one of the reasons I've been sort of experimenting with some of these side projects is that there's plenty of room for these characters to keep doing stories. I think they're well-defined characters, and I can always go back. That's why I've been doing things like the Stick Tales and which is the characters telling the story of a famous work but using themselves, sort of like what the Muppets used to do. Then things like Julio Scoundrel spinning off sorta into his own crazy land of comic book type of and that kind of stuff will let me create even when I've moved on to what I'm gonna do next in the world, after the Order of the Stick. I can still come back and do an Order of the Stick related project, even though the story, the plot, has reached its proper conclusion and so on. So I guess I'm sort of setting up now for what will happen next.
JESSE: And I think I've read in interviews or in things you've written that the comic is more than halfway done at this point?
RICH: Oh yeah, definitely more than-- well, I say that, but you should take it with a grain of salt because I run long. Things are always longer than I plan them out to be because I always think of things in the middle that need to be addressed, either they're logical concerns or a character moment that needs to happen in order for it to be emotionally realistic. So then there will be an extra strip here, an extra strip there, and it'll add up. So it's definitely more than halfway done in terms of number of books, but the number of strips left, I don't even have a clue what that's gonna end up being. Some people are all "he's gonna plan to end it at strip 1000", absolutely not. It will go way past strip 1000 because we're already at 833 and we're not done with this book yet, and there's at least two more books left. So yeah. It's to go. If you're not a reader, there's still plenty of time to jump on.
JESSE: I personally have all the books. No big surprise there considering as I've told you I have the poster on my wall. So I think we're gonna wrap it up, but I just wanna ask you, do you have anything else you'd like to add, or anything you'd like to plug or mention?
JESSE: But I wouldn't ask you to spoil the comic even though I want to be like, "what's gonna happen next?" But I understand that would be unfair.
RICH: I am proud of you for not asking me either Vaarsuvius' gender, or what the Monster in the Darkness is, or how Belkar's gonna die. Those three questions everyone asks.
JESSE: Yeah, I figured you keep those things a secret for a reason, and it would be lost if you were to just blab it out. So I tried not to ask those.
RICH: Two of them are really important and one of them is so not important that it doesn't even need to be answered.
JESSE: Exactly.
RICH: I'll let you figure out which ones are which.
JESSE: Exactly. All right, well then I think that's all the time we have, but I would like to thank Rich Burlew one last time for being on with us.
Can I just say that you guys rock? I just did an interview and not one, but two of you picked it up and worked to transcribe the whole thing. That's really awesome.
Can I just say that you guys rock? I just did an interview and not one, but two of you picked it up and worked to transcribe the whole thing. That's really awesome.
Xapi did the vast majority, but I'm happy to help a little. Anyway you too deserve some love for asking such great questions! The whole thing is a goldmine.
The whole interview. Thanks Xapi & B. Dandelion. I multiquoted it here so that I can copy and paste it into the main index. I'm going to do a little reformating as well, nothing major. I'll post another update when it is all done and added to the index.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xapi
Intro and commentary on the Kickstarter Drive:
Spoiler
J - Hello this is Geekademia on the Non-productive Network, my name is Jesse Baruffi
D - I'm David Lawrence
J - and we're here with another special guest, Rich Burlew, the author and artist of Order of the Stick, hello Rich!
R - Hey, how's it going?
J - Pretty good. So, the reason... I think the reason we were able to get you on today is the fact that you're going through a very large donation drive at the moment on the website Kickstarter
R - Yes, yes I am.
J - So, to anyone who might not know about this, why don't you tell us a little bit about it?
R - Alright, well. For a while I've published my own books, of the Order of the Stick, and because I'm a small one person company, I ran out, essentially, of all the existing books, which isn't just a problem for selling those books, but also for selling any future books, because people like to have things in whole sets, so I was worried about what would happen when I put out my next book if my entire back catalog was unavailable, so I had heard about Kickstarter, I had followed some projects and I thought "Well, I'll put up a little Kickstarter and we'll try to get..." I get people bugging me all the time to... not bugging, you know... asking all the time when the next reprint would be of one of my books in particular, War and XPs, which is the biggest, fattest, most expensive book to print so far. So I was like... and I absolutely did not have the money for it. And so I thought "Well, I'll put up a Kickstarter for it, and if it goes well, I get to reprint the book, and if it doesn't go well, I'll have something to say next time somebody asks me isn't War and XPs in print". And I thought that was worth it right there. So I set up this Kickstarter project drive and it's... pretty good so far. We got it funded enough to reprint that book in about... 36 hours I'd say, and it's gone on from there to funding the reprinting of every single book that I have, six, the ones that are regularily in print, and it's been pretty amazing, I had no idea that I'd get this sort of response from my readers. Yeah, it's been a ride, to say the least.
On the fans, the forum, and some of the things that go on here:
Spoiler
J - As someone who goes on the forums on your website from time to time, it seems you've got some extremely devoted fans
R - Yes, that would be an extremely charitable description. No, it's wonderful, I love my fans, I do have fans that are very dedicated, often more dedicated than I am. You know, they're dedicated to some of the minutiae about the comic that has never crossed my mind, and... but that's great, I mean, I'm happy that they can get that enjoyment from it, even though I don't want to even worry about it (J interrupts, get cut off) like the number of character appearances or who has the most number of kills in the comic, you know. Good for them. (mumbles)
J - Yeah, you've got bigger things to worry about, like what happens in the story
R - Story, yeah.
J - One thing I noticed recently on the forum that I thought was kinda interesting is the fact that people have started to... sort of making a soundtrack to the series
R - I saw the thread title, but I haven't been... I haven't been on the forums as much as I should since this started, been having to put up an update almost every single day for the past two weeks, so I haven't actually caught exactly what's going on there but it's an interesting idea, I mean, I know that Homestuck does similar sort of things with the fans creating soundtracks and he actually uses them in his animation which I don't think is gonna happen for the Stick but it's still a great idea to be able to have something to listen to... I don't know, it's an interesting idea.
On social networking and OotS:
Spoiler
J - One thing that I really wanted to ask you about, 'cause I think this is kinda fascinating... I've noticed most people in the webcomics... I guess, field?, are... basically kinda throw themselves on every social networking site there is whether it's like Facebook or Twitter or Tumbler or any of that stuff.
R - And you're saying I'm a backwards luddite hermit.
J - Well, yes but I mean it as a compliment.
R - I had to download Skype in order to have this conversation.
J - I certainly don't mean that as an insult, it seems to me that it's something we here at Geekademia don't even use a lot of that stuff, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming to have a Facebook page for the podcast. But I was just wondering if that was a conscious decision on your part or is that something you're just too busy for.
R - Yeah, it's pretty much a conscious decision, I mean, I am a technologically backwards luddite, that makes it easy, but second, I think, if I want people to see my content I want them to sort of come to my website, instead of mantaining different websites at 15 different social networks. I don't want to have to worry about whether my Facebook page is updated in addition to my website. And some of these I'm just a late arrival to, in the sense that there is an Order of the Stick website that somebody created, a fan created, and it's been out there and everybody's linked to it, and everyone liked it in their profiles or whatever and I don't have control of that, so rather than there being two competing Facebook pages I just sort of let that live it's own life as a fan created thing and I'll concentrate on my own website. I will probably get dragged into Twitter very soon but, ah,not yet, haven't crossed that threshold yet, and every thing else, either I'm oblivious to it or I just haven't had the time to learn and figure out whether it works for me
J - Ok
R - I think I'm also a little bit older than a lot of the other webcomic- I mean, I'm not OLD old, I'm 37, but I think a lot of the webcomic creators out there are college or just there after, and therefore are a lot more 'up' on these technologies than I am. And I use a Mac, which is not always up to speed up until very recently with the iPad explosion coming and such.
J - Gotcha. Well that makes sense and, I'm only a little bit younger than you, but yeah, I kinda feel similarly if I was going to do something creative, I'd focus on that instead of the endless, like, updating of other things, personally.
R - Yeah, I have enough trouble keeping my own website updated, so it seems like I would just be adding more work on myself. And I had a fairly large audience before Facebook became "the" thing that everybody had to be on. I started this in 2003, I don't know exactly when Facebook started peaking, but I know that I already had a substantial audience by that point, so I don't know that I saw right away what the benefit would be, and now that I do, it looks like somebody already did a page for me, so... I let it be.
I'll keep going when I get the chance and come back to post it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xapi
@ The Giant: Thanks a lot, if you keep reading this let me know of any other mistake or thing I didn't catch if you feel like it.
@ThePhantasm: I don't have a strong opinion on where in the Index this would go, I'm just posting it here and we'll see what happens with it later.
@everyone:
Here are a couple more questions. There are two questions regarding roleplaying and OotS campaign world that I started transcribing at work, so I'll finish and post those on wednesday. Chronologically, those two would be befoire the batch I'm posting now.
On the OotS storyline getting darker
Spoiler
J - As far as the storyline of the OotS goes, one thing that has definitely happened as time goes on is that despite continuing to be funny and continuing to be a humor comic on some level, there have been some much darker elements introduced.
R - Yes
J - So what made you decide to take that shift and still remain with the same characters and story?
R - I don't know, I think I've always had a draw to that shock reveal. Not shock for the sake of shocking, but that dramatic sudden moment when something happens in the story you absolutely did not see coming and perhaps as an either darker or more impactful moment that you ever thought was possible in a work, in the work you were seeing. I used to do that as a DM, I used to set up situations where the players thought one thing was happening the entire time, they walk in the door and see a scene that threw all their preconceptions on the ground and stomped down on them, I think I really enjoy that, I think it creates powerful moments in the story, and sometimes that means doing something dark, sometimes that means taking your comedy villain who is bored and having him slaughter a room full of Paladins with a bouncy ball. You know, because it's so perverse, and it's such a violation of their honor and law mindset, where they're these noble Paladins who will defend to the last man, and they just get destroyed like that. The goal is sort of, not offend, but bother the reader, it should bother them. You should look at Xykon and say "He's a horrible monster". He can still crack a funny joke, but you shouldn't be sympathetic to him, and if you are, I don't know if I necessarily I want to know about it, because that's a little scary. And that was one of the problems with SoD, "here's the story of Xykon", but I'm not going to make him even slightly sympathetic, if anything, you're going to think worse of him by the time you're done with this. So, I think I have an affection for writing the villains, because of that ability to sort of make your jaw drop, you know, heroes can't really do that without.. you know it's going to be... no one's gonna gasp when they do something specially heroic or kind. And I really don't want my heroes to be dark, with the exception of Belkar, but that's another story. I don't want Roy to suddenly do something out of character or shocking, the closest thing I got to that was I had Haley kill off the assassin that had been harassing her, and that was still pretty surprising, and I think a lot of people didn't see it coming, but I also sort of goofed there in the sense that I cut the scene that made it more obvious that Crystal was still actively trying to kill Haley, truce or no truce, so, that was something I fixed in the book, but it's still, it was a fairly surprising, but again, like I said, I still have to go darker to be surprising like that, so, I think that's where it comes from really.
J - Ok
On the Giant being excesively wordy, how he likes to talk about the creative process, and on the commentary from the books.
Spoiler
R - You see I'm just as wordy in my interviews as I am in the comic, it all flows naturally from me.
J - Believe me, we'll have you on as long as you want to stay, if you want to just talk for twenty minutes, that's awesome. I will take one bit of fanboyish break from the interview, when we started this podcast, I had a couple of people who were sort of my long shot goals of people to get on the show, and you were towards the top of people I didn't think I'd get but I was gonna try anyway. So I thought you might want to know that. Again, we don't mind to listen to you talk.
R - Honestly, I was excited at the chance to talk about something other than Kickstarter, because I've done a bunch of interviews and they're all about Kickstarter sometimes to the point of not even mentioning what my comic is about, they say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but at a certain point you want people to find out, I mean, the people who already know what my comic is about, already know what my comic is about, so they don't need to get the spiel but I like being able to talk about it, actually about my comic and not how much money I can raise.
J - Sure. As someone who writes as well, not professionally unfortunately, I know it is sort of fun to be able to talk about the creative process, because it one of those things the readers never see, they don't know what's going on in your head while you're doing it.
R - Sure, that's why I do the commentary in the books, they're sort of what I would think to talk about, that's not always what someone who is reading would think to talk about or want to know about, so they're not always exactly what people are looking for in terms of behind the scenes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xapi
On what the comic is about, and some comments on rules accuracy.
Spoiler
J - OK I think David wants to ask you a couple of questions, I've been crowding the mic so I'll let him ask a couple of things
D - So, you mentioned nobody asks you what your comic is about... what is your comic about?
R - My comic is a comedy adventure fantasy comic, it's about a group of adventurers, heroes or warriors, whatever you want to call them, called the Order of the Stick, as they go about their adventures with minimal competence or knowledge of what they are doing, and eventually sort of stumble into a plan by an undead sorcerer to conquer the world, essentially, and they're out to stop him and conquer their personal problems at the same time. Hopefully not in that order, so they get their personal problems taken care of before the final battle. And it's a comedy. Specially in the early parts it has a lot of roleplaying games... the whole thing is sort of within the framework of Dungeons and Dragons, the early strips made many explicit references to this, specially for jokes, the later strips just use it as the framework of the world, in terms of deciding what kinds of spells can a sorcerer cast, what kinds of spells can a cleric cast, etc. etc., I don't really worry about "oh, this character doesn't have enough hit bonus to... you know, let me roll the dice", if the story needs him to hit, he hits, if the story needs him to miss, he misses. There's a certain segment of my fans who think that's grossly unfair. Not that they necessarily believe I should roll the dice, but they believe that the percentages should be accurately represented, so that if somebody swings their sword at someone 20 times, they should hit a number of times equal to their, you know, relative attack bonus blah blah blah. That doesn't happen, that's not something I worry about. But yeah, it's essentially a fantasy adventure quest story, of a warrior out to avenge his father against a sorcerer, and the sorcerer happens to be trying to conquer the world at the same time. That's a nutshell. And it's stick figures, that needs to be said. If you're picturing that in the most elaborate fantasy artwork, that's not what we're talking about. They're basically really simplistic colorful block characters going about this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xapi
On The Giant roleplaying, and how writing OotS replaced DMing in his life.
Spoiler
J - Order of the Stick is of course a huge gaming comic so I was wondering if you still had time to do any roleplaying these days?
R - No, no, I haven't in a while. The last roleplaying I did was when I was working on... when I was gonna do Snips, Snails an Dragon Tales, the limited book with the Dragon Magazine strips, I did some 4th Edition roleplaying to be sure I knew sort of what I was talking about, which I probably didn't but I can pretend better, and that was over a year ago now. It just doesn't work, you know, it hasn't really worked out that way, that I had as much time for that as I used to, sort of fallen by the wayside, but not in a way that I'll never go back to it, just in a time way, I think you get busy at a certain point in your life, with your work and your family and your such and such, and whether or not you have time for it is sort of random, sort of up in the air. I mean, I still get a lot of that sort of fix from thinking about it, talking about it and such like that. But in a certain point, I was always the DM when I played, and at a certain point it just feels like I'm taking that much time to craft a complex story, maybe I should just write it down and someone would pay me for it. I guess that's possibly maybe a little bit of it, because I'm now sort of essentially a professional fantasy writer, that I can't really bring myself to put the same amount of effort I did when I was in college and such and it was the focus of my creative attention.
On the OotS Roleplaying setting, and why it doesn't exist
Spoiler
J - And along those lines, I realize that doing it at this point would probably be a mountain of effort and give too much away, but I've seen people on the forums asking if some day there would actually be an Order of the Stick world created for any sort of gaming system. Do you think you would do that if you had the time and opportunity?
R - Let me tell you, I started working on that a few years ago, and what happened is, I got about 20 or 30 pages in, and WotC announced 4th Edition. And I didn't know what was gonna happen with it, I didn't know whether I was gonna want to make it for that, I didn't know if making it on 3rd Edition would still be possible with the game license, would they find a way to revoke that, it was all up in the air, everything was sort of chaos and I had no idea what was gonna happen, so I put it aside, and then have never gone back to it since, really. It wasn't compatible at all with 4th Edition, so therefore that wasn't going to work, and I don't know, I didn't know whether I would ever really have the direct audience that I thought it should so I think I just sort of let it lie fallow after that.
I cannibalized parts of it, the document I started working on, I think the last compilation I put out, Don't Split the Party had some black and white cartoons that were from that project,and I know the map that I did in the back of one of them for Azure City was actually of the Azure City country description, so you know, pieces of it have been seen here and there ever since. But another problem was that I'd done a write up for Elan's Dashing Swordsman class,and since then I had at least three things I've put into the comic, you know, here's this joke about this class that has this ridiculous cliched hero abilities, and if I put out that class, I can't really do that any more. Can I then say "Oh, it has this ability too"? 'cause I've already taken people's money to say "This is the class that it is!". So I think it's easier to leave things vague and up in the air and just use them when I want to as humour rather than as concrete game rules.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xapi
On the double poster:
Spoiler
J - You can't see this, but behind us in the studio is the big double poster of all the characters.
R - Hah! That took forever.
J - I can tell.
R - What's funny is I had worked on it, and then had to put it aside, and when I got back to it I had introduced like 4 new characters that had to go on, I had to find room for Tarquin and Malack and Kil-Kil over in the corner of the villains poster, and I put Captain Malack's helmet on... Not Malack, Tarquin's helmet on. He was still new enough that I thought people who weren't caught up to the story, so I didn't want them to see who he was before... you know some people only read the books... yeah, so, did that at the last minute.
On fanart and fanfiction (yes, THAT sort of fanfiction).
Spoiler
D - It's funny, I just saw some fanart for Order of the Stick, but it was drawn like Frank Frazetta.
R - (Laughs) Yes.
D - Super detailed, very...
R - Yeah, what I always find interesting is the choices they make for the parts of the characters that are really not be able to tell what's going on because they're sticks. I've seen fanart that was really realistic of Roy fighting except for some reason he had no pants, like he had one armor piece over his torso but his legs were bare. That's why I think at one point I had Haley make a crack about how she's wearing long pants but you can't tell because she's a stick figure. Because I wanted to put a stop of that, I wanted no more pantless Roy. That's a whole other direction that I'm sure is out there on the Internet, but I don't need to see it.
D - Well, that kills my next question...
R - (Laughs)
D - Once again, on the forum for a while, there was a whole section of people...
R - Oh, yeah. We had to slay that once people started crossing some lines. Once they crossed the Elan - Nale incest line, we had to put a stop to that
D - As well you should.
R - Yeah exactly
D - There are some weird people there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xapi
On Fantasy, clichés, TVTropes and Science Fiction.
Oh, and some D&D there too. Sorry I couldn't break it down further.
Spoiler
D - There's a question though, can Fantasy be taken seriously anymore?
R - You mean in the sense that a lot of it is recycled? A lot of it is the same sort of material all over again? I think so. I think there's definitely something to say with fantasy still. Order of the Stick is in many ways sort of a critique I guess, a spoof of a lot of fantasy cliches, but once you see the cliches, you dodge them. I mean, there's plenty of fantasy writers who don't do the same old "warriors on a quest" thing, which I'm doing but by way of sort of turning it on it's head. I think there's plenty of room in fantasy for unique stories. I think the number one thing people can do to make their fantasy something new and interesting is to not marry it to the same old medieval sort of time period for no apparent reason. I mean, if magic exists in a world, why can't it exist in a different historycal setting. I think there's still plenty to say, and I think there's still plenty for me to make fun of, so, you know, hopefully that will keep going on both sides.
D - Question: We have talked about TVTropes, even mentioned the name (...)
R - (Laughs, interrupts) Sorry, what was the question?
D - The thing is, they have sort of these shorthands, like he's the Chosen One, he'll save us from the Dragon or the Evil Wizard.
R - Yeah, like the next thing that happens would have to be the thing that happens 'cause this thing happened because the trope said so.
D - Yes. I mean, do you think it's possible just to divorce completely, to walk away and do something else?
R - It's hard. There was a point in time a few years back when I felt like every time I put out a strip the number one response to it was "Oh, he's just doing this trope", "he's just doing that trope", you know, and put a link to it, "see, he's just not original at all". And I don't know whether that just became less popular as a way of sort of pidgeonholing things, or whether I've actually broken enough of them now that nobody assumes they know what's gonna happen next. But one way or another that doesn't seem to happen as much anymore. People try to sort of guess what I'm gonna do, and I hopefully kick it in the shins and run away laughing. But I think there's a danger of over simplification of literature, of becoming so wrapped up in these compartments that put every element of the story that you sort of miss the story. It's sort of like a lazy criticism. Criticism in the classic sense of actually doing a critical piece, not in a complaining wait. It let's you churn out an analysis of a work without putting much tought into it. I think it's fun to point to the website and see the diferent ways different works do the same sort of cliches, not in a bad sense, but I do think there's a danger in taking them too seriously as the 'be all, end all' of literary criticism.
D - Yes, indeed. I have read a lot of fantasy, and it's always like "here's the Chosen One, here's the local , here's the obviously evil sorcerer who betrays everyone"
R - Yeah, exactly. I think fantasy is more prone to that than almost any other genre. And that's partly because there have been a few titans of the genre who sort of formed everything that was to come after. And also honestly because of Dungeons and Dragons. I think people playing D&D has reinforced certain stereotypes in their mind (mumbles) RPGs that follow the same tropes and all of these sort of things, has reinforced this sort of monolithic fantasy from which few authors deviate and well so, but there's a lot of the same old same old out there too. So I think fantasy gets probably a lot more of those, those tropes listed, than almost any other genre. You know, Science Fiction, I'm a huge SF fan, SF is, every story you read is esentially a completely different setting, I'm sure, Space Opera stuff tends to be a lot of the same, whatever, but you can just go off and do something wildly different and still be Science Fiction, and I think less people do that with Fantasy these days.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xapi
On the D&D media scare, Dark Dungeons and Tom Hanks. There's many places in this part of the interview where the audio is off or I just can't figure out what they are saying.
Spoiler
D - You mentioned the impact of Dungeons and Dragons.There was a huge backlash against D&D
R - Yeah, sure.
D - Do you think we're likely to see something like that again?
R - I don't think so. I mean, there's certainly always going to be people who are still going to say the same charges against it, you know, that are still gonna say the things that weren't true then, and still aren't. But I don't think it's wildly circulating, I think because it was new then, people didn't know what was going on, didn't know what this thing was, and then they got a lot of misinformation from various sources, and the media picked it up and ran with it as a media scare. And now it's old news. It's been around for thirty and some odd years, you don't get articles in the media about Dungeons and Dragons making people sacrifice goats [interference] "Dungeons and Dragons is coming out with a new edition, because D&D owner Hasbro has released this information in this press conference, blah blah blah.". So I think that's not gonna resurface. I mean just the fact that it's owned by Hasbro now gives it a legitimacy that I think it probably didn't have back in the day, when it was owned by a bunch of guys in Wisconsin [interference] gives it a "Oh, obviously it has to be OK, it is owned by the company that does Mr Potato Head." And I don't think it's in Hasbro's interest to let those kind of stories exist. When you're a big corporation, you kinda get that power in the sense that if they're going to do a story about Dungeons andd Dragons they're going to immediately walk up to your Hasbro or WotC and ask for a quote, and then their sort of media team will take care of it from there. But I think the days of mass hysteria scare about D&D are behind us at this point.
J - I think there are bigger scapegoats now as well.
R - Yeah, absolutely, there's the Internet and all of it's glory. Playing D&D seems downright quaint now, you can find people who are in their 50s who've been playing D&D for 30 years, it's not.. you know, in detriment of the hobby, but it's not something that all teenagers are flocking to these days. When you're 13 you're like "Hey, let's go play D&D tonight!" You have to get those kids into the hobby in a way that isn't really happening right now. I'd say as long as it's not threatening tomorrows children I htink it'll stay on the right side of the public opinion.
D - Speaking of threatening children, what we do on the show... are you familiar with the Jack Chick comic Dark Dungeons?
R - I am, vaguely, passingly familiar, as much as any long time D&D player could be.
D - We might have to do a show on Jack Chick.
R - I like to think of my comic as a sort of tribute to the great comic that had come before. Could I have done a Dungeons and Dragons themed comic if not, like I said, if not, if the giants of the genre had not put forth that independent comic creation of lore?
J - Dark Dungeons was a very interesting book. I would say it's not even close to the crazyest thing Jack Chick has ever done.
R - Yeah, not top ten really.
D - No. But the thing I love about his...
R - (uninteligible, gets cut by connection) it wasn't as crazy, he's gone really off the (?) then, then it probably wouldn't have been taken seriously until this day.
D - Well, according to Dark Dungeons, apparently the sourcebook is an actual spell book, from wich you can actually, literally just call up the devil and say "hey".
R - Spells, yeah, exactly. I've certainly heard that. All I can say is I think the copies I've been using must be defective in some way, either there's a misprint or a page missing because I've been playing the game since I was 11 or 12 and I've yet to actually cast a magic spell, deeply dissapointed at that.
D - How about Maces and Monsters?
R - Oh yeah. Tom Hanks has a lot to answer for.
D - Yes he does.
R - (uninteligible)
J - He unleashed Forrest Gump upon the world, he has to pay for that. Now we get into Dave's axe grind.
R - Personal media vendetta should actually be the title of this podcast.
D - He knows what he did.
J - Where gonna try to get him on the show for a reconciliation. They're gonna hug each other on the air.
R - Or just volleyball with him.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xapi
On The Giant's favourite characters to write, and some commentary on every character of the Order. Even Durkon, but that's just to say there's not much to say :P
Spoiler
J - Back into the Order of the Stick a little bit as far as the characters, to talk a little about the characters. I have my theories on this, but I'm wondering if you have a personal favourite character as far as writing.
R - It depends on whether you mean writing the jokes or writing the personality and internal conflicts. Jokes is easy, Belkar with Elan a close second. You've got your sort of... either your violence jokes or your bad person gets their comeuppance jokes with Belkar, and then Elan has your dumb jokes, has your sillyness, has your kinda child like comedy, and I like writing both of those. As far as writing a personal sort of inner thoughts on your life whatever things (sic) I really like writing Haley a lot. She's got issues, I think she's probably got the most legitimate issues of the people in the Order, and that makes her interesting to write. It's interesting how she's going to react, based on her upbringing and sort of what she's been through in her life to this situation or that situation. I think that makes it more.. to you, Elan's pretty straighforward, you know what he's gonna do. You may not know in the sense that it's something completely random and off the wall and pull out a hand puppet and start worshiping it, but you know he's gonna do something weird and silly and ultimately harmless, because he's a good person, and nothing bad is gonna happen to him as a result. And you know Belkar's gonna do the opposite, he'll take the most awful, irrediming sort of path that he can find and get away with. But you don't know what Haley's gonna do in a situation, she wants to be a good person, but she wasn't raised that way, she was raised to be a thief. And so she sort of has to struggle with being a hero, what comes easily to, well, it comes pretty easily to Roy. He'll snap at people, he'll be sort of verbally abusive, but he's not gonna... he's never attempted to do the wrong thing, really.
J - There was the one time, but...
R - Yeah. Exactly, and that was a big point of development for him. But really, since then, that was within the first 150 or 160 strips, so for the mayority of the comic's lifetime he's been pretty clear on what he should be doing.
J - It seems like Vaarsuvius has become a character with a lot of internal moral conflict recently as well.
R - That's true, that is correct, and that was a concious sort of effort on my part, because I felt like Vaarsuvius had been underutilized, by the end of the War and XPs book I felt like Vaarsuvius was sort of... "and then we have an elf", wich is a problem I still have with Durkon but I have plans to adress as well. And so I think I crafted almost all of Don't Split the Party around "let's (uninteligible) a better arc"... some of it I had planned already, some of it I already know that when I did the first... Spoiler by the way, if anyone hasn't read this... when I did the first small black dragon, that I was gonna have the older one come back and be a villain in some point that would attack Vaarsuvius for what he or she had done. But the sort of sell your soul angle was a little more recent, and more of an attempt to really get at what Vaarsuvius issues were in life. So that sort of dovetailed nicely into one story that I'm really happy with.
I have 19 minutes to go of a 59 minutes interview.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xapi
On the variety of OotS villains, and on the D&D alignment system.
Spoiler
J - That brings, the whole idea of the Black Dragon and the demons, brings up another thing which is the idea that you seem to play a lot with the idea of Evil, like there's a huge variety of villanous characters with motivations all across the spectrum from, you know, and in some ways it seems like the comic tries to deconstructs that, in other ways it plays it straight
R - More like, I think both are valid, you know what I mean?, both are ways of looking at the problem, and I think again getting back to the history fantasy literature, I think there are an awful lot of cardboard cutout tackling (?) villany out there, and that's a choice to make when you're writing your story, and I sort of want to have it both ways, I want to be able to have villany villains, and at the same time, not writing a character that doesn't make sense, not writing a character that doesn't have a motivation to what they're doing. And I think there's a lot of debate among my fans, because they're not necesarily used to seeing that, from fantasy villains, specially when it comes to Black Dragons, undead sorcerers and Goblins who are out to destroy the Gods. You expect those sort of characters to be very straightforward, and I try to make it a little more complex than that, which, I was thinking, readers, in this (?) open up alternate interpretations, people would swear that 'cause Redcloak thinks what he's doing is the best for the Goblin people, that Redcloak is in fact the good guy, that he is the hero of the story. And that's... an interesting viewpoint. And I'm glad that I provoked that, I'm glad that I wrote a character that is layered enough that some people would say he's absolutely in the right, but yeah, I really like turning it upside down and not assuming that because it's a dragon it has no emotions. I think D&D appeals to people who are much more Math & Science oriented, that... I can sort of surprise them more by delving into the emotional side of things, and they don't see that coming, if they're D&D fans. And people who are generally fiction fans just enjoy it on it's own merits.
J - So, it comes out to not being as simple as the nine simple moral codes that D&D ascribes to.
R - Yeah, and I think one of the themes of Order of the Stick is there's this guide alignment system in D&D where it places every single person in one of these nine moral codes, and for the entire history of the game, that I've played it, people have been complaining that that's over simplystic. "Oh, it's more complicated than that", and it absolutely is more complicated than that, but they're also doing it wrong. They think because they have this alignment they have to act this way, this one specific given way, and I think each one of those categories is so wide open to interpretation, and that was a lot of what Miko Misayaki was about, was that she's lawful good, but she's a complete bitch, you wouldn't want to spend time with her at all. And I think that was sort of the flip side of the simpathetic villain: the unsimpathetic hero. Or at least good guy. So yeah, I definitely like to subvert expectations in that specific way, because I think the alignment system gets a bad rap from people who aren't trying to make it work, and say "that's overly simplistic".
14:30 left.
Quote:
Originally Posted by B. Dandelion
I'm on it.
Spoiler
JESSE: Yeah, I certainly enjoy the alignments for the same reason that you do, I agree that it doesn't have to be super simple. I don't know if you've done this, but have you ever sat around talking about characters in stories and what their alignments were or your friends for that matter?
RICH: Yeah, back in the day. We used to -- it's usually a good way to try to explain to new players of D&D how it works, you pick the sort of archetypical characters. But one of the problems with that is that those characters will be associated forever in that mind with what that alignment is. And I also think there's some naming flaws with the alignment, I think by calling one of the alignments "lawful" they've created thirty years of people thinking it means you have to obey every last "keep off the grass" sort of law. And that's not really what it's supposed to mean, it's supposed to mean sort of an ordered way of thinking, having a personal code, having a set of tenants that is greater than yourself.
JESSE: I think that may come from Elric, and Michael Moorcock having the whole...
RICH: It absolutely comes from Elric. He did Law and Chaos, those were his two. And you know, he didn't have to worry about a billion people trying to interpret what he meant by that, he just needed to present it in the context of his stories. So no negative to him for doing so, but I think it was adopted and has been argued and debated ever since by people playing the game.
JESSE: As someone who works pretty hard at keeping your story twists shocking and such, do you have anyone that you've brainstormed with, or is it just something you keep completely secret until you're ready to do the big reveal?
RICH: I keep a lot of it internal. I write down notes, I think of things, and sometimes I think of things and change them later. Not deeply, I think my main plot points have been the same since I started really thinking about the plot and sort of sketched out things that would happen, but there are certainly minor details that change at the time I'm writing the scripts. Certainly moment by moment actions can change, twist or whatever in a way if I think of something more interesting at the time that I'm writing it than I did five years ago. Then I go with that, but really the big moments have all been pretty close to how I pictured them a long time ago. Sometimes, some of these things are where I would be, I would write down a note like "and then they go to the desert." And I knew that when they got to the desert, Tarquin would be there, and they would do some desert-ey stuff with him before going back, before finding out what they needed to find and then go back out. But I didn't really get too worried about what happened in his empire until I was starting to plot this story arc, because it didn't really, it affected them personally but it didn't change the plot with Xykon and Redcloak so I had the sort of freedom to put that on the shelf until I got to it. Now I would think from here we'll sort of flow more from what I just did than it would have previously, sort of work that back in.
JESSE: The current arc seems to be a lot about family.
RICH: Sure.
JESSE: Actually... I've bounced this theory around, but I wanted to ask you if this was something you intended or if it's just my imagination. For the most part, a lot of the conflicts in the book have been about good and evil, but I felt like in the current arc, it's been more about conflicts between law and chaos, would you say that was intentional?
RICH: Absolutely intentional. I mean, I think good and evil are easily grasped, and I think it's a little less intuitive for people to really understand law and chaos as they are -- if they exist -- as concepts. Because here you have Tarquin, for most of the first part of the story, is evil, is just straight up evil. But he loves his son. He cares about family. He likes his empire running orderly. He doesn't just sort of go around slaughtering people for kicks. He has a plan, he has a goal, which he's sort of executing step by step. He's not Xykon. He's not this sort of crazy force of evil. You can almost picture Tarquin existing in the real world. So I think yeah, absolutely -- and then Ian, Haley's father Ian, is sort of the opposite. He's a good guy, but he's abrasive, paranoid, a little bit crazy, a little bit off the deep end, not really together because he's sort of so chaotic that he kinda can't detach from that. He can't be not chaotic for a moment and see the way things are really kinda going on around him. So yeah, I think there's definitely that undercurrent.
JESSE: Yeah. And I noticed sort of the idea of Girard Draketooth and his real hatred of Soon Kim, the two of them being very lawful and very chaotic.
RICH: Right, exactly. Where you would, I think most people would immediately go "yeah, but-but Soon Kim was a paladin, he wouldn't do something bad," and you have to see that to Girard's point of view, just the sort of organiz-- that a man doesn't create a secret organization of warriors unless he plans to use it for something. You know what I mean, the sort of... expecting the worst in human nature at all times pessimism that says that if Soon Kim is gonna make this sort of legion of magical warriors and keep them secret from his populace that clearly he's up to something. And there's also, I mean there are certain events that happened in that history between Girard and Soon Kim that have not been revealed that will certainly maybe make him seem a little less paranoid than he does right now, but not not-paranoid. But yeah, there's more there going on with what happened with the Order of the Scribble than has been revealed. But that's all gonna be unwound as the story comes towards its conclusion, there's more to learn, I mean there had to go find Girard right now, so some pieces will be found then, I'm sure.
JESSE: Do you think you may do a prequel book about the Order of the Scribble someday, or is that not something you're sure about?
RICH: I wouldn't rule it out, but I don't currently have any plans to and I wouldn't know what I would do with it. I think the main thrust of their story needs to be included in the online strip. You need to know exactly what happened all that time ago that made them so angry at each other in order to understand the main story. So therefore I wouldn't want to shunt it to a side book. When it needs to be told, it needs to be front and center, and then once it's been told, it'll influence what people think about the characters after that. So I wouldn't want it to be I had told much of the story, much of the things that Redcloak revealed to Tsukiko in the recent strip about how he was tricking Xykon was already known by people who had read Start of Darkness. But it didn't sort of change what was going to happen next for them to have known it separately. But anything about the Order of the Scribble isn't really like that. It's important in a way that would change things, and therefore it can't be let out of the bag early. But by the same token I wouldn't object to writing a story of them just fighting Baron Pineapple, or something like that. Certainly wouldn't have any problems with that, but I think the main conflict between them is gonna be in the main comic at some point.
JESSE: Okay. Well, speaking of that, I'm gonna take it back to the kickstarter for just one second.
RICH: Sure.
JESSE: Which was that several people bought stories about characters that they wanted you to write about. And I know you said for a while those had not been revealed to you yet. Has that come about yet, do you know who those characters are going to be?
RICH: Three people have bought them, I've only been contacted by two of them so far. I contacted all of them and have only heard back so far from two of them, they both gave me sort of a spectrum answer of, "I like this character and that character but I wouldn't mind if it was this character." So I haven't nailed down the final list for them, I'm waiting for what the final third person says, because if two of them both pick the same character, then I'm definitely gonna do that one, but otherwise I might pick some of the ones that appeal more to me. So far the ones that have been floated are Therkla, the assassin, the half-orc, the Cliffport police department, do a detective-spoof sort of something like that, and the demon roaches... which I've no idea what I would do, but maybe I'll come up with some idea and throw that out there and then some other options beyond that. But then again, it's that I still haven't heard from the third person, so that could be something totally in left field still coming our way.
JESSE: Cool, cool, cool.
DAVID: I know a lot of webcomics authors say, "well I have a very specific end and that's it." Is Order of the Stick actually gonna have a conclusion, or do you just wanna keep on writing it?
RICH: No, no. It has a conclusion. I know exactly how it ends. I think every single plotline that I've introduced has a definitive conclusion to it that will be in the main comic, it's not gonna be ignored or just left hanging forever. There's definitely gonna be a final book of the main storyline. But that being said, one of the reasons I've been sort of experimenting with some of these side projects is that there's plenty of room for these characters to keep doing stories. I think they're well-defined characters, and I can always go back. That's why I've been doing things like the Stick Tales and which is the characters telling the story of a famous work but using themselves, sort of like what the Muppets used to do. Then things like Julio Scoundrel spinning off sorta into his own crazy land of comic book type of and that kind of stuff will let me create even when I've moved on to what I'm gonna do next in the world, after the Order of the Stick. I can still come back and do an Order of the Stick related project, even though the story, the plot, has reached its proper conclusion and so on. So I guess I'm sort of setting up now for what will happen next.
JESSE: And I think I've read in interviews or in things you've written that the comic is more than halfway done at this point?
RICH: Oh yeah, definitely more than-- well, I say that, but you should take it with a grain of salt because I run long. Things are always longer than I plan them out to be because I always think of things in the middle that need to be addressed, either they're logical concerns or a character moment that needs to happen in order for it to be emotionally realistic. So then there will be an extra strip here, an extra strip there, and it'll add up. So it's definitely more than halfway done in terms of number of books, but the number of strips left, I don't even have a clue what that's gonna end up being. Some people are all "he's gonna plan to end it at strip 1000", absolutely not. It will go way past strip 1000 because we're already at 833 and we're not done with this book yet, and there's at least two more books left. So yeah. It's to go. If you're not a reader, there's still plenty of time to jump on.
JESSE: I personally have all the books. No big surprise there considering as I've told you I have the poster on my wall. So I think we're gonna wrap it up, but I just wanna ask you, do you have anything else you'd like to add, or anything you'd like to plug or mention?
JESSE: But I wouldn't ask you to spoil the comic even though I want to be like, "what's gonna happen next?" But I understand that would be unfair.
RICH: I am proud of you for not asking me either Vaarsuvius' gender, or what the Monster in the Darkness is, or how Belkar's gonna die. Those three questions everyone asks.
JESSE: Yeah, I figured you keep those things a secret for a reason, and it would be lost if you were to just blab it out. So I tried not to ask those.
RICH: Two of them are really important and one of them is so not important that it doesn't even need to be answered.
JESSE: Exactly.
RICH: I'll let you figure out which ones are which.
JESSE: Exactly. All right, well then I think that's all the time we have, but I would like to thank Rich Burlew one last time for being on with us.
Uh... but this is the index of the giant's commentary, it is ALREADY set up to merely refer to them and you ALREADY have to click on them to read his actual words...
If, for whatever reason, you are searching for posts by date, chances are you don’t care about the actual words of posts that do not match your date criteria. Having to click to read the posts proper is therefore irrelevant.
If, for whatever reason, you are searching for posts by date, chances are you don’t care about the actual words of posts that do not match your date criteria. Having to click to read the posts proper is therefore irrelevant.
Why would the date matter without the words though? I don't need to know if the Giant made a post last April, I'm more likely to need to know when he said something on a given subject.
Why would the date matter without the words though? I don't need to know if the Giant made a post last April, I'm more likely to need to know when he said something on a given subject.
Agreed. If you want to search simply by date, well, the Giant has a post history here.
I don't see how the actual words of the posts wouldn't count. This isn't an index of dates. Its an index of content. Only occasionally is the date of a comment in the index even that important.
__________________ Thanks, Bradakhan, for the avatar!
For what it's worth, I'd be more interested in reading by post date than by topic. It certainly provides a bit of context, as well as letting me easily remember which ones I have and haven't seen.
That said, I don't want to volunteer someone for extra work. ThePhantasm's link would probably be sufficient for me, if it actually worked instead of returning "Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."
That's not what an index is. An index isn't a Table of Contents provided in chronological order. An index is a topically organized tool pointing you to specific citations about specific things. The only difference between this and a book index is that this isn't alphabetically organized (mainly because there is no good way to do that - none of the topics can really be summed up in one word).
The link I provided works just fine for me. However, you can get to the same thing by clicking on the Giant's profile and then clicking the "read more posts by the Giant" link.
__________________ Thanks, Bradakhan, for the avatar!
Why would the date matter without the words though? I don't need to know if the Giant made a post last April, I'm more likely to need to know when he said something on a given subject.
While the content is undoubtedly more important than the time frame, sometimes information is time sensitive- if he's talking about how much time has passed since event x, for instance.
While the content is undoubtedly more important than the time frame, sometimes information is time sensitive- if he's talking about how much time has passed since event x, for instance.
No one is denying this, as far as I can tell. Please read comment #280 further up the page.
On another note, the Geekademia Interview is up on the index! I had to move the TOC to a different post... the interview almost maxes out the 50,000 character limit.
I had to have a massive fight with the server just to get it all up but it finally worked. ThePhantasm: 1, Server Problems: 0.
__________________ Thanks, Bradakhan, for the avatar!
While the content is undoubtedly more important than the time frame, sometimes information is time sensitive- if he's talking about how much time has passed since event x, for instance.
Yes, but if you're reading the post, you can see the date in the corner.
Yes, but if you're reading the post, you can see the date in the corner.
The point is that if you are only interested in posts made the Summer of 2010, because, say you were on a nostalgia trip from when you first started reading the strip that year, you do not want to bother reading posts from before then or after then. The goal is to check the date before you read.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ThePhantasm
Agreed. If you want to search simply by date, well, the Giant has a post history here.
But unlike this index, that includes a lot more cruft posts. Especially the ones that just say “New strip is up.”
The point is that if you are only interested in posts made the Summer of 2010, because, say you were on a nostalgia trip from when you first started reading the strip that year, you do not want to bother reading posts from before then or after then. The goal is to check the date before you read.
You feel nostalgia for... Rich's comments?
"Nostalgia trips" aren't what the index is for. I'm not going to go to that amount of trouble for someone's momentary nostalgic entertainment. This is for informational content purposes only. Besides, are there really that many people who are going to want to go on a "nostalgia trip" through Rich's comments? I find that hard to believe.
EDIT: It does seem quite a few posters want this. Can you guys give me a more solid reason than personal preference? If it comes down to it I guess we could put it to a vote. Before that I'd like to hear everyone's reasons (not just Shhalahr Windrider's).
__________________ Thanks, Bradakhan, for the avatar!
Of course it does, it's your search. (vBulletin archives the search by user, probably so you can go back to it without the board having to re-search. But it's specific to you and doesn't work for others.)
As for adding dates, if you don't want to do it then don't. You certainly don't owe anybody. I'm just saying that for my part, let's say I'm only interested in story/plot posts. I would A) like to check every month or so to see what's updated in that section. And B) if I see that posts on similar-ish topics are made around the same time, I'm more likely to read them together. But I don't think either of those are any stronger than personal preference, so don't put yourself out if you don't feel compelled.
EDIT: It does seem quite a few posters want this. Can you guys give me a more solid reason than personal preference? If it comes down to it I guess we could put it to a vote. Before that I'd like to hear everyone's reasons (not just Shhalahr Windrider's).
For what it's worth, some of us agree with you that the dates don't seem that useful unless you're motivated to click on the actual quote. I do think that comic numbers would be useful in at least some instances, like the Vaarsuvius alignment quote, especially as it seems to have changed:
Everyone in the party is of Good alignment except Belkar as of strip #11 (unholy blight) (Alignment)
The most recent strip thread before the "Vaarsuvius is true neutral" quote appears to be strip #800, so there was plenty of time to change alignment in between, if that's what happened.
That has been specifically not included as it no longer reflects the feelings of the author
Edit: Or, more specifically, would be grossly mis-utilized without its proper context, which Rich has made later quotations which directly counters the arguments it would be used for.
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EDIT: It does seem quite a few posters want this. Can you guys give me a more solid reason than personal preference? If it comes down to it I guess we could put it to a vote. Before that I'd like to hear everyone's reasons (not just Shhalahr Windrider's).
I don't see a whole lot of value to it, but it doesn't seem like it should be difficult to collect all the dates.
Which made me think maybe I should do it.
So I did. (With a couple of minor formatting changes, like moving a colon or line break that was out of place here and there, and removing a highlight term from one of the links)
Alignment and Environment(October 25, 2011): Enor and Gannji were not operating wholly outside the ethical framework of the Empire of Blood. This doesn't change the nature of their acts but does mean that the acts are not as indicative of their overall alignment as some might suppose.
Elan and Nale's Parentage(November 18, 2011): How did it affect their alignment? Giant can't fully answer because of events yet to be revealed. Elan spared Nale's life because of Elan's understanding of what it means to be good.
D&D, Alignment, and Morality(February 14, 2012): Rich on the comic's criticism of the way D&D has been played for over three decades. "D&D cannot and should not begin and end at black-and-white, and indeed already doesn't, if everyone would just learn to look at things a little more complexly." See also here (D&D "racism" and alignment; February 14, 2012) and here (the real world applicability of Redcloak's story; February 14, 2012).
Character Appearances & Forum Speculation(October 6, 2009): Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. For example, just because two persons have similar hairstyles doesn't mean they are related.
Characters and Merchandise(November 22, 2011): The presence, absence, position, or style of any character on any piece of merchandise has no bearing on any future (or past) plot points.
Art and Magic:
Spoiler
Invisibility(March 15, 2010): Why the art for invisible characters isn't consistent (utility trumps consistency).
Counterspelling(January 23, 2012): The Giant doesn't use different art to differentiate between counterspelling with Dispel Magic and counterspelling with the same spell.
Spell Colors(June 28, 2010): The colors come from the spellcaster's choice or personality, and not their alignment or the types of magic.
D&D Rules and Explanations -
Spoiler
Rules Accuracy In The Comic(August 17, 2011): "If you are looking for moment-to-moment rules accuracy from this comic, you probably should stop reading."
Rules Accuracy In The Comic, II(January 10, 2012): Case in point: Rich avoids the D&D term "calling" for the sake of non-D&D OOTS readers, who probably would not understand its meaning.
Acid-Born Shark(April 6, 2011): Rich created it, and made fun of himself in the comic.
Character Items:
Spoiler
Elan's Rapiers(May 13, 2010): He has 2. His original, and one from Julio Scoundrel.
Haley's Boots of Speed(May 29, 2011): Yes, she did get them dyed to match her brown / tan garb.
OOTS' Stats(April 10, 2010): Rich hasn't written them down, and everything is up in the air until they need a specific ability.
Tsukiko Breaks The Rules(August 14, 2011): Tsukiko has too many schools. Rich doesn't make character decisions based on common player trends.
Durkon's Mass Death Ward(September 19, 2011): Rich did not even know Mass Death Ward existed when he wrote the strip. He pegged it at 7th level instead of 8th.
Elan and Nale are Twins(May 3, 2004): So Nale has the same Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution as Elan.
A Piece of Straw(January 3, 2006): Haley used a piece of straw to get out of the jail cell. Info on Haley's Dexterity, Level, etc.
Combat Scenes and Explanations -
Spoiler
Miko's Fight(November 30, 2005): How Miko defeated the OOTS off-panel and captured them.
Roy's Arena Fight With Thog(October 6, 2011): Roy's strategy to taunt a dungeon-crashing Thog into breaking the pillars.
Chronology & Timeline(May 26, 2010): Anything that states a numbered, dated year references the Northern calendar. The Oracle uses the Southern calendar. Further details on timeframe of Belkar's death prophecy included. Some time references in the strip (like the deva's chart) should not be taken too literally.
More Prequels? The total number of planned prequel stories is "pretty much fixed." (September 1, 2011)
OOTS Age Range(July 2, 2010): Intended to be early to mid 20s. Durkon is the "dwarf equivalent" of this age range, in his 50s.
SoD Paladins & Miko's Fall(March 15, 2010): Only the crayon pages are narrative by Redcloak. Not every event is necessarily "seen." Certain scenes are largely shown from Redcloak's perspective. Details of why the paladins who killed Redcloak's people may or may not have fallen, why it doesn't matter, and how showing it would have cheapened the effect of Miko's fall later.
Right-Eye's Family(June 15, 2008): They weren't raised because Redcloak doesn't control Team Evil's finances to pay for resurrection, Xykon does. Evil characters are not discouraged / prohibited from raising the dead in OOTSverse.
Soon's Gem and Gate(August 21, 2011): Details about Soon's rift and how it is protected. The gate / rift could not be moved. You can shift a gate to another plane, but not another place on this plane.
Soon's Castle(September 1, 2011): Soon built the castle, but did not build Azure City.
No Purpose? "As a general rule of thumb, no one should say the sentence, 'There's no (or no other) possible narrative purpose for Rich to have done X!' until the story is completed. Because there's always a narrative purpose, you just haven't thought of what it is." (January 10, 2012)
Typo in #597? Nope. It is a joke. (September 30, 2008)
Racism and Sex in OOTS(May 2, 2009): Rich answers two separate concerns: One, whether there is some correlation between skin color and promiscuity, and two, whether there is too much promiscuity among the women portrayed in the comic. The short answer to both is no.
Plot Holes:
Spoiler
Giant's Response I(November 29, 2011): Including - why Haley was surprised that Miko was killed, info on Nale's self-delusion and ego, how the rift got so close to Xykon's Tower (it grew), and what is and isn't a plot hole.
Giant's Response II(November 30, 2011): A character thinking one thing instead of another thing is not a mistake, it just is. The rift grew according to Redcloak's predictions, but he was measuring the actual hole, not the cracks.
Writing Process and Story Development
Spoiler
V's Gender History(May 29, 2011): Why Rich made V's gender ambiguous and what discussions about it were like in the early days. Roy's 'V-man' comment is not necessarily indicative of V's true gender.
The Dwarven god Thor(July 12, 2004): OOTS Thor is not based off of D&D Thor. Until referenced in the comic, the Nordic legends / mythology does not exist in OOTSverse.
Character Development / Backstory:
Spoiler
Parental Problems(November 18, 2011): Background info on the parents of various characters like Elan and Haley, including character / plot development history.
Miko and Shojo(November 18, 2011): Shojo was the "tape" that held Miko's character together for so long. He was responsible for much in Miko that was good / positive.
V's Splices(August 21, 2011): There won't be a prequel book about them, and Rich hasn't developed a backstory for them. Just 3 evil souls.
Part 1: Kickstarter and the Fans
- 1A: Introduction
- 1B: OOTS Kickstarter Project
- 1C: OOTS Fandom & GiTP Forums
- 1D: OOTS Soundtrack Thread & OOTS Animated
- 1E: OOTS & Social Networking
Part 2: The Comic and Role-Playing Games
- 2A: On Whether Rich Has Time For Role-Playing
- 2B: Will There Ever Be an OOTS World Created for a Gaming System?
Part 3: The Comic's Storyline, Part I
- 3A: The "Darkness" of the Storyline
- 3B: On Behind-The-Scenes Story Commentary In Interviews and Books
- 3C: What Is The Comic About?
- 3D: On The Comic & D&D Rules
- 3E: Creating the Character Wall Poster
- 3F: On Fanart & Whether Roy Wears Pants
- 3G: Putting an End to the Crack Pairings Thread
Part 4: Modern Fantasy and D&D
- 4A: On Keeping Fantasy New & Interesting
- 4B: TVTropes & Lazy Criticism
- 4C: Public Perception of D&D
- 4D: Jack Chick & Tom Hanks
Part 5:The Comic's Storyline, Part II
- 5A: Rich's Favorite Characters to Write Jokes For
- 5B: Rich's Favorite Characters to Write Drama / Character Struggles For
- 5C: Vaarsuvius' Moral Conflict
- 5D: The Storyline & the D&D Alignment System
- 5E: On Keeping Plot Twists Secret
- 5F: The Desert Plot Arc & Law vs. Chaos
- 5G: The Possibility of an Order of the Scribble Prequel Book
- 5H: The Kickstarter Donor's Choice Stories
- 5I: The Conclusion of the Storyline
- 5J: How Much Story Is Left To Tell
Part 6: Outro and Ending
Special Thanks to Xapi and B.Dandelion for transcribing the interview. Reformatted for the index by ThePhantasm. Original interview by Jesse Baruffi and David Lawrence of Geekademia.
eBooks(April 11, 2011): Yes, Rich has considered it. Digital PDF's are not in the works. Rich prefers to sell physical copy books.
That has been specifically not included as it no longer reflects the feelings of the author
Edit: Or, more specifically, would be grossly mis-utilized without its proper context, which Rich has made later quotations which directly counters the arguments it would be used for.
Seems to me since the list includes later quotes, it would make the most sense to include them all and let people figure out for themselves how they relate.
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Re: The Index of the Giant's Comments
Official Incense Aroma Specialist for the Vaarsuvius Fan Club! 
(vBulletin archives the search by user, probably so you can go back to it without the board having to re-search. But it's specific to you and doesn't work for others.)
