And green gives him the ability to nurture a garden that would be the envy of all Brassmoon.
That’s an interesting theory, and I think you may well be onto something!
All I can say is I wish the D&D campaigns I used to play had the kind of magic items THunt likes to give out.
I’m such a sap. sniff
Minmax seems to be turning into a proper character instead of a munchkin. I’ve really enjoyed these last few strips - very touching.
Minmax lost his munchkin status (or started losing it, anyway) when he started viewing Kin as a person, not a monster.
Actually, I think it started with his reaction to Dellen bragging about rape. At that point, he still thought of Kin as a monster, but was quite clear that that didn’t make it OK to rape her.
I’d argue that Minmax thought that she was a sentient being, and not an animal. This is complicated by the fact that in fantasy worlds, it’s possible to be a sentient being who isn’t human. At any rate, MM was repulsed by the idea of raping a sentient being, and I think that started him on the path to considering her as a person, not a monster. And it wasn’t an easy path for him.
Good call!
Yep, it’s the level-up explanation, which shoots down my armor theory…leaving us still in the dark about what, if anything, the armor does besides change color.
Minmax may be developing as a person, but as a character he’s still very much a min-maxer. The only reasons to take fighter past 2nd level are to take the Weapon Specialisation tree or focus on feats. Barbarian synergises very well with Fighter. By taking a level in Barbarian, Minmax gets Rage, d12 HP, +1 BAB, +10 Speed. At 2nd level he’ll get Uncanny Dodge.
I know that THunt has established that Minmax can still see with his “bad” eye. But I still wonder if the healing potion will restore it to its original pre-injury state.
Hmmm will that bag of healing potions be any use to the melting orc?
Hard to believe a year has passed since we’ve discussed this comic. I’ve been following it closely, and I presume others have, too.
I’m glad to see that the author has found a posting schedule that he believes he can stick with, and is managing to do so (at least for the time being). It even makes the “Altsplanations” comics easier to put up with (you might be able to tell that I’m not a huge fan of the story being broken up like this).
So: Despite what he said here, Minmax has made what looks like a HUGE sacrifice.
I can’t imagine THunt letting all that has transpired in this storyline go to waste, though.* Anybody have any notions on how he might get the crew out of the Maze without making them go through iteration #1,982,772? And probably then some?
(If anybody thinks we should abandon this thread and start a new one, I’ll let them make the suggestion.)
*Except that a small, frightened part of me can imagine just that… :eek:
For future viewers, here is the “sacrifice” episode I’m talking about.
I just thought his quick thinking, where all the Kins and Forgath didn’t.
Reading the comic and understanding the meta-story (that these are characters being roleplayed by players in a game of Dungeons & Dragons) I’m trying to make sense of the “recent” changes in Minmax. I mean, the whole point of the character has been that his player is a “min-maxer”, concerned mainly with painstakingly optimizing stats for maximum combat performance. Hence, the character’s high Strength score and stupidly low Intelligence (I assume Minmax has had an Intelligence score of 3 or 4. Anything lower than that, and a creature in D&D is illiterate and probably can’t even form words to speak; Minmax is at least “literate” enough to approximate the spelling of Kin’s name). And more concerned with “winning” the game than actually “roleplaying”.
But over the course of this story arc, Minmax has changed dramatically for the better as a character, roleplaying-wise, and has more recently been showing signs of actually having a brain in his head. Several of his recent decisions/actions have indicated an intelligence we haven’t seen before. And all of this has happened in a relatively short time.
I’ve been considering a few possibilities:
-
The character’s player dropped out of the game, and a new player took over the character instead of rolling an altogether new character. The new player is a better roleplayer, and the DM allowed him to shuffle stats around to make Minmax smarter and less of a, well, min-maxed character.
-
As #1, but the DM is now running the character, because Minmax was so deeply involved in the ongoing story that it would be awkward for the character to simply disappear or get killed off.
-
Minmax’s player is still the same guy, but player has gotten older — he’s “grown up” a bit and has become more interested in the roleplaying aspect of the game, and is making a conscious effort to turn Minmax into an actual “character” instead of a simple “monster-slaying, loot-gathering machine”. Because it’s usually not a simple, quick matter to boost an individual stat (in this case, Intelligence) in D&D, it looks to me that at some point in the maze the characters leveled up*, and Minmax’s player took a feat or otherwise learned a new ability that boosted his Intelligence score considerably. And I think that feat/ability is related to whatever happened when the psionic gears turned his blind eye and facial scar purple. Minmax has acquired a psionic “implant” that has boosted his Intelligence score. OTOH, he had been starting to show more intelligence even before the purple eye.
Of course, these changes obviously started right about the time Kin joined the party. And a lot of Minmax’s more … educated … actions could be attributed to a higher Wisdom score, rather than Intelligence. Didn’t he loot Dellyn’s wooden sword when he killed him? Wisdom is an important stat for Ranger spellcasting, so it’s not unlikely that that sword grants some sort of Wisdom bonus. Or perhaps Kin radiates some sort of aura that boosts the Wisdom (and maybe Intelligence) of nearby party members.
Minmax’s actions in the most recent comic are clearly the actions of a character with higher Wisdom and Intelligence scores than we’ve come to expect from him. (And frankly, I thought Minmax’s actions in this most recent strip represent one of the high points of the story. That was just … awesome. And it wasn’t something the “old” Minmax would have done. The “old” Minmax would have … drooled or something.
- And given that the party has apparently been through nearly 2 million iterations of the maze, they’ve probably leveled up quite a few times.
Also, has anybody else read Thunt’s latest blog post? If you haven’t, I highly recommend it. It turns out that Kin’s story is Thunt’s mother’s story.
Was it ever made explicit that there’s a meta-level in this comic where these are actually PCs of players in another universe, or has it always been the OOTS premise where the universe works according to the rules of D&D, but there isn’t some kind of meta-world where the characters are actually being “played” by people?
This is kind of what I was thinking when I mentioned that some of Minmax’s actions, including this latest one, might be the result of a high Wisdom score. Kin’s race (dammit, I can’t remember what her race is called — I want to say “naga”, but I know that’s not right. And I can’t look it up because all of my D&D books were stolen last year) is noted for having very high Intelligence scores, and wizards and psions are common amongst them. Intelligence, as a stat, is good for analyzing problems, as we saw with the analytical discussion of how the psion’s gears worked, but Wisdom is better for quicker decision-making. It looks to me like Minmax used the Sense Motive skill and figured out how to foil the psion’s plan. He took what he’d been told about how winning the maze meant you could never enter it again, listened to the psion explaining his plan, and immediately realized how he could defeat him: by forcing him to win.
I will not be surprised if we soon discover that Minmax has taken a level or two in Paladin.
Yes, there have been some comics where new characters have appeared, and it’s plainly obvious that these new characters are “rerolls” by players whose characters died in the previous encounter. Notably, the characters in the early days of the comic who were all variations on Drizz’t.
Also, Minmax’s name. He was, until recently, a blatant example of a character run by a minmaxer.