One of the Ranger class’s better known abilities is that they get the Track feat for free. The Track feat lets you make checks against your Survival skill (which is based on Wisdom) to track a quarry. Survival is a class skill for rangers, and they get a ton of skill points, so one can generally take it for granted that any given ranger has maxed out Survival, for use for tracking (hence Roy hiring Belkar as the party’s tracker). Belkar, however, doesn’t care about anything except killing, and so never bothered to put any points at all in it.
Miko, by contrast, had to actually spend a feat on Track, a feat which could have been used for many other things (like, improving her combat ability in a variety of ways). And since Survival is a cross-class skill for all of her classes, she had to spend two points for each rank and has a lower maximum skill rank. Plus, her classes give fewer skill points per level than Belkar’s. So it really wouldn’t make sense for her to have very many ranks in Survival, and in fact, she herself says that she only has 1: So she can track, but she’s really not very good at it.
But compared to Belkar, her single skill rank gives her an edge over his none. Now, it would still be possible for Belkar to have an equal or greater total skill modifier, if his Wisdom bonus were greater than hers. But Miko’s Wisdom is at least a little above average, and Belkar’s is below average. So he’s still worse than her.
I was with you all the way up to here. I never saw any evidence that Miko’s Wisdom was above average. If anything she was probably one of the few people Belkar had a reasonable chance at beating on a Wisdom check.
Miko couldn’t have gotten as far as she did as a paladin and a monk without above-average wisdom. It wasn’t that she was unwise, it was that she was a self-righteous bitch.
Objectively, she’s cast paladin spells (Cure Light Wounds, I think) which means she had a Wis of at least 11. Which is only a hair above average, but it is above.
As an aside, that strip shows her as remarkably polite and reasonable, for Miko. She finds the plan of “whoever has the higher mod does the tracking” acceptable, and even when it turns out she has more ranks than Belkar, she still offers another avenue by which he might best her.
Probably because none of that touched her hot button issues. A situation that, say, implied that Roy had better moral judgment than her or that Durkon had more divine favor might have had a different reaction.
You might be thinking of the Worf Effect, which dictates that the stronger and more badass a hero/PC you are, the more time you’re going to spend getting smacked around like a redhead stepchild to establish that this week’s villain is real powerful.
Yes, you can raise him the same way you’d raise any other creature. Its only weird things like celestials, elementals, undead and constructs that are more difficult.
Elan, of all people, seems to be the only one who’s figured out the secret - you avoid your counterpart and attack the weaknesses of another person’s counterpart.
Interesting that we haven’t seen the sixth member of the Linear Guild revealed yet. And others have mentioned Durkon hasn’t appeared recently.
So maybe 800’s big surprise will be Durkon and Hilgya.
It seems from today’s comic that V has realized it, though I suppose we’ll have to see.
Why do we think there are six? Or is it because there’s always six?
Yeah, I’ve been wondering if she was gonna make an appearance someday, considering her rushing off in tears something like 600 strips ago. I bet now she’s a dwarf ho’ with an attitude, all sportin’ piercings, a tramp stamp and a poleaxe, and out to get even on the Durk-meister.