Order of the Stick - Book 5 Discussion Thread

Oh, my goodness, Little Nemo, you are almost certainly correct.
I didn’t get it until now.

Hmmmmm…

That makes a lot of sense. It also reraises the question of why exactly the Order of the Scribble hated each other so much. I hope we get that story someday.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who took a while to figure it out.

And we’ve seen that Soon also had his paranoia.

O.O

Nemo, I think you’re on to something.

Ironically, it appears that while all three of them assumed the other two would cheat, everybody actually lived up to their agreement.

Welll,Girard kept in touch with Serini, and Durokan kept in touch (Heh) with Lirian.

Long-standing resentments boiled over as a result of Kraagor’s death.

And yeah, that comic makes it clear that Dorukan didn’t like Soon any more than Girard did. Serini was able to stop the men from killing each other, and it’s not clear if Serini and Soon, Lirian and Girard, or Lirian and Soon ever saw each other again. It’s pretty clear that none of the men ever kept in contact with each other. (And I don’t think we saw any two members of the Order of the Scribble together in Start of Darkness; just two of them individually.)

Link doesn’t work; try this. You left out a " at the end of the link; it screwed it up bad enough that it ruined the formatting of my post when I tried to quote yours. :slight_smile:

I wouldn’t say that warding the throne room against scrying constitutes paranoia-- That’s just a simple, basic precaution that he’d be negligent to omit. Likewise for, say, consecrating it. And even if Soon hadn’t put such a ward on the throne room, Shojo surely would have.

Eeep! Sorry about that. What were you going to say?

My first sentence, except the glitch ate everything but “this”; here’s what my original reply looked like:

Link doesn’t work; try this.

Just a reminder, folks, there’s a past stripsthread for this sort of discussion.

Please restrict this thread to discussing the most recent strips.

Characters can dual-class from fighter to thief with the ordinary 1e rules, but the whole point is that they in fact become “bards under druidic tutelage” upon switching class a second time: they aren’t really druids (since they’re neither required to be True Neutral, nor allowed to use shields), and can immediately start using their old fighter THACO and thief saving throws while gaining a whole bunch of non-druidic (and non-thief and non-fighter) abilities.

There’s no indication they lose their new armor-and-weapon restrictions – which ain’t those of a druid, even leaving aside that bit about shields – upon reaching a given level, because it’s not really 1e dual-classing; it uses those rules as the jumping-on point, but then apparently becomes the lone exception to 'em.

[QUOTE=Peter Morris]
Just a reminder, folks, there’s a past strips thread for this sort of discussion.

Please restrict this thread to discussing the most recent strips.
[/QUOTE]

I figure Tarquin’s latest-strip comment, seemingly referencing 1e, sorta kinda suffices.

Piling onto Chronos’s observation, is this post from Burlew, explaining how he plotted out the “Miko vs the Order, Round 2” fight in Strip 251. That’s a lot of plausible detail for a guy who doesn’t feel bound by the rules. I want to say that he made a similar post explaining their Round 1 fight, but I can’t find it.

My take is that Burlew is very cognizant of the 3.5 rules, and tries to nonetheless surprise the audience while staying within them as much as possible. Like Durkon using Meld into Stone to get the drop on the LG. Or the Smokestick/Holy Word combo. Of course, the rules will take a back seat if drama requires it. (See, Familicide.) But on the whole, I think he tries to follow the rules as much as possible, which, for me at least, makes it a lot more fun to read. The whole trying to figure out the ‘locked room mystery’ kind of thing.

I do agree with Babale that it is hard to square a Level 25+ (assuming Xykon leveled once or twice from the Azure City battle) Sorcerer having that much difficulty with even an Ancient Silver Dragon. Especially having RedCloak there to help too. I’m still going with Epic though, and if he’s lower than 27, it isn’t by much. He needs some epic levels to cast Superb Dispelling and Cloister. Or can any level ~15+ arcane caster cast Cloister if they have the headband?

Unlike many of the posters in the OOTS forum, I didn’t find the Drow sign language that obnoxious. Tarquin had mentioned dealing with them in the past, and he’s old enough to remember when everybody just had to have a Drow character. It’s annoying that he’s instantly proficient in a language he probably hasn’t had to play with in 15 years, but hand-wavable, I guess. (Quoting one OOTS Forum poster, "Who knew the Drow had a sign for “accountant”?) What I found ridiculous was the two handed throw of his ax, that just happened to swat Belkar out of the air before the coup de grace on Nale. And the mask, and the Dwarf tossing, and the…: combined, it’s all a bit much for me. Which’ll make his eventual ass-kicking by Xykon that much sweeter, I guess.

On the benefits and drawbacks of the 1e Bard, this thread at a UK D&D forum goes through a lot of them. One thing, thinking about Tarquin as a Bard, (Not that I think that he is, but playing with the idea.) if you ported a 1e Bard to 3.5, would he be able to count all of his Fighter and Thief, ahem, Rogue levels towards skill points? So if he was a Fighter 7/ Thief 7/ Bard what-ever, would he get to count all 14+ level’s worth of skill points? That might explain why he has such a stellar Ride score, while not demonstrating any epic feats yet.

Not to mention that 1e Bards had a ridiculous amount of hit points, due to all of the multi-class hit dice they picked up. This postexplains it better than I could. (Scroll down to May 19th, 2010, Man in the Funny Hat.) FTP:

Not sure if I agree with all that, but I thought it was an interesting point. Tarquin being a Factotum is probably a lot more elegant solution though.

One last question for you all. Durkon went on about only having enough diamond dust to cast one more Resurrection. I think this is only a big deal if you have two dead characters and need to figure out which one to raise. Or Durkon could be the dead character—he is returning to the Dwarven homelands “posthumously”—and then they could have a mountain of diamond dust for all the good it would do. You could get Malack to do it, assuming Nergal is down with the whole Resurrection thing, but wouldn’t he have his own stocks of diamond dust to draw on?

So, assuming we’re limited to Durkon and his stock of dust, who will be the two dead characters out of: the LG, the Order, the Draketeeth, or Ian and Uncle Geoff, where this Sophie’s choice will come up? Belkar and Haley? Belkar and V? Girard and V? Alternately, I guess Durkon could use the powdered diamond as the component in a Symbol Spell, like Death. I thought that was going to be his “just 'da spell, lad.” Shows what I know.

“Bring my accountant”?

I assume he was trying to sign “Bring my Axe”.

I am sooo slow.

The kobold is his accountant.

Ack. I must have missed that. Ok, thanks.

(Further to the discussion about 1st Ed Bards, having talked about hit points without CON bonuses we should note that if CON bonuses are available then the lucky bard is potentially applying them to 7 fighter hit dice, one thief hit die, and ten bard hit dice - that’s 18 doses of CON bonus to the fighter’s 9. I once played a bard who had over 140 hit points…)

On the other hand, only fighters got full benefit of the con bonus to HP: For everyone else, it capped out at +1 per level.

And it’s not at all implausible that a pure fighter would max out the Ride skill, especially for a human fighter who happens to have a high Int score. If we guesstimate that Tarquin is about an Int of 16, then he’s got 6 skill points per level, and fighters don’t really have all that many useful skills on their class skill list. What else is he going to spend those points on?

At this point I’m guessing Tarquin is a deliberate parody of characters that just miraculously happen to know a wealth of information on seemingly every topic under the sun, and can defend themselves against seemingly every conceivable method of attack. Just as Miko was a deliberate example of the wrong way to play a paladin.

(Though I think this point was brought up earlier by someone else, re: Tarquin.)

Prior to the parody really showing up to the extent it has recently, Tarquin was just so Affably Evil that even though he’s a bad guy, everyone liked him. Perhaps the over-the-top parody is partially to re-assert Tarquin as being hated, and make a greater percentage of the readership happy when he snuffs it.

In any event, it’s clear that Nale, Tarquin and other secondary villains I may not be thinking of have to be disposed of before Xykon and Redcloak. As to which of those two will last longer, six to five and pick 'em.