Yes, I know. That’s why I said they are easy to spot and avoid.
Only because of the smoke. He’d have seen the trap and dodged it otherwise.
Nope, the traps are easy to see even Z saw them.
Story-wise, I agree; Schlock Mercenary, Order of the Stick, Goblins, and Girl Genius are the only webcomics that I have been actively stressed out by while waiting to see what happens to the characters at certain points, I think. And Schlock Mercenary’s astonishing unbroken record of daily updates for almost 13 years now is a big strong point for it.
They were easy for Haley to spot.
Z saw it after it had been activated, which, yeah, is pretty easy.
THe linear Guild will have no trouble evading these traps.
OK, point taken. You’re probably right. Even Belkar, the non-tracker tracker can see them.
You’d think that one of the two clerics would have Find Traps memorized. Or a handy scroll of it. At least they could avoid the traps, even if they couldn’t disarm them. (Unless they have Ian stashed away somewhere…)
As far as using the fiends like Haley did the dominated kobold, Planar Ally doesn’t let you force march them into oblivion. You have to negotiate with the outsider and they have to agree to the task. Moreover, a Barbed Devil has a Int of 12 and Wis of 14. Nothing special for high level adventurers, but OTOH, it isn’t stupid enough to think a dungeon isn’t going to be trapped, and it’s probably not going to blithely waltz ahead of Nale’s party. I’m guessing the piscoloth has similar stats.
One interesting (and maybe funny, if Xykon et al show up) feature of Devils in general is that they can see in all darkness, even magical. Can’t you just see the Barbed Devil look at the MiTD for the first time, scream, “F**k this! You’re not paying me enough to fight that!”, and instantly Teleport out?
OK, that would be funny. As would the speculation among the fans that would kick off.
Question: what happens to them (and Sabine, and Qarr) if they get killed? When they were trying to figure out what to do with the Linear Guild after the Battle of Haley’s Speech, Haley seemed to think that Sabine would just rematerialize on the lower planes if she was killed, although she isn’t sure. And then when Miko actually DOES kill Sabine (or at least gives her what would almost certainly be a lethal condition for a human, what with the 180-degree twist of the head), it doesn’t even seem to affect her. But Celia will just merge back into the Plane of Air when she dies. What will happen to the Planar Allies / summoned monsters / Sabine / Qarr when/if they die?
LOL. That would be awesome. Does that apply to demons as well? In the book War and XPs, on the commentary page for “Round 4: Kill the Messenger” (the section covering strips 368 through 376, where Xykon and Redcloak and the MitD fight Miko at the watchtower), Rich is discussing how one big reason he included this scene was to give us some foreshadowing about how powerful the MitD is, so we’d know to be worried when Haley and Belkar go after Roy’s corpse later on.
Anyway, at the bottom of the page, there is a one-panel mini-cartoon where the MitD says “Maybe I’m a kobold!” and a hobgoblin cleric says “You’re pretty tall for a kobold,” and the MitD says “… maybe I’m two kobolds?” and a demon roach below says “Ooo! I know! I know!” and another roach says “Shh! You’ll ruin the surprise.” If demons can see in all darkness as well, that explains how they know what he is.
… Although I suppose their fabulous fourth-wall-breaking powers would probably explain it just as well …
There are two basic categories of spells of this sort, summoning spells and calling spells. Only the latter actually affects the subject of the spell - summoning someone and killing them doesn’t hurt them, but calling them and killing them does.
On the other hand, the Giant seems to play a bit fast and loose with those terms: Dorukan’s Cloister spell explicitly has a loophole for summoning spells, but both his booty call spell and Celia’s talisman appear as though they ought to be calling effects, not summoning.
Nale is a rogue.
Well, he is a multi-class fighter/rogue/sorcerer. To say he has lousy skills at much of anything is to be very charitable.
He’s very good at gloating.
Fighter and Rogue synergise very well, especially if you want a duellist type character.
Well, the sorcerer levels mitigate that quite a bit I believe. Especially since he specializes in enchantment spells. (Last 4 panels.) And his class selections were a joke about the process of becoming a bard in earlier editions. That took forever. My half-elf never did make it.
I’m not a D&D player but my understanding is that a bard has a mix of skills that other character classes also have. You could acquire these same skills by a very complicated path of moving from one character class to another, accumulating skills from each as you go. The joke was that Elan and Nale have essentially the same skills but Elan chose the simple path of being a bard while Nale chose the unnecessarily complicated multi-class path.
Yes, but I have always read it as also being a joke about the fact that in 2nd Edition, (Or maybe AD&D) to become a bard you first had to be a Fighter, then a Rogue, then a Cleric? or Druid?, before starting as a bard. And in that version, you couldn’t use any of the skills or abilities from the earlier classes. After 5 or 7 levels of a Fighter, you started over as a 1st level Thief, with a lot of hit points, then switched again to the first level magic user type, then finally switched again to a first level Bard. Needless to say, not may people actually managed it. 
Given that Elan’s now got a prestige class it wouldn’t surprise me if Nale’s also taken one - Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster come to mind.
It was 1st Ed AD&D. You had to dual-class as a Fighter then Thief first. Then you could become a Bard. Bards got Druid spells IIRC. Bard was a separate base class in 2nd Ed AD&D and used wizard spells, and it was a better wizard than the wizard at lower levels.
Not quite: you couldn’t use any of the skills or abilities until the level of your second class exceeded that of the first. I think HP might have been an exception.
The strip is based on 3.5 rules. And if it was based on 2nd Edition rules, it wouldn’t be the same joke. The joke is that Nale used a really complicated route to acquire those skills that was unnecessary; there was a simple alternative that would have done the same thing.