“Tier envy?”
I love the way he’s put the chatter in the foreground, and we only see the expressions and gestures of the significant conversation. And stabbing is probably going to come up again.
I wonder if there’s some significance to V’s bird hopping off his/her shoulder in panel #6?
And you can still pretty much chart exactly what Haley and Elan are saying to each other in each panel.
At some point – probably as bonus content in a forthcoming book – we’ll get this same comic from their perspective.
Well, Blackwing is the only one of the four figures in the foreground who notices Haley and Elan running off and sees where they were headed. He may well have even caught a bit of their talk. At the next opportunity, I could see Blackwing whispering all this into V’s ear, so they’ll have an ally aware that things may get hairy (or indeed stabby) rather soon.
Geek in-joke. Some D&D players on the Internet categorize the different classes into tiers based on how powerful they are. Wizards and clerics (and, in fact, most full-spellcasting classes) are put into tier 1, marking them as the most powerful. With good players, this isn’t all that big a deal, since the more powerful folks will know how to not eclipse their friends, and a lot of the challenges will be resolved by the players themselves, not by their class abilities, anyway. It can, however, cause some inter-party conflict sometimes.
I don’t see why. We all know what Elan told Haley.
Because there’ll be a joke in there about wondering what the current foreground crowd is saying.
How do the other tiers break down?
I’m having a hard time finding the standard list, but it’s something like this:
Tier 1: Cleric, Druid, Wizard, Archivist, Artificer. These classes are broken-powerful if you don’t make an effort to not overshadow others.
Tier 2: Almost all the other full spellcasting classes, including Sorcerer, Psion, Favored Soul, etc. These classes can generally do any given thing the Tier 1 classes can, but aren’t as flexible.
Tier 3: Classes that can fill multiple useful roles in a party, but not to the Universe-bending extent of the full casters. Rogues and bards are here, plus the classes from the Tome of Battle and Psychic Warriors, among others, as well as well-played rangers and paladins, and most of the other partial-casting classes from the splatbooks. Folks creating new classes generally aim for this power level, as it’s considered most “balanced”.
Tier 4: Classes that only do one thing, but do it well. Barbarians are the main example of this: A straight barbarian is actually pretty good at smashing face (almost as good as a cleric or druid), but that’s about all they do well.
Tier 5: Classes that do one thing, but which take effort to do it close to as well as Tier 4. Fighter is here.
Tier 6: Classes that only do one thing, and which, even with optimization, still don’t do it very well. This is the home of monks and the Complete Warrior version of the Samurai.
Somewhere on the Internet (I think on the Wizards of the Coast site) there’s an “official” list that everyone references, but I can’t seem to find it since WotC restructured their site to emphasize 4e.
Sort of a Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead only backwards
Tier 0: Factotum. Broken-powerful, capable of doing nigh-anything any other class can do… and can take extra standard actions a turn. Capable of frustrating a ‘killer’ DM in seconds flat.
Factotum (with lots of Font of Inspiration and Cunning Surge not banned) is pretty powerful, but still nothing compared to the wizard who can take five full turns of actions before the battle even starts, and could use each and every one of those actions to instantly end the battle.
Try this thread (it’s a repost):
I have to say, Haley’s experience as a rebel leader is really showing. Yay character development!
The conversation about the money presumedly is significant (the strip is titled “The Love of Money”). Is it supposed to show that Haley is committed enough to Elan that she’s willing to share her money with him? Or is a foreshadowing that money is going to come between them at some point?
I was rereading “Don’t Split the Party” the other day and I was wondering about an old issue. Go back to 562 - that’s the one where Kubota tells Therkla to kill Elan. Why did Kubota do that?
It had been established that Kubota was intelligent and a master manipulator. So he must have realized Therkla had a crush on Elan. And it had been established that Therkla was one of his most useful and competent minions. So why would Kubota have given an order that was so likely to turn her against him? It was after all Hinjo not Elan that he needed to eliminate.
Kubota could have told Therkla that because of her loyalty he was going to make sure Elan would remain unharmed. That would have reinforced her loyalty to him.
Or, assuming he decided that he didn’t want to have her loyalty split, he could have told Therkla that he was going to make sure Elan remained unharmed. And then arranged to have him killed by Qarr or somebody else. Maybe even set it up to make it look like Hinjo was responsible. That would have reinforced Therkla’s loyalty and eliminated Elan as a potential threat to that loyalty.
But telling Therkla to kill Elan herself created the strong possibility that she would rebel against his order (which is essentially what happened). Maybe Kubota was testing her loyalty or maybe he was annoyed that her loyalty had become questionable and was punishing her. But either possibility seems like a silly thing to do in the midst of the campaign against Hinjo. As I noted, Therkla was one of his most useful minions and he needed her services. Why take an unnecessary chance on losing her?
So if you go directly to jail, they don’t collect 200,000 GPs?