In “On the Origin of PCs” Roy parlays with a group of orcs (who were thought to be menacing a town but actually were just trying to get good seats for a rock concert) rather than killing them. The rest of his (pre-OotS) party disagree:
Party member 1: “Why was it is our best interest to parlay with the orcs? We could have killed them and gotten the same XP and not wasted three weeks.”
Party member 2: “They’re listed as Chaotic Evil, too, so we could kill them without aligment problems.”
Party member 3: “And we wouldn’t have to listen to this crap music.”
Roy: “They weren’t doing anything wrong. We’re supposed to kill them because they like music?”
PM 2: “Um, YES! We’re adventurers, randomly killing things is what we do!”
Roy: “Yeah? Well count me out then. I may find that I need to kill creatures in the service of some higher duty, or for self-defense, but I refuse to kill anyone because it’s slightly more convenient than talking to them.”
Roy quits the group but Durkon, who is also a member of the party (and much abused by them) chooses to follow Roy because “In all tha years I’ve been in human lands, yer tha first I ever saw who’d use 'is head when 'is sword was handy.”
So Durkula is well aware of Roy’s preference for talking first, hacking later.
Short but sweet. I’m loving the update speed. Go, Rich!
As for the maneuver, I find it hard to believe that it both has a name and reputation, but also that Roy is unusual in having learned it from a dead friend. Death and resurrection are commonplace in the OotS world, so people shouldn’t be surprised that “no fighter alive” knows that move. Not a big gripe, but it did make me raise an eyebrow.
Raise Dead is “cheap” (probably still out of the reach of common folk) but that has a restriction of no more than one day dead per Cleric level and, as we saw, time flies in the afterlife.
Resurrection isn’t common even in the Stickworld, given both the relative scarcity of high level clerics and the cost to have it done.
That’s a good point. Still, with the literal revolving door afterlife, it does make me wonder how there isn’t more transfer of knowledge between the dead and the living. Still, your point is sufficient to prop up my suspension of disbelief.
Why are high level clerics so scarce in Stickworld? Our little group of misfits can’t be the only set of adventurers wandering around and grabbing XP. And they’re not even particularly good or competent adventurers. At one point, Elan’s father assured him that if he had to replace party members, all he’d have to do was set up in a local tavern and a (something like) Zerkon LightningHammer would show up with the same level as Durkon. So in theory, the Stickworld should be crawling with high level PCs.
The corollary to which is that if you DID have that many high level adventurers wandering about, it should be trivial to set up an army of high level adventurers to defeat Xykon. Such is the paradox of having the story revolve around you.
In any event, the attempts to Resurrect Roy (and Durkon) show that high level clerics are a commodity in fairly scarce supply (again, not even counting the gold piece cost).
Oots-world is constructed so that Roy can’t call in the cavalry. Because realistically, he should be able to: if you face a bigger problem (e.g. end of the world vs. merely fulfilling Dad’s quest) you get a bigger hammer. Rich once said that part of his challenge was to construct the story to make this obvious choice unfeasible.
In practice, Roy is the cavalry. So I’m willing to accept that the order has some rare or special spells/techniques.
But that’s in support of the story (even within the OOTS world (I guess the story-telling feat?)). There are just enough characters of whatever needed level to drive the plot. A surfeit of high-level clerics removes plot tension.
The ability to Resurrect is contingent on the spirit wanting to return to life. As we’ve seen, the afterlife is pretty sweet, at least for Good characters. It may be that though many clerics have spells that can bring the dead back to life, very few dead people want to return. Roy returned only because he had such important business; it’s quite plausible that the only fighters who happened to take that rather esoteric feat didn’t take it; it certainly seems to have a prerequisite that it must be learned from someone else, not developed from scratch. It may well have been extremely rare.
There are some gameworlds where upper level clerics, or upper level characters period, are rare. Take Eberron, for instance. 3rd edition, High Cardinal Krozen, the second most powerful cleric in the faith of the Silver Flame, is level 12. So is the Lord of Blades, the messianic warforged general who’s leading a rebellion to free the warforged. The King of Breland is level 10, and Kaius III, king of Karrnath, who’s secretly a 150 year old vampire, is level 13.
So, in 3.5, you had to be at least a 9th level cleric to cast raise dead, and in Eberron, at least, there aren’t a lot of 9th level clerics around, and most of the ones who are around are either too busy or too indifferent to your problems, adventurer, to do it. Maybe it’s the same in the Stickworld.
You have to keep in mind that the members of the OOTS are very high level characters. They just sometimes seem underpowered because they’re fighting Epic level characters or entire armies. But Shojo and Hinjo, who had access to all the assets of Azure City, acknowledged the OOTS were more powerful than anyone else around.
Also, consider a few other things: It’s reasonable to assume that the feat Roy learned is a high level feat. It also appears to require some amount of one-on-one training. Maybe a significant amount: it’s really impossible to know how long Roy and his grandfather were training.
Now, the way feats usually work in D&D is that they don’t say, “Must be 12th level to learn this feat,” they say, “Must have a Base Attack Bonus of +12,” if it’s a combat feat, or “Must be able to cast 6th level spells,” for magic feats. The various “warrior” classes (fighters, paladins, etc.) have the best BAB at +1 per level. Other classes have a slower progression. And, of course, these classes generally can’t cast spells, or at least, not super-powerful ones like resurrection or plane walk.
So, while it’s pretty trivial for a cleric to communicate with the spirit of the dead, they’re generally not going to be capable of learning a feat like the Spellsplitter Maneuver. And while there’s more than a few fighters out there who are capable of learning it, they’re not in a position to train for a month or so with a dead person to learn it, because they can’t talk to dead people on their own. And then there’s the twin problems of finding a spirit who knows the feat, and convincing them to teach it to you.
So, for Roy to get this feat, a few things had to line up just right. He had to have a connection to a person who knew the feat; that person had to be favorably disposed to Roy; Roy had to die; he had to go to the same afterlife as his favorably disposed relative; he had to stay there long enough to be trained in it; and he had to consent to be resurrected and pulled out of literal heaven to come back to this world of mud and tears.
That’s a fairly unlikely sequence of events, and even then, it’s still not necessary to the story that no one else has ever done anything like that: there may very well be someone else out there who has also learned this “forgotten” feat. Maybe even several someones. Roy doesn’t have to be unique, he just has to be rare enough that the bodyguard to a high level cleric hasn’t run into anyone like him before this strip.
I’d also hazard a guess that, as Roy has an unusual set of stats for a fighter (being quite intelligent and with a high will, traits usually reserved for clerics and wizards, not fighters), there may not be many high-level fighters with Roy’s uncommon statline. I imagine most of them, like Thog, stuff all their points into Strength and Constitution. Roy may be the only fighter alive that knows Spellsplinter because Roy’s the only fighter alive that didn’t min-max this stats like crazy.
*Except, of course, that you will never improve at any skill you know, never have a say in what happens in the world, never have children if you haven’t already, never talk to anyone with a different point of view, never experience any real risk, never visit anywhere else, and never see any friends or family members who did not share the exact same shade of alignment as you. Oh, and you can still be destroyed by evil adventurers, but you never get any better at defending yourself.
That’s… remarkable inconsistent with what Rich has actually shown in the comic. Roy learned a new feat that, apparently, he could only possibly have learned in the afterlife, so you can improve your skills after you’re dead. “Never visit anywhere else” is kind of a meaningless limitation when “here” is a plane of existence infinitely larger than the world you were born on. Rich has gone to some lengths to demonstrate that “alignment” and “personality” aren’t the same thing: Hinjo and Miko are both lawful good, and have some pretty significant differences in point of view. And if you can be destroyed by evil adventurers, then yeah, you’re experiencing real risk. And you can learn new feats while you’re in heaven to make it easier to defend yourself against those evil adventurers.
“Never have a say in what happens to the world” is a legit complaint, but also describes the lives of 99.9999% of everyone who ever lived, while they were still alive. And “never have kids” counts as a bonus as far as I’m concerned, but I’ll grant that most people probably feel different. And Stephen Fry has some pertinent input on that whole “never see your family” thing.