The Order of the Stick

It'd be cool if a weapon like that (which can return to you by teleporting) allowed you to do something silly like get your full attack action at range, because you're repeatedly throwing the weapon and having it warp back to your hand each time, in the same span of time it would take to swing it in melee range.

edited 1st Jul '17 6:09:48 AM by Enlong

The issue there, I would think, is transit time. Unlike ammo-based projectiles, the sword has to complete its path to the target before Roy can resummon it and chuck it again.

edited 1st Jul '17 6:12:20 AM by TobiasDrake

I suppose that's something that would depend upon how the DM interprets the time it takes. On the one hand, a sufficiently fast archer can use their full attack with a bow. On the other hand, that could perhaps be interpreted as the archer drawing and firing before even the first arrow has landed. Which is insanely fast, but maybe possible considering the superhuman feats P Cs can perform. But a thrown sword would have to land first, so it would have to be moving fast enough that it could be thrown a bunch of times in the span of, what, 6 seconds? So, probably about a half-second of travel time, at most.

Bows also have a more efficient firing mechanism. They're made for ranged attacks.

Like, I could see logic in getting multiple thrown attacks in a round with a resummonable weapon like this if it was a weapon that was made to be thrown. Roy's greatsword suffers from both not having an effective means of propelling it beyond simply lobbing it through the air and lacking the aerodynamic design of an arrow or spear.

It's weighty, hard to toss, and has a lot of inertia to overcome, slowing its course. All the reasons why throwing your sword is an ineffective strategy don't go away just because Roy can resummon it.

Sure to all of the above; but, if you have something you know you can throw and have come back to you, it behoves you to practice with it, regardless of the inherent issues.

Because you might need to know exactly what you can and can't do with it.

We'll have to wait until it's used to know whether Roy's sword has any special magic for making it better when thrown at people.

Why people? When you've got a pit between you and a lever...

In that case hitting it with the hilt would be less of a problem.

Roy does try to activate a ranged attack before the giant encounter. I could see there being some other property of the sword that makes it useful in that regard.

If he can use this for his Disrupt Casting attack, this could be very useful.

Well, getting hit in the face by the hilt of a sword is a bit distracting, no matter your Concentration check.

edited 1st Jul '17 10:50:15 AM by Euodiachloris

Okay, ranged Spellsplinter is an awesome idea.

I actually did predict he might be able to summon the sword to himself. The description in Wrecan's book made it sound like there was a huge variety of effects the magic could have, and summoning it didn't seem out of the question. I should've posted something.

Of course, Elan's still out his Chaos Sabre. Think it could summon other weapons?

edited 1st Jul '17 11:41:22 AM by shigmiya64

Very much doubt. This is all about Roy's connection to this specific sword.

It wasn't Elan's sabre so it's probably gone forever.

lel, at least one of you got it right what happened

Yeah I was thinking that the only other weapon I remembered seeing go over the side is the one he got from a random crewmember.

Ah didnt notice newest comic was already linked to huh

edited 2nd Jul '17 5:04:02 AM by SpookyMask

Wait, Elan lost his sword too? When?

EDIT: Ohhh, I see what happened there. Someone thought it was Elan's sword Roy was using after dropping his own.

Yeah, my money is on this being the ranged attack Roy was hoping for. Summoning some kind of Sword Beam was just an assumption Roy made before he'd had a proper read through the Big Book Of Exposition.

edited 2nd Jul '17 3:10:21 PM by johnnye

I mean, if so, it's not a very good ranged attack. The main benefit of this is that he can't be disarmed anymore, which has been another major weakness of his in the past.

It's possible he can enchant the sword in some way when he throws it.

How does throwing weapons work anyway? Can the thrower move before or after?

I dunno which edition of D&D this comic is based on, but in 3.5 ye have two actions(not getting into explaining stuff like swift actions and free actions) per turn, move action and standard action and ye take them in order you want to take them But then again, D&D systems can be rather different. Like D&D 5e actually lets you move, attack someone and then finish rest of your moving.

Like, can I just say I find it bizarre how many fans of this comic in this thread don't play the game? I mean, other places I've seen this comic getting posted is usually rpg forums, so I just find it kind of bizarre since most of jokes are system based gags which wouldn't be that funny if you don't know the system

Anyhoo, unless sword would have some sort of special quality, it would be basically throwing it as improvised weapon which are kind of shitty. But not gonna say more on that since I'm not familiar with older D&D systems so for all I know in ones past third edition ye can throw swords without problems

edited 2nd Jul '17 9:57:46 PM by SpookyMask

OOTS is 3.5e. The very first comic is actually a joke about the party being upgraded from 3 to 3.5 mid-combat.

I didn't play D&D when I started reading the comic, but I'd been interested in playing it for a long time, and just lacked any entry point. I'd been a player of RPG video games and a fan of fantasy for ages, so even if the exact minutiae of 3.5 rules and world weren't something I was familiar with (and even now I'm not 100% familiar with, since I play 5e), I've always been able to follow it anyway by proxy familiarity. While the exact punchline might be different, the basics of a joke about the ridiculous breaks with reality fostered by game rules are pretty much universal to RPGs.

On a more platform-agnostic level, Roy gaining a ranged attack isn't meant to turn him into a ranged attacker, it's meant to alleviate the Crippling Overspecialization that means that an almost-dead enemy just needs to get out of reach long enough to drink a couple of potions.

Roy's still going to prefer to fight in melee and always would have done.

@42819 Yeah, that's my bad, I thought Roy had borrowed Elan's sword instead of that crew member's.

@42820: It looked pretty dangerous when he tried it on Durkula.

edited 3rd Jul '17 3:19:24 AM by shigmiya64