The Order of the Stick

...huh. I could have sworn he did in the last panel, but all he's saying is, "And you were worried she wouldn't fit in." I could swear he had a line about "the new girl".

Nope. Nothing of the sort from that page or the last one.

Isn't the like a colossal downgrade in power though?

She could certainly fill an important role within this story arc, though.

Adopt her, Elan. She's the sibling you always needed.

That role is most likely "dwarven tour guide."

No, I mean in a character development sense.

"it looks like someone pointed out a mistake by the Giant. Mr. Scruffy is right next to Belkar in panels 6 and 8, but is gone in the larger shot in panel 7."

You've never owned a cat, have you?

So, why are Xykon, Redcloak, Oona and Mit D dungeoneering without taking any mooks with them? Some hypotheses:

1. They don't have any with them. The team that teleported from Gobbotopia are still the only forces they have, plus Oona's tribe. BUT: surely some other bugbears would be willing to go monster hunting.
2. They'd be redundant. Anything tough enough to be a threat to Xykon and Redcloak is going to go through low-level goblins like a mincing machine. BUT: they'd provide a few rounds' distraction, or could be used more tactically as eg ranged support or scouts and sent back to camp when injured.
3. It's too dangerous, and Redcloak won't risk them; keeping them alive would be a distraction from simply working without them.

I'd say some combination of 1 and 3 is most likely, but it's hard to see how they wouldn't benefit from bringing, say, a mid-level backup healer (Redcloak specifically mentions his spell slots are a limiting factor), or a rogue trap spotter.

edited 29th Sep '17 7:26:52 AM by johnnye

this isn't Xykon's first gig, apparently

They've been exploring Kraggor's dungeon a while. Maybe they started using them as meat shields and ran out.

Having gotten over his Fantastic Racism, Redcloak no longer views any of the goblin peoples as being disposable. Even if they had brought any of the hobgoblin troops with them - and we've been given no reason to think that they did - he would likely decide that whatever negligible tactical advantage would be conferred by some low-level mooks in an epic-level dungeon isn't worth the inevitable loss of life, when all of them get immediately killed in the first round of combat.

Didn't they keep it to a small group for faster travel?

Xykon would overrule that basically immediately though. The "no loss of goblinoid life" thing.

The characters aren't using mooks out-of-story because no one really wants to watch Xykon and Redcloak have that argument again.

If Xykon was really committed to killing them Redcloak couldn't stop him, but he doesn't care that much.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Xykon's rationale for not using the mooks is because why would he? This isn't the battle for Azure City we're talking about. Driving hordes of goblins into the tunnels would almost certainly result in them getting killed, which is why Redcloak isn't going to volunteer it, but it also wouldn't accomplish anything.

Xykon's prone to doing things for shits and/or giggles but those things are more fun when he gets to do them himself. Pointlessly tormenting the living is a boredom activity for him.

What it really boils down to isn't a lack of motivation to not use mooks but rather a lack of motivation to use mooks. This is not out of the ordinary for him; he bores easily and prefers doing things to not doing things.

Also, he's getting exp from this for the first time in ages, so bringing low level mooks along would cut down on his gains.

I don't doubt that Xykon would derive entertainment from sending groups of hobgoblins to their deaths. He finds suffering funny whether he's the one inflicting it or not - we're talking about the guy who stood around and watched adventurers kill Redcloak's family purely for entertainment value, remember.

I doubt it. Don't recall the exact rules offhand, but vanilla hobgoblins would be of such an inconsequential level compared to whatever's in there that they probably wouldn't factor into XP yield at all.

Besides, to gain XP, they have to be alive. And there's no way that any hobgoblin mook who goes in there is coming out.

They can't gain XP anyway unless they have class levels. Generic mooks or redshirts generally don't count as part of the party level calculation for experience awards.

That gels pretty well with the suggestion that they took some mooks with them the first few times. If that were the case, Xykon would have enjoyed seeing them slaughtered, Redcloak would have objected to the waste of life, then Xykon would have got bored and Redcloak would have convinced him it was a pointless strategy. All of which we've seen before.

But also, Xykon hasn't got much reason to mess around torturing underlings if there are high-level monsters to fight. He only seems to go for that stuff when he's understimulated.

I think it's extremely unlikely they brought any mooks with them into the tomb. We saw them arrive at and leave Girard's Gate with no mooks, and Oona is way too cheerful for them to have press-ganged a bunch of bugbears into a suicide mission off-panel.

edited 1st Oct '17 12:08:48 AM by shigmiya64

Semi-serious suggestion: maybe Redcloak wants to avoid a repeat of the time that a random hobgoblin single-handedly delivered the killing blow to an ancient dragon, and they immediately killed him because he was now overqualified for his position.

When did that happen?

In one of the Book 2 bonus strips, when Xykon, Redcloak, and the CITD were clearing out the tower full of Good-aligned monsters.

It happens right before this scene - you can see the dead dragon in the background of the first panel.

@shigmiya I dunno about Oona, if the "beast must respect master" stuff is anything to go by she seems like a Proud Warrior Race Guy type who would consider being killed by monster to be an honorable death for someone who evidently wasn't strong enough to survive.

Unrelatedly, I've just noticed that Redcloak and Xykon's two companions are a bugbear and a bete noire...