The Order of the Stick

You don't know that the Holey Brotherhood won't make a dramatic return. :P

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Apr 12th 2024 at 4:52:03 PM

Yeah, I’m still surprised nothing came of the half of a scorch mark. It still could, when Redcloak reaches that door in his methodical search pattern, but Team Evil discovering the secret of the backstage area would only slow them down at this point, since the heroes aren’t there anymore.

I loved it when Rich made an announcement that a character would appear who'd only appeared a single panel before, then seeing a hooded character people began to jump to conclusions that it must be the Holey Brotherhood.

Oh, you'll see--you'll ALL see!

I mean, literally. The comic is executed in a visual medium, after all. :P

(In before the revelation pertinent to my personal pet theory is handled entirely in text. :P)

Hmmm.

I'm gonna let that go, because I'm cool like that.

I actually think the odds of them returning have now increased as we’ve learnt more about the gate defences. They could easily be another defeated villain like Caldor who have been forcefully used as part of the dungeon system.

Edited by Silasw on Apr 12th 2024 at 8:41:35 PM

I, uh, I think the Scribblers would have balked at enslaving people for the Gate's defense.

They just, y'know, didn't really think Calder the dragon was people.

Red Dragons in 3.5 have "always chaotic evil" in their alignment descriptions.

So dragons really don't have as much free will as a human (with no set alignment) or a goblin ("usually neutral evil") does.

I would argue that that doesn't imply that they're not people, however. They just have a less-varied moral compass than most.

The Scribble as a group didn’t set up the gate defences this way, Serini seems to have done most of it herself.

• Serini: I might enslave sentient beings for my dungeon but I draw the line at people.
• Elan: What about them? *points to Holey Brotherhood*
• Serini: Okay, you go spend five minutes talking to them about their belief system and then come back and tell me how human they are.
• Elan: Ohhh, is this one of those language model things I've been hearing so much about?
• Serini: Always gotta keep your guard up. I almost fell for it until I noticed one of them has seven fingers.

Mimi: *Looks at their hands*

Oh yeah, I forgot the comic's already made that joke.

Which raises the question, "at what point does a lack of free will mean that a creature shouldn't be considered people"?

I'd like to point out that there is a very good argument to be made that there is no such thing as free will to begin with.

Which would make the whole debate academic, but I'm not one of those who believes the arguments that free will doesn't actually exist.

Whether or not free will exists in a role-playing game, or a comic based on an RPG universe, is perhaps an easier question to answer.

If there's no true free will, you still need to pretend there is to have a meaningful society, so the point is moot.

...I still mourn Milk Dudes.

At the end of the day, it's still a story, and stories have narrative causality. This is not something that we can simply ignore, but neither is it normally remarkable.

Rich has frequently made narrative causality an in-universe factor, especially with both Elan and Tarquin attempting to manipulate it, but all of the characters are Genre Savvy enough to point out those conventions, and "self-aware stick-figure D&D parody" is literally how the gods made this particular iteration of the world.

Given all of this, it's hardly unreasonable for us, as readers, to play I Know You Know I Know games with the author of the work. He's opened that door and invited us in. Of course, it can be taken too far, but that's fandom in a nutshell.

There's a whole raring argument about what 'free will' actually should mean and that will fully swallow any discussion that gets serious enough.

Personally I think a creature which acts in an unfree way is still a being and I don't think that disqualifies from personhood? If they, say, can communicate sophisticated ideas, that's a person right there. Even if you think they might not be a person, I think there's strong reason to treat them as one anyways, polite standard style. Especially if you are not absolutely entirely unshakeably sure they aren't people.

Also to put my earlier objection in succinct, less silly form: Saying you're playing I Know You Know I Know games implies you are actually guessing, like, meaningfully well. You aren't; by all means, keep guessing that way, but stop kidding yourselves that you're in on a secret level of games with the author when you aren't, I guess?

The story was playing that kind of game for a while, but is it still now? Personally, I think it's dropped that, and I think it fits the themes of the story that it has. It's not pretending it never did it—it's acknowledging it—but it's portraying that kind of view less positively, more cynically, more like a reductive lens that will ultimately prove wrong. So I think, anyways.

You're welcome to disagree but that's the actual challenge that's been registered; I'd say you're missing the point of it but that would sound accusatory? And that was 100% me writing something hugely pretentious for fun rather than communicating the thought that had come over me well at all, so, 100% on my part.

I mean, if there's no free will, then it presumably affects us all, and so the definition of "person" can't reasonably include "has free will".

But more to the point, my own definition of "person" doesn't really speak to whether or not the being in question has free will.

Which is, of course, part of the problem: different people will define the word "person" differently.

That said, I do agree with RaichuKFM that if a being seems to be a person, and we don't have a strong argument for them not being a person, then I'm inclined to advocate for at least treating them as a person.

It's related to what one might call the "soft solipsism" position: we can't prove that anything beyond us is real—but lacking something better to go on, we might as well proceed on the assumption that it is.

By definition, none of the characters have free will because they're all creations of Rich and therefore cannot think for themselves.

I would think that free will (or at least having as much free will as other people) is a valid criteria to be considered "people".

Nobody in a D&D setting is going to plausibly argue that a Golem or an animated skeleton is a person, and the obvious reason is because they don't have any personal will or personality.

It gets trickier when we talk about creatures that are intelligent but have an "Always Evil" or "Always Good" alignment. Fiends, for example. Does a demon have free will, or just the ability to intelligently pursue a set of goals which were fixed at its creation and which it has no real ability to alter? Like a magical version of a very advanced robot.

If you live in a D&D world then this question can be important. Treating a demon as if it can change for the better is going to eventually bite you in the backside if it can't in fact change and is merely faking character development while waiting for the best moment to betray you.

Fictional characters can sometimes act in ways that surprise their creators. Writers talk about this from time to time. They originally planned for a character to act in a certain way but now that it's an established character they realize they just can't make the character do what they had planned without acting out of character. Not exactly free will, perhaps, but interesting.

Edited by Bense on Apr 16th 2024 at 11:38:48 AM

I don't think having free will is important to whether or not a being is a person, but having will is.

I think a robot, even one with goals fixed at creation, can easily be a person. I'm a compatibilist, so I think such beings can easily have free will, but even without that. Let's... Okay, thought experiment.

Say you head into the grand library in the local wizard's tower; you were invited in, all the village was. The wizard is big on spreading literacy, say. Inside you meet the librarian, who is a bit small and clammy-looking, but a perfectly amiable chap. Very helpful, and while a little shy, very happy to talk once you get a casual conversation started. Seems just like anybody else, really, except shut in this big wizard tower studying for however long.

Say, then, the wizard comes down and goes "Ah, I hope my homunculus is serving your needs adequately?" And, to answer your surprised look, the librarian says yes, they're a homunculus, ultimately designed to serve their master's goals and utterly in service to him. So they work in the library, and are happy to do so, doing their best to serve his needs.

Would you think the librarian was a person?

I think it can he easy to imagine "Oh, a stimulus-response machine is not a person" while imagining something that clearly falls short of personhood for other reasons. Our librarian here, if I did ny job right, passes a lot more tests; has (or appears to have) personality, feelings, desires, even a will—they're just all in the service to the wizard. The homunculus can't choose not to follow the wizard; but also they wouldn't want to. They like doing that, or at least they say so. To me, they're clearly a person, and the real muddle is if this is okay or the wizard is doing something wrong here. I am curious how other people feel, though.

In the case of a fiend, I think it's even stronger. Even discarding the possibility of redemption/ascension or such... They can choose differently. They just have a bounded region they can choose within. They'll always be evil, their choice is how they'll be evil.

But I feel like most people have a bounded region of choice, anyways? Like, I cannot see me in any case ever choosing to run outside and attacking innocent people. I don't think that I could ever flip that switch in my values, to approve of and desire senseless violence towards real people. I don't think my practical inability to do that speaks to any limitation of my agency, any lack of freedom on my part; instead it speaks to what my will is. Maybe there are possible scenarios where I turn into a rampant shinkicker anyways... but they're implausible, contrived things that have to really mess with me, that sand down or snap my will and put something new in. That's not freedom at all.

So what it means is the fiend is the same way, but some features of their will are so strong they can't be broken in any scenario; they will always be evil because nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever make them want to not be evil. I think it can make sense to view that as constrained, still, even unfree... but it's really just an exaggerration of a normal feature of people's will. I don't think it disqualifies personhood.

If an angel could never ever possibly choose to stop being good, would that disqualify personhood?

A possible perspective is "Demons are people, but since they're super evil and can't ever change, we should give them no quarter", after all.

(Personally, I like if demons can change, but the vast, vast majority just... don't. Especially when it's because it's hard. Where staying as a demon, even though it's so obviously the worse option, even though it's miserable, is easier because you just give up and take the path of least resistance.)

You're basically arguing that your examples have at least as much free will as regular human beings, and that's why the qualify as people.

In a D&D game whether a character actually has free will can be pretty easily answered. If they are a player character then the answer is yes. If they are an NPC then the answer is no. NPCs that do have free will are GMPCs, and are usually disruptive to the game, because the GM can't be fair to the other players while he's playing his own character.