The Order of the Stick

We were talking about any surrender, not just Chromatic dragons'.

As the first one to bring up Miko, Bense’s words were, “I think it's pretty certain that Miko would not accept a red dragon surrender.”

By the by, I agree. Before her breakdown, Miko took Detect Evil as the final word on “should I kill this?” And while she is a critique on how not to play a paladin, she didn’t Fall (until she did), so her actions were acceptable in her gods’ eyes, so the larger critique is how the gods view Good and Evil. Again, there are paladins and there are paladins.

She didn't accept the Order's surrender in the first battle until after she tried to kill Roy with a Smite Evil and didn't understand why it didn't work.

The second battle with the Order happened off-panel, so who knows what happened? We just know that Durkon didn't fight her. Miko may have beaten them all senseless (unlikely as that may be), or maybe she beat them up a little and they surrendered. In any case, Miko knew that they were all non-Evil (except for Belkar) before that battle.

It's pretty clear that paladins in Stickworld only fall when their gods say they do. If your god wants you to slaughter every goblin in a given village, even the kids, then you're good to go. This is in contrast to your basic 3.5 paladin who falls as soon as they commit a "willful evil act".

This is probably because The Giant wanted to show some ways of how a paladin should not be played, so he had to let the paladins in the comic be capable of acting like bad paladins he's seen or heard of in D&D games without falling.

Yeah, because Roy's "surrender" was a "Hey baby you're finer than I thought so I don't want to kill you anymore".

As far as the second battle went, Rich may not have illustrated it, but after getting complaints that Miko shouldn't have been able to win the second battle, he went and described how he thinks it would have went if he did draw it, and it involved Miko beating the crap out of the entire order sans Durkon.

Edited by Resileafs on Apr 24th 2024 at 4:59:40 AM

Miko is definitely in the "if it's evil, don't accept its surrender" camp, but she's not exactly a great role model.

Issues of free will and moral choice aside, it seems clear that whatever gods administer the Sapphire Guard's oaths, they don't demand that surrenders be accepted. So I have to assume that it's all about the individual paladin's interpretation of their oaths. You have to do something really bad to get your powers zapped... like murder your king.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 24th 2024 at 5:00:21 AM

That's pretty much what I was trying to say, but more eloquently.

To be fair, Miko had Windstriker. On the other hand, Durkon wasn't fighting, but he was healing, at least a bit. If I wanted to/had a bit more time, I could go dig up the forum post detailing the fight round-by-round—much more detail than the Giant's usual "rules are guidelines" style.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Apr 24th 2024 at 6:14:02 AM

I agree with you that the larger critique has become how the gods view good and evil in Stickworld.

The Giant in the commentary of War and XPs says that the capture of Azure City by goblinoids was well-earned karma for the Southern gods because they had sanctioned the Sapphire Guard massacres of goblinoid villages for decades.

I think the real problem is that the gods decide issues like "should we destroy the world?" by majority vote, and as Thor pointed out, there are more evil and neutral gods together than there are good gods.

Edited by Bense on Apr 24th 2024 at 4:29:03 AM

Wasn't it stated that many of the paladins who took part in the goblin massacre lost their status?

Rich left it ambiguous, basically saying that it didn't matter to Redcloak whether any paladins fell because his people were murdered either way.

For even more fun with this moral ambiguity, the Southern Pantheon's willingness to sanction the murder of innocents by their paladins lessens the moral culpability of said paladins somewhat. Not entirely, but if they're counting on their gods to be guides to Lawful Good behavior and said gods instruct (or even just allow) them to slaughter defenseless villagers, that's one heck of a mixed message.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 24th 2024 at 6:37:54 AM

Plus, unless all of them fell, it being a genocidal massacre still stands out.

If some of them were able to take part in it and not fall, that would imply that it’s not the genocidal massacre, in itself, that the gods had a problem with.

To that point, the Sapphire Guard worships the Twelve Gods and all of their varying alignments as a group, which probably doesn't help matters. Not that this excuses their behavior, and besides, Sir Francois and the leader of Roy's old party are both Northern.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Apr 24th 2024 at 6:47:45 AM

Paladins, and clerics to some extent, are the only classes whose powers absolutely depend on them following some kind of moral code and/or satisfying the demands of their divine patrons. (Yes, other classes have alignment restrictions, but that's not the point.)

It follows that the gods have a certain responsibility to hold up their ends of the relationships in question by providing guidance and/or censure. So if the Sapphire Guard isn't getting that, or isn't getting it in a way that we would regard as Lawful Good, that's totally on the gods themselves.

Redcloak is angry at the Sapphire Guard, and justifiably so, but his deepest rage is directed at the gods who ordered his people to be killed. That's a big part of why he refuses to listen to Durkon: he doesn't want equity; he wants revenge. (More precisely, the Dark One wants revenge and Redcloak is partially channeling that. Which only supports the idea that the gods share responsibility for their servants' actions.)

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 24th 2024 at 7:07:05 AM

This is why I don't count Redcloak's backstory as proof that paladins in oots can just get away with killing surrendering opponents. Because whether or not the paladins were censured or not wasn't important for that story.

Rich may have left it ambiguous on the forums, but I consider How the Paladin Got His Scar to be good evidence that in fact no paladins fell for the massacre of Redcloak's village. The villain in that comic participated in the massacre and certainly didn't learn that "hey, paladins who slaughter goblin children go straight to fallsville," and neither did the Sapphire Guard as an institution. It was a memorable incident to the villain because the High Priest of the Dark One was in that particular village, not because it was the only goblin village they ever completely massacred and that caused a lot of paladins to fall.

It's pretty clear that it's only after the events of HtPGHS that the Sapphire Guard stopped massacring goblinoid villages.

The twelve gods of the Southern pantheon have the same problem that the gods as a whole have - they decide things as a group, and as a pantheon they are true neutral rather than good-aligned (this has apparently been confirmed on the forums).

I keep thinking the new page is out.

Sorry, this thread is actually primarily about almond farming in southern California and how that relates to stick figures.

I understood that reference.

If memory serves, it was a Patreon Q&A, and the reasoning was actually that the Southern gods are all True Neutral individually, because people pray to them based on their zodiac sign. There's no seasonal cycle for good and evil, so every god is worshipped by the whole moral spectrum and their favourite myths average out.

Huh. I could have sworn Rat was Evil. Maybe because he’d was one of the gods in somewhat friendly contact with the Dark One before that fell apart.

Rich clarified that the Dark One assumed that Rat was evil because he was in the same coalition with evil gods.

If Rat isn't evil why is he in a coalition with evil gods?

He’s sneaky neutral.

Also, he's neutral, and someone had to be their representative.

My theory has always been that the paladins that directly killed children or innocent civilians fell, but that the ones who stayed out of it didn't, which is a problem in and of itself (i.e. it's okay being complicit in a massacre as long as you don't personally carry out crimes). Also that paladin was pretty delusional from what I could tell from his trope page, so it would jibe that he wouldn't grasp that doing another massacre might cause him to fall.

Shouldn't it be impossible to be a Paladin of a True Neutral god? IIRC the 3.5e rules were that classes that draw power from a divine source could only receive power from a god within one alignment of their own, so a Paladin with its Lawful Good alignment restriction could only be a Paladin of a Lawful Good, Neutral Good, or Lawful neutral god.