The Order of the Stick

I will say this: Rich has always been somewhat scornful of people who "pants" Obviously Evil characters.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 9th 2018 at 10:46:54 AM

Of course, then you have stuff like him deciding characters like Therkla (or whatever), Ganju, and Enor are Neutral.

And then there's how a lot of people don't think it makes sense for Vaarsuvius to still be Neutral.

Which I don't necessarily disagree with his reasoning for any of those, but I think there are stronger arguments to be had that all of the above are (or were) Evil than there is that Thog et al. weren't actually evil.

Edited by LSBK on Aug 9th 2018 at 9:48:06 AM

What's wrong with Therkla being Neutral? As far as I can tell, she never acted out of malice, but out of a sense of being scorned by the world at large. Her tragic flaw, if anything, was being too passive in her approach to morality. She refused to actively take a stand until it was far too late.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 9th 2018 at 10:51:37 AM

Quite. It can be a bit of a toss-up figuring out which characters will wind up being Neutral all along and which ones will smack the audience with the "Did you not see my giant neon EVIL BAD GUY sign?" stick.

I could see Hilgya going both ways.

Because she was an assassin that killed people. Apparently she never got any pleasure out of it, and she did it out of a sense of loyalty to Kubuto for helping her, but still.

It relates to that thing I said about a character can be an awful person without being full on evil. Some people have higher standards in which they don't separate those two things, at least not when it involves killing others.

Edited by LSBK on Aug 9th 2018 at 9:53:59 AM

Maybe I'm just in tune with Rich more than others, or maybe it's my personal approach to storytelling, which is to accept characters at face value unless there's a good reason not to, but I have yet to be surprised or disappointed by the "reveal" of anyone's alignment. It's always been obvious to me.

Where I see people going wrong is when they start applying their own belief systems to the characters, and start inventing hypothetical, non-canon explanations for their behavior in order to justify those beliefs.

If anything, Therkla can be seen as an archetypal example of how to construct an assassin who is Neutral.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 9th 2018 at 10:52:49 AM

Neutral suits assassins just fine. An assassin is a weapon; the person who hires them made the decision to kill someone, not the assassin.

With Therkla though there was also a bit about her wanting to avoid Detect Evil.

Edited by LSBK on Aug 9th 2018 at 9:55:58 AM

To play Devil's advocate for a second, most Assassin archetypes throughout D&D's history, be they prestige classes or whatever, have an Evil alignment as a qualification or prerequisite. If you go by those, it's not unreasonable to presume Evil as a default for anyone in that profession, but if you carry that expectation into OOTS without qualification, you're going to run smack into Rich's deliberately nuanced treatment of the subject, and you have only yourself to blame for it.

I don't specifically remember that; can you find the reference? Anyway, she might have wanted to avoid it to prevent it from being revealed that she was not Evil. It's hard to get ahead in the assassin business if people find out that you have morals.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 9th 2018 at 10:58:05 AM

Strip 560.

Oh yeah, now I remember. That does throw a monkey wrench into the "Not Evil" thing, doesn't it. Detect Evil doesn't determine if someone is Neutral or Good. Maybe Therkla thought she would register as Evil. Does everyone always know what their alignment is? She could have been skating on the edge between Neutral and Evil and be worried about which was more dominant at the time...

Edit: I'm not making excuses, just trying to resolve the narrative contradiction.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 9th 2018 at 11:11:38 AM

Her not knowing, and not being confident enough to let them test it in that particular situation does seem to be the simplest answer.

Assassination may not necessarily have to be evil, but Kubuto was pretty open about being evil and the villain. She didn't seem to consider it her place to question him, but that seem less to be about agreeing with him, and more "He's the boss and I owe him, and that's that."

Edited by LSBK on Aug 9th 2018 at 10:17:11 AM

Hilgya, by contrast, kills out of petulance, in a very personal and direct manner.

We've only seen her inclined to murder in response to some pretty heavy wrongs, though.

She tried to murder her husband because she was forced into an entirely one-sided marriage against her will, literally at crossbow point.

She considered murdering her family because they were the ones who forced her into said marriage.

She wants to murder Durkon for impregnating her and then spurning her as soon as he'd gotten his rocks off.

You can certainly argue that her view of these situations might be warped, but there is at least a kernel of truth to each of them, and they are some pretty serious wrongs inflicted on her. Compare that to Belkar, who has literally murdered people who were being actively helpful because he didn't care enough to listen to what was going on. Oh, that lovable scamp.

I really don't think there's much a case for Durkon, is the thing. If she had left it at "He was a dick to me so I don't like him" that would be one thing, but trying to find him for a year to murder him is just going too far.

You can't blame him for getting her pregnant because they both knew they didn't have protection and decided to have sex. Her getting pregnant is as much her responsibility as it is his.

And, again, if you're really going to say "The man she love spurned her" I still think that's more on her for "falling in love" with a guy she knew for, what, a day? He absolutely has no obligation to share her failings or world-view.

Edited by LSBK on Aug 9th 2018 at 10:46:57 AM

As you say, a lot of that is one-sided exposition from a character whom we know to be an unreliable narrator, so it's hard to take at face value.

I don't think we know what exactly Hilgya wanted when she was looking for Durkon. Her exact words were "I was told someone here needed help murdering Durkon Thundershield." That doesn't mean she went straight to murder as the solution for her issue with him. From what we've seen of her she almost certainly assumed he'd done something even worse to this party of adventurers trying to kill him.

We've been over that before - while it's possible that she came for some other reason, her just wanting to kill him is the most likely scenario.

When given a reason to think she was after something else, I'll change that opinion.

Edited by LSBK on Aug 9th 2018 at 10:54:04 AM

I'm not saying she didn't come to kill him, just that it's not necessarily why she was looking for him.

I'm withholding judgment on the Durkon thing until I see how she acts once he's revived.

One the one hand,

• Durkon: I done ya wrong and I'm sorry. Can I make up for it?
• Hilgya: Nope. Stabby times now!
• Verdict: Evil.

On the other hand,

• Durkon: I done ya wrong and I'm sorry. Can I make up for it?
• Hilgya: Fine. I'm still mad at you but I accept your olive branch.
• Verdict: Not Evil.

Right now, Hilgya thinks Durkon is bad because of her warped perspective. She was enthusiastic about joining other people who are trying to kill him, which makes sense because if an adventuring party is trying to kill him, that just corroborates her opinion that he's bad.

It all really depends on how she behaves once he has a chance to definitively assert his Not Evilness.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 9th 2018 at 10:08:34 AM

Option two could still be Evil depending on how she wants him to make it up to her.

I'm less concerned with whether Hylgia is a bad person than I am with the incessent logicking about how she must not only be a bad person but somehow materially worse than other not-Good allies the Order has had in the past.

Who has been doing that? That sounds like a complaint you made up just now, honestly.

Edited by LSBK on Aug 9th 2018 at 11:29:39 AM

In D&D alignment logic, if you murder people as your primary job, you are evil. If ye kill people are side effect of yer job, ye probably more neutral

Honestly kidding there. Main reason for assassin's being evil is that prestige class' flavor basically says "In order to be assassin, you have to do job that shows you will do the job no matter what." aka kill this puppy if you are evil enough type thing. Because assassin's aren't supposed to reject the job on cause of ethics

Edited by SpookyMask on Aug 9th 2018 at 8:02:38 PM

"This guy got me pregnant and when I hear about people wanting to murder him I'll gladly join them" is not what I would class as neutral. There's a distinct lack of questioning whether the murder is deserved. Nor is "Well, I want out of this marriage, I guess I'll just leave my entire family destitute as revenge after running away from home and not really needing to come back.

As for Belkar: nobody has said he's nice. Nobody has said he's good.

But he's controllable, and actually has some sort of concern for the rest of the Order in a warped way by now. That's far more reliable than someone that was fine with killing one of them before even finding out the vampire thing.

I mean, I'm not going to begrudge Hilgya for wanting to get back at her family (or at least her brothers) but I do find it weird how people talk as if she needed to do that.

Coming back to Dwarven Lands doesn't mean she'd have to back to Iven or her clan. And she's a high-level cleric, I'm sure she could find other ways to secure money.

It's understandable why she would want to fuck over family, but it doesn't really seem like she needed to in order to live the kind of life she wants.