The Order of the Stick

Or rather, trying to over apply science to a stick figure D&D parody comic is an inherent exercise in futility. It's like trying to figure out why Fighter can block the ground in 8 Bit Theater.

Edited by LMage on Aug 26th 2019 at 9:27:09 AM

i thought you wrote Fighteer for a second and i got really confused

There's also Bellisario's Maxim to keep in mind.

Say what you like about Loki, but it appears to me that he didn't just screw himself with respect to Hel; he had reasons.

Every time I think I want to create a webcomic, I'm reminded of how annoying it'll have to be to come town from "the sky" as it were and tell the people that follow it that they're wrong about the world

Edited by SalFishFin on Aug 26th 2019 at 8:15:25 AM

As much as I like "Loki has a loophole where he can only be truthful about his schemes in the specific context of rubbing them in Thor's face", I'm also having fun imagining an alternate gag where he gives an evil Richard III'-esque soliloquy direct to the reader and ends it with an admission that we are his only opportunity to get it all off his chest, and can you imagine how boring it is to be The Chessmaster when you never get to do any Evil Gloating?

I do kind of wonder how many people who read Order of the Stick will believe the D&D works in exact same way though.

Like its general thing that when fan thing(or spinoff or alternate version) of something else gets very popular(or if spinoff is popular, but not as popular as original version), there will be lot of misconception about differences and stuff .-. Like with regard to Pathfinder and D&D, ten years later, and some people still mistakenly believe Pathfinder gods need faith

Edited by SpookyMask on Aug 26th 2019 at 9:36:41 PM

The nice thing is Dungeons & Dragons is a collaborative activity so unless you're somehow playing entirely with newbies or folks who entered through OOTS, it seems unlikely to be a problem.

And even if it is, what folks do to the lore at their own table is their business.

The comic also seems fairly obscure. It wouldn't surprise me if D&D players vastly outnumbered non-players. So any misconceptions in the fandom would be corrected.

That too. I'm reminded of something Stan Lee once said about Versus Debates. Paraphrased, "The person who wins a fight is whoever I, the writer, want to win the fight. If Spider-Man and DareDevil fight and I want Spider-Man to win, then Spider-Man is going to win. If I want DareDevil to win, then DareDevil will win."

And Straczynski's, for that matter. When asked how fast the ships travel in Babylon 5, he famously answered, "They move at the speed of plot."

Burlew, hilariously, made an airship that moves at the speed of plot as an actual in-universe metaphysic.

Yup. That's precisely the flexibility that made D&D (and, by extension, pen -and-paper tabletop gaming) the phenomenon it became. Rule Zero: the GM is the final arbiter of all things.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 27th 2019 at 8:12:47 AM

I think it should be pointed out that having a writer just say "I'm the writer and if I want X to happen it will happen!" isn't always good writing. Like if Superman fought most other heroes logically Superman would win. The writer can make him lose if they want but they have to remember that the rules previously laid out in the universe are there and may need to arrange a situation in which Superman is at a disadvantage. See The Dark Knight Returns for a great example of how Batman, someone who is technically weaker than Superman, can overcome him.

Fortunately Burlew is a good enough writer that nothing in his work glaringly contradicts something else. He also does a good job of setting up situations in which a technically weaker opponent can handle a threat above their pay grade like when V fought the Dragon or the Order beat Tarquin.

Edit: I think stuff like this is why many writers leave distance measurements and "power levels" vague. It makes it easier to write the story how you want without contradicting yourself. This is likely why Rich has never given us a complete world map or actual stat sheets for the characters. Granted when a writer does put in that level of detail it creates a richer experience but it does hamstring them if done improperly.

Edited by Kostya on Aug 27th 2019 at 12:42:37 PM

"having a writer just say "I'm the writer and if I want X to happen it will happen!" isn't always good writing"

It by definition couldn't always be good writing, since it applies to all writing. It's not a thing you can avoid; it's fundamentally how art works.

What makes good writing is how well you hide the fact that everything that happens is ultimately pure contrivance on your part. On one level you want everything that happens to seem like it happens according to consistent rules of a naturalistic setting (Writing by the Seat of Your Pants is getting so immersed in this that the author themselves may not always feel like they're making decisions... but they still are). Beyond that, you can try to get everything that happens to send a consistent message about any theme(s) you're trying to get across, even if they're incredibly simple: for example, writing a story in which good triumphs over evil has a very basic and unoriginal moral of "being selfless and protecting others is good, being selfish and hurting others is bad".

Stan Lee doesn't really flip a coin and decide Daredevil wins this one; the story he's telling will have Daredevil representing a superior ethos in some way, so his ideology is shown to "beat" Spidey's. He's probably either representing a less moral position than Spidey but a more practically effective one, so his victory is a cynical and tragic one, or he's the more moral of the two in this case, so his victory is a triumphant one. Or maybe Both Sides Have a Point and the story is a dialectic that leaves us feeling ambiguous about who should have won. In any case, Stan Lee still decided who was going to win, and wrote the rest of the story in such a way as to make that happen.

(PS Apologies if this seemed lecture-y, it's an idea I've been trying to put into words for a while now and I'm basically thinking out loud.)

Edited by johnnye on Aug 27th 2019 at 7:02:10 PM

You are fundamentally correct. Writers come up with the stories they want to tell first, and then develop plots to tell those stories. Continuity serves the writer by allowing them to draw upon existing details and plan for future stories; it serves the reader by allowing them to establish familiarity with the world.

Where slavish adherence to continuity impedes storytelling, writers can and will ignore or revise it, hence Retcon. Where fans complain that Scene X violates a rule established in Scene Q, that can have validity in some respects, but does not always mean that the writer(s) did something wrong or failed in some way.

Again, I feel the need to point out that I never said the writer was wrong about anything; I disagreed with someone's interpretation of things. Big difference.

The writer wants to tell a story, so whatever they want to happen will happen. The difference between good and bad writing is whether such outcome follows logically from the premise or contradicts it.

Even that much isn't necessarily true. Luke Skywalker ends Empire Strikes Back as a loser with some mild Jedi training under his belt who gets effortlessly curbstomped by Darth Vader. Then he opens Return of the Jedi as the greatest Jedi of all time and even beats Vader's ass in the rematch despite having apparently never returned to Dagobah and continued his training in the interim.

And people generally agree that those movies are some of the best films ever made. It's not really about the universe being logically consistent; it's about whether or not the audience is engaged enough to ignore the hands of the author moving pieces around.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 27th 2019 at 12:56:56 PM

Return of the Jedi seems to be the least liked of the Original Trilogy, so not the best example right here.

Regardless. While having an engaging story can make the audience ignore the inconsistencies in front of them, it's still better not to create those inconsistencies in the first place. While few people will be bothered by little plot holes if the overall story is good, pretty much nobody will be bothered by the plot holes just not being there. Larger things like retcons are a good way of pissing your audience off and it's generally considered nice to avoid them. The only question is whether the effort expended on making the story more consistent will pay off in the end.

I also don't believe that the writers always go "If I want X to happen it will happen!". I can recall quite a few examples where the writer went "I would like X to happen, but that would be stupid, so I'll go with Y instead." What happens is a matter of what writer decides will happen, not necessarily what they want. It's rarely big things that get resolved in this manner, but adherence to the rules can bring good results in the long run, since at worst you'll end up with something unsatisfying but still score some points for consistency and at best you'll come up with a scenario that is both satisfying and makes sense in the context of the story.

Edited by Tharkun140 on Aug 27th 2019 at 10:18:14 AM

Star Wars may be among the most popular films in the world, but I'd say it's far from being the best, though I guess it depends on how you define a "good" film. It also has many other plot holes and inconsistencies. Yes, the sheer coolness factor outweighs it, but I don't consider it good writing when the author relies on purely MST3K Mantra for success (or try to ride the already established popularity of the series, as the newer Star Wars series do, as well as the countless amount of spin-offs, but that's a whole different topic).

Good writing is when the author can make a twist and the audience goes "wow, it all makes sense now", instead of "wait what, never mind it's so cool". Among my recent experiences the best one of these I've come across is Mistborn. There are some twists during the story that at first come as out of the blue, but the issue never gets dropped, and the feeling accumulates (in the characters as well as in the reader) that the established rules of the universe might not be complete. Then the big twist happens at the end, and everything suddenly falls into its place. You realize that every twist so far has been inevitable and everything makes sense. All of it without dropping the coolness factor, of course.

Of course, it depends on the kind of audience you (as a writer) are targeting. The vast majority of moviegoers don't want to use their brains too much, they are more interested in seeing cool stuff than thinking about whether it makes sense or not. Hence why Star Wars is so popular, because it's really good at that. But it doesn't mean the two worlds cannot be combined, see Game of Thrones as an example. Failing to do that and going just for the Rule of Cool is not necessarily bad writing, but it's lazy writing.

Edit: You just d me on your first point. On your second one, I don't understand the distinction. If a writer decides mid-course that they change the story from what they previously thought out because otherwise it would be inconsistent, then something's already gone wrong and it would be really difficult to pull back without either having to retcon or changing to a less satisfying resolution. At least when it comes to major plot points.

Edited by petersohn on Aug 27th 2019 at 10:32:25 AM

Even as a kid I thought Luke in ROTJ was... weird.

I think it's part of why I liked The Last Jedi more than many... Luke being an infallible god among men never made sense to me, so him having a moment of weakness actually worked.

The distinction is that what the writer wants to do and what the writer does are often not the same thing. Consistency matters, at least to some people. When I'm writing stuff, I often find myself going "Actually, that is kind of dumb. Let me rewrite it a little." I would not wreck my entire plan for the sake of consistency and neither would most writers, but changes are made. The post I was responding to seems to imply that the rules are always shaped to fit the main story, whereas from my experience, it's oftentimes the other way around. I'm sure there are writers out there who would never compromise their story and themes for the sake of the rules they established, but they don't make up the entirety of the scene. I'm not sure if they even make up the majority.

Edited by Tharkun140 on Aug 27th 2019 at 11:06:57 AM

Off-topic, but I think a lot of the problem with RotJ is that it wasn't originally planned to be the series finale, but Lucas decided he wanted to be done with it all and so crammed everything into it. For one, Leia wasn't going to be Luke's sister/the Other Person Yoda Mentioned, but there was no time to introduce anyone else. A very similar webcomic example was Alice Grove, which chugged along enjoyably enough plotwise until the creator again decided to end it, and everything got strapped to a rocket-sled and literally shot into orbit.

So, hang on — that "I am absolutely making this up on the spot" forum explanation from 2015 sounds an awful lot like the exposition about "Dedication" Thor gives in 1144.

Did he really come up with that in a slightly churlish answer to a nitpicky question from a fan, and end up liking it so much he made it canon 3 years later? 'Cause that's pretty cool

I assumed that was the case when that strip first came out, because it does line up pretty well.

So I just worked out why Loki’s half a billion number does in fact make sense.

It’s not the real number, Loki is lying to Thor about the number of people whose belief has melded him. Why would Loki lie? Because he’s Loki, he’s so moulded by his followers belief that he can’t tell the truth that he can’t be 100% honest even when explaining the fact that he can’t be honest.

Also it’s nice that Loki knows Hilgya’s name, seems all the gods pay close attention to their clerics.

...Actually thinking about it, do the gods get a chunk of dedication every time a follower dies, even if they get resurrected later?