The Order of the Stick

Edit: Ignore me, it's midnight.

Edited by fredhot16 on Dec 2nd 2019 at 10:03:18 AM

Redcloak may have resorted to melee killing smaller monsters, or mind-controlling some of them.

Um. Can stay invisible even during actions, seems able to fly, use of debuffing arrows/darts, possibly from another plane, unwilling to kill those obviously on Team Good... Sprite?

Edited by Euodiachloris on Dec 3rd 2019 at 10:35:18 AM

If the new voice is Serini she might be having a similar reaction as Girard Draketooth would have had to Paladins showing up.

Yeah, but unlike Girard's clan presumably her people (and her, if she's still alive) will know the other gates have fallen.

All along, Serini has been the missing element in the Order of the Scribble story. It was bound to get explored sooner or later.

With the heroes heading to the last gate, I agree that we will get the Backstory behind what happened to the last member of the Scribble, but I don't believe any of them are still on the Material plane. I think the orange/green bubbles belong to some sort of non-mortal and their fates are tied to the existence of Kragoor's gate.

It's an unexpected side effect of MITD's shenanigans. He's been marking extra doors to sabotage their search. The implication in this strip is that Redcloak has been consequentially increasing the number of doors they search each day, based on the apparent trend of doors searched on previous days.

No, I got that, I’m just surprised the team is capable of it, based on the results of the one dungeon-crawl we’ve seen them do. But I guess it’s the only plausible way Redcloak wouldn’t already have cottoned on to MITD’s ruse.

It is possible that the invisible guys are related to Serini somehow. However, their last comments suggest that they are in a team whose agenda is to destroy the world. That means they might on the side of the IFCC.

It helps the MITD is probably Beneath Suspicion, since no one regards him as capable of, let alone likely to have reason to, pulling such a stunt.

Edited by sgamer82 on Dec 3rd 2019 at 9:00:06 AM

Well, maybe they're gotten enough experience, both in the "level-up" type and the "alright, what have we learned today" type?

Edited by fredhot16 on Dec 3rd 2019 at 7:39:18 AM

Am I the only one who thought the voices might belong to the evil cockroaches?

My first impulse (which I blanked the post for) involved his re-marking of doors resulting in them tackling doors that had not had a chance to recover, but I then realized that would be if he were removing marks, not adding them.

@Druple: Yes, you are.

Edited by DeMarquis on Dec 3rd 2019 at 12:44:50 PM

That's not a bad strategy for him at this point, come to think of it. If he cons Team Evil into tackling doors they've already cleared, he could keep them at it a lot longer. But he'd need a way to remove the paint cleanly, and also he could accidentally clear some of his falsely marked doors—and wouldn't it be just grand if the Gate was in one of those.

That's also risky because it there's a chance they might recognize something inside- or even just going 'weird, there are a lot more dead monsters behind this door than most of them. Hey, wait a minute...'

Narratively speaking, at this point it’s fair to say that one of the doors the MitD falsely marked is the one with the gate, isn’t it? The only narrative alternative that strikes me as likely is the very last door that Team Evil could enter is the one with the gate.

I've long held that none of the doors lead to the gate.

"The real trick is making the mark think they can win."

I think that it being in the last one they enter is likely. I mean, surely the gate's gonna have to be found somehow, right? Like surely we can't have 'just before the heroes show up, the villains realize they've been tricked, and have no choice but to commit to several more weeks of fruitless searching before they can effectively imperil the world' or 'the entire final battle happens without the Gate being found, and then the heroes are forced to pick up where the villains left off so they can enact Thor's plan to seal the Snarl permanently.', y'know?

This a theory I strongly disagree with. I hold that anyone who sees this set-up is gonna immediately start looking for a trick of some kind to spare themselves the ordeal of having to deal with blindly searching through dozens of identical epic-level dungeons. At which point, either the real gate is hidden behind the security that tighter than all of those doors combined (in which case, why even bother with the trick?) or the trick is about to backfire horribly.

Really, this set-up strikes me as tailor-made to make intruders who think they're being smart waste a bunch of time searching for a back door that doesn't exist.

Edited by Gilphon on Dec 3rd 2019 at 1:38:15 PM

That's the thing, there also is no back door.

Because if you set up a straightforward challenge("Spot the lady, here's the lady, keep your eye on the lady") a lot of people will just try to beat it.

Even if you tell them there's a trick to it("The hand is quicker than the eye, don't get fooled") people will believe they'll be able to see through it.

Very few will be able to see through to the next level: The winning card was never on the table at all.

I disagree with the notion that if this is Serini (or however you spell her name) she'd react similarly to Girand and his people. It doesn't seem like she wanted to split up at all, and only suggested it because several of the others couldn't tolerate each other any longer.

I don't think we've been given a reason to think she'd react to involvement from any of the others with actual hostility.

So what are you saying? That the gate simply isn't in the area at all? That doesn't really make sense either; it has to be somewhere. Like even if the back door is five miles away or something, that's still a back door that could potentially screw you over and it only takes one person who's either lucky or smarter than you to figure that out.

And, well, honestly relying on anything like that as your defence is the high of arrogance. You're betting the fate of the world on the idea that nobody who can outsmart you will show up at any point in history. And the mere fact that you're suggesting it as a possible scenario proves that that would be a bad bet- people who would see through that sort of thing provable exist.

The critical point here is "straightforward". Doing this the "intended" way is so tedious, dangerous and time-consuming that people are gonna be hoping for a way to bypass it.

Edited by Druplesnubb on Dec 3rd 2019 at 8:20:07 PM

Yeah, you're probably right. I mean, what kind of person would think they were smarter than everyone else and could con everyone and would bet the entire world on it if they had the chance?

Can you imagine?

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