New OotS comic is up. And if you can't or won't read the comic to see what happened yourself, well...

>All my money on Belkar finding it. somehow.
There is a non-zero chance it falls next to him, or possibly on a giant he's fighting and it kills the giant.

fpbp

>12 month quest for Roy's sword ensues
>it's 6 pages long

I'm starting to suspect the author is actually Grr Martin...

not enough rape, murder and foodporn

Eh, it probably drops at Belkar's feet.

I love the comic but oh my god, this update pace is murder.

Waiting more than half a month for a new page is suffering.

First edit I've ever made, enjoy.

wew

I am REALLY starting to hate that bitch engineer. This is definitely Rich's intention, and hooo boy is it working. I can't wait to see whatever kind of comeuppance she gets.

Still got to give Burlew props for actually being progressive and not an SJW. It's honestly pretty impressive to see someone not only give his female characters agency to be strong on their own, but to also give them agency to be antagonists on their own without any kind of male interference. Most lazyasses only do the first part, and usually at the expense of their male characters.

Is Andi /ourgirl/?

1 on 5 chance he calls it back to his hand using the connection he has to the blade or some shit. Otherwise, Roy's looking at another long fall or a last minute power up.

>You killed my butt stuff
>Roy powers up

MY SIDES

>Belkar looks like he's in a rough spot
>him and opponent notice something falling through the sky
>Belkar about to make some snide comment about plot contrivances
>killed by the sword mid sentence

Post yfw this happens.

lol faggot

>twenty more strips that way

Is this actually considered a good comic on Veeky Forums? Or is this one of those things where Veeky Forums pretends to like things in order to have fun mocking it sarcastically on several levels of irony? Because I just cannot see how someone could enjoy this story. There is no real drama that isn't immediately resolved with stupid deus ex machina shit, there is no tension, no one ever dies because it's fucking D&D and they can just resurrect them like they did with Roy, so why do I even care about any of these characters? None of them are particularly compelling, the story crawls slow as fuck and has been injected with a shitton of mewling animals and various other "characters" that are too silly or just flat-out stupid to give a shit about. The author keeps introducing new world content and piling crap on top of crap to keep the story moving so that there is no consistency. Not to mention the story has dragged on for so goddamn long that no one really gives a fuck if they defeat Xykon anymore. Burlew is just wasting his time when me and about 90% of the fanbase is going to wait until the last strip is announced, then skim through everything up to the last 100 panels. Given this fucker wants to go to like 1500 or some shit like that, I think it's safe to say Burlew is going to be wasting his time for another few years.

>Is this actually considered a good comic on Veeky Forums?
I don't know, you dense newfag, why don't you read this thread and find out?

>Wait half a month for a new page
>It instantly sets back the plot at least twenty pages
At this point, I think Burlew plans to die with this fucking comic unfinished.

Well, she thinks that everyone should do everything her way, tries to drastically change the way things are done because she thinks everyone around her is an idiot worried about nothing, proposes simple and straightforward "solutions" to problems which can't be solved that way (which mostly consist of ignoring problems instead of addressing them), blithely ignores the logical arguments of people who actually study things because her "common sense" tells her that they're nothing, and ends up causing massive problems for others which could have been easily avoided if she had been even a little more considerate of their positions.

Make of that what you will.

>no one ever dies because it's fucking D&D and they can just resurrect them like they did with Roy, so why do I even care about any of these characters?
>Roy was dead for several hundred strips
>(you)

GitP forums are more entertaining than the comic.

I just read it as a force of habit; Burlew will probably end up putting his hand in a woodchipper when vacationing in Canada this summer and it will delay the comic for the next 74 weeks. I kinda roll eyes at every new strip, and then I read the next one. It really is a force of habit.

...

Even he doesn't really want to do this anymore. But like Roy, Burlew refuses to abandon something he started before it's finished, no matter how long it takes or how little point there is in finishing it anymore.

>Even he doesn't really want to do this anymore

He makes quite a bit of money from it, otherwise he wouldn't be bothering with the art upgrade and constant books and arts.

He also wrote years ago that OOTS is not a frantic, ever-changing D&D campaign, but something he wrote and already knows the ending to.

Sure, the guy is horrible at pacing this story and likely to have his soul consumed to fulfill the ever-demanding needs of Stan Lee's phylactery before he finishes this fucking thing but still.

Also OOTS really has its moments (when it comes to RPG humour, it only really competed with stuff like Darths & Droids and that other comic by that guy) and the art-style, while simple, is inoffensive.

When OOTS was in its heyday, it was concurrent to shit like LFG, Goblins and Dominic Deegan, and those were way worse.

It wouldn't be such a problem if the guy didn't take weeks to draw a goddamn page of a stick figure comic.

I'm not sure how I feel about the production pace in real-life clock time (in story pace is fine for me), but I've been reading this strip for over half a decade and I'm invested.

I personally think that there aren't really Deus Ex Machinas, up to and including the Mechane rescue; it felt well explained and justified, even if it wasn't how I expected things to go down.

Honestly, if anything, Rich has a bad habit of shitting on characters while they're down even if it impacts pacing (see this strip, and depending on your interpretation, the entire Durkula arc). We already did the "Roy loses his sword" arc and it looks like we're possibly gearing up for round 2, which concerns me.

>Stan Lee
>a Lich

When was this and why was I not informed?

Well I've read it since a year after it started, and at first it was kind of funny but then it turned to rank shit after they got to Azure City. It's the inevitable result of a small amount of success mixed with an insecure man with little else going for him in life. He blew up and created this whole storyline and world that is a straight rip off of several mythologies and stories, and proceeded to commit every cliche in the book whilst dragging his "story" on for ten more years than it needed to.

Yeah and what long-term consequences did Roy's death actually have, besides cementing this comic as a powerwank and making the statement that D&D games have zero stakes after 6th level because you can just resurrect anyone who dies?

>, but I've been reading this strip for over half a decade and I'm invested.

That's the only reason anyone is reading it. A bunch of tired old grogs who want it to be over already but have to deal with this bumbling fuck adding another storyline to his already-overburdened comic strip.

> He also wrote years ago that OOTS is not a frantic, ever-changing D&D campaign, but something he wrote and already knows the ending to.

Good. Then let's get to the fucking ending.

When 2016's celebrity death toll just couldn't stop ramping up, /co/ basically came to the conclusion that Stan Lee is a lich, coming unscathed and Shang Tsunging everyone's souls to keep himself alive.

Fucker dethroned Christopher Lee a year before.

>D&D games have zero stakes after 6th level because you can just resurrect anyone who dies?

Nale is dead as a doornail and not coming back, ever, because Burlew hates True Ressurect.

The "Stan Lee eats people's souls" joke predates 2016.

Thanks for the accuracy, user, I only saw a massive resurgence of those memes in 2016.

Yeah, they picked up a lot last year, for obvious reasons.

Yes, it was a very eventful year, all things considered.

>be me
>forever DM in my group
>DMing a long campaign
>have been running this campaign in 3.5 for over a decade
>started with two first level players, a fighter and a cleric
>they're now high level after a ton of sessions where I didn't award exp because i wanted to keep the campaign going
>at one point the fighter died so I kicked him out of the group for half a year
>didn't let him reroll, made the party res him
>have had it in for the fighter since pretty much day 1
>eventually say "fuck it" and throw him a bone since he's still playing a 3.5 fighter at high level and even masochists deserve something
>tell him his sword is a weapon of legacy and it has a ton of cool powers
>he starts to get really excited about playing again
>mfw I take his sword away in the middle of the very next encounter

This is what they get for foreverDMing me.

You mean besides

>SPLITTING THE PARTY

Which led to a metric fuckton of things so long it's literally an entire goddamn arc:

> Vaarsuvius, going rogue, causing:
>A worldwide genocide which killed an army of capably trained high level illusionists actively defending the gate from Tarq and Xykon.
> Kicking Xykon out of his lull, putting the pressure back on the order for BRitF
> Closed off the plot thread of the Azure city refugees
> Introduced the fiends as mediating forces which wanna fuck up the story

> Over several months, exhausted almost all resources of the party such that after buying weapons and bribing the crew of the Mechane they currently have nothing left,

> Let Haley and her crew close the thread on several outstanding story issues, including:

>"Why don't the more organized azure guards who inevitably survived fuck up the goblins, adventurers fuck up goblins all the time?
>"Why aren't the elves getting involved?
>"Why aren't geopolitical rivals that supposedly exist going to bat to take out a city of evil goblins?"
>"Who the fuck is Haley backstory-wise, and what's all this about her father being sold off by a thief's guild we've never seen?"

And lastly

>Led to a whole bunch of character development for everyone

None of that shit's a power wank, and his death ramped up the stakes of all measurable plot lines, leaving everything in a more high-tension state than the one which preceded it.

underrated post

underbasted roast

Why read something you don't like? I don't get you, user.

HAVE YOU TRIED NOT READING OOTS?

Man, it's really something to see it written all out. I mean, obviously I knew all that since I've been reading up to date, but to see so succinct a summary about all the events and notable occurances really shows how far we've come in the comic.

So you's saying...Roy is going Psionic now?

I don't believe you. That's fake or satire.

It really is a magical place. I miss when the fancomic section was more active, though. There used to be a new real terrible gem in there every few weeks.

OP here. I made this thread, but I didn't expect an OotS thread to go this long.

Truthfully, I'm looking at the last panels.

>Roy dropped his sword into snowy mountains, from on board a moving airship, albeit one close to crashing.
>He is now being hit by a frost giant, and it appears to be an axe blow to the back.

Perhaps I'm underestimating a high level 3.5th Edition Fighter, but I'm betting that the axe will break Roy's back, or cause him severe difficulty moving.
Combined with the fact that he'd have to travel down a mountain, or survive a big drop to BEGIN to search for his sword....

And the fact that Roy, while on good terms with most of them, doesn't really like his father, nor does his dad like him.

And his dead dad's oath is why he started on trying to fulfill this quest to begin with.

But now he knows Xykon isn't trying to just take over a dungeon or kill a city. Xykon is confident he can control or make use of the Snarl.

Unless the last gate stays in-tact, protected, and unopened, things get fucked up.

>If Xykon destroys the last gate, and can indeed control/use the Snarl, he uses it and fucks things up.
>If Xykon destroys the last gate, and can't control the Snarl, it's still a world-ending monstrosity with even more freedom, & things get fucked up.
>If Redcloak successfully betrays Xykon, and gets control of the gate, he now has an army of goblin(oid) nations, and guards the door to a world-threatening monstrosity.

And if any other evil faction doesn't destroy it but gets control of the last gate, having the keys to a world-threatening monstrosity's jail cell is a huge bargaining chip for THEM.

Roy probably knows this, and I bet, feels it's his duty to stop evil from winning this gate. It's no longer just about fulfilling his dead dad's oath.

So in his situation, with a heavy blow to the back when he was off-guard, and already injured, I'm betting -yet fearing- that it'll be something like:
>Roy and the crew will come to the decision that "It fell down a mountain, our ship has places to go, there's no way you'll find it, and you're in no condition to go searching an icy mountain for something that may just be in pieces".
>Roy will say "Yeah, you're right. I don't need it anymore anyway."
>Roy goes on to get a new weapon, to symbolize that he's moved on from a family heirloom weapon, that partially symbolizes his blood oath to fulfill's his dead father's blood oath. Would be meant to be a form of character growth.

Of course, this isn't what I'm hoping for. My expectations have holes in them.

Roy's dead dad was a mage, and hated his son becoming a fighter when Roy has like 18 INT and 16 WIS or such, so it's silly for even the Greenhilt Family Sword to be Eugene's symbol or whatever.
And Roy's Granddad, who taught Roy to use it in the afterlife, and whom Roy is on good terms with, was a fighter.

Not to mention, I'm still curious about the green aura it has. It slays undead and powers up, but I'm not sure we know all there is to know about it.
How it came to be, or why, for example.
Is it just an effect of being made of "Starmetal"?

I'd like to see us be shown more about that sword.

But yeah. Do you guys think something like that is plausible?

>Perhaps I'm underestimating a high level 3.5th Edition Fighter, but I'm betting that the axe will break Roy's back, or cause him severe difficulty moving.

You're underestimating a high-level 3.5 fighter. It is entirely possible for Roy to have triple-digit HP at this point.

Still. Would it be seen as a good idea, in-universe, for the ship's damaged fighter to jump/parachute/whatever out of an under-siege airship, onto a snowy mountain, to look for a sword that may have broken from the landing?

Are we really sure he'd go looking for it?

....Well, assuming the other user(s) in this thread aren't right and something like it landing by Belkar happens and he "finds" it for Roy through that set of circumstances.

A real DnD fighter would jump after his sword. After all, it's probably less than 20d6 damage at that point, the ship just hit the mountain.

A little of the classic Giantitp...

...

>sword that may have broken from the landing?
It's a magic item, it isn't broken.

Sorry to keep bringing up issues, but I don't always remember everything that comes up in the comic. Still....

What about the issue of time? If Roy leaves the airship, he's on that mountain, yet they're in a hurry to get to that Dwarven meeting, so that they can talk with the people there about NOT having the Gods destroy, and thus, recreate the world.

I am getting the Godsmoot arc at least somewhat correct, right?

Roy leaves the ship, he either doesn't make it there in time, or pulls a Big Damn Hero moment out of somewhere arriving at the last second.

...

>tfw you realize that Veeky Forums is a legitimately less cancerous place to discuss a comic than its own home forums
>tfw you read Rich's comments in the threads and realize how much he hates dealing with his forum's retardation

I pity the man so much. How he manages to avoid going SJW or batshit in that madhouse is beyond me.

Well, Julio did once tell Elan that the Menache always arrives just in the nick of time.

You get the fanbase you get.

OOTS got most of its fanbase from tvtropes because of the lampshade hanging link and because it's gone on for so long.

Makes me feel like the way to get a comic big these days is to spam it on relevant social media.

...

>OOTS got most of its fanbase from TVTropes

OOTS actually predates TvTropes by like 3-4 years.

And the second wave was TVTropes, though you are right. You can't control someone like them discovering you and pulling a Lenny on the cool parts of your fan base.

But he's right.

user is likely referring to one of the TVTropes articles using OOTS as an example of the article in practice at the top of the page.

Yes, Giant has gone full SJW, if he wasn't one to begin with.

>that day when Burlew shut them down hard and said "Hanging a Lampshade" was an old dramatic term and he had no idea what TvTropes was

Man, I wish I still didn't know what TvTropes was. It was this one douchebag in a campaign I was playing in that alerted me to its existence, farting out some trope name for a character I was making at the time, and I just wanted to smack him.

He's always been a progressive. The difference is that he doesn't just shoehorn everything into the comic, and works it in naturally and doesn't go crazy about it.

Ehh, his beliefs likely aren't as "in your face" as he makes them sound there. Remember he's speaking to a pack of gibbering retards, autistic manchildren, and TvTropers.

For example; I'm a math teacher, and I regularly get asked "when will I ever use this." My 1st block class knows that I believe that math is an important skill that can make your life easier if you understand it, while my 7th block class probably thinks that I've convinced myself that they'll be homeless bums if they don't eventually master advanced calculus. The difference is the number of times I'm asked and my growing annoyance at being asked the same question 20 times a day.

Honestly, I want the Mechane to go nuclear, and Bandana to join the party to kill Durkon. Really change things up, especially when Julio comes back from his vacation in heaven and sees what happened to his entire shit.

The conversation actually continues for a few pages and was proceeding before that, but I agree that "who cares" was probably a bit of a trigger phrase.

>hears a term he's not familiar with
>immediately responds with violence
I think I see your problem.

What, do you go around talking in tropes, and you're offended now, user I don't know?

Because if you do that, then you can go fuck yourself, too, buddy.

Using familiar jargon to refer to something isn't actually a crime unless he did it in a way that was obnoxious. If all he did was mention a trope name your character reminded him of, he didn't actually do anything wrong. If he started insisting, then he was at worst being obnoxious.

He used like five different tropes in a single paragraph (like he was trying to compose some sort of fucking trope limmerick), after I responded to his 'hey, she's a !' with 'what', along with telling me something along the lines of 'you should go to tvtropes, by the way, it's a great site, and it helps you avoid looking like you're just regurgitating cliches like you just did'.

So, yeah. That was my intro to tvtropes, and to people that do shit like that, so I'm going to stick with my 'wanting to smack him' reaction.

And as I said, he IS right. Arbitrarily labeling people as "Evil" solely because they look different *is* racism. Evil is defined by the content of your character, not their looks.

And he makes it clear that just because there is racism because of that view, it doesn't mean people still can't be Evil. Was Redcloak's family unjustly oppressed solely because they were goblins? Yes, undoubtedly. Did Redcloak turn himself into a mass-murdering monster who sold the souls of his remaining family just to pursue a plot he couldn't bear to give up? Also yes.

Except that murdering goblins for XP because they are evil doesn't make you a real life racist, and goblins have more differences that make them "usually evil" than looking funny, including being servants to a dark god.

Then yeah that's obnoxious. It's also not what TvTropes even says it's for. There's specifically a page about how tropes aren't bad and they're just patterns given names.

That's the thing, those other differences are the key part. They actually DO evil shit beyond looking different, and that looking different doesn't make them inherently Evil.

Yeah, but races in D&D aren't "usually evil" because they look funny, they're usually evil because of those other reasons.

Burlew has said outright in the books that Redvloak isn't evil because he's a goblin; he's evil because he's a mass-murdering pillager.

His brother wasn't even evil at all.

Yeah, I know. I'm still kind of annoyed at it due to the way some people do stupid shit with/because of it, but I know it's not really the site's fault, but I'm still annoyed at the same time.

I'm only human, I know it isn't entirely logical. I try and rein it in, anyway.

But players only see the former and not the latter, and go murderhobo based on that alone, which is what he was saying all along.

Have you ever actually talked to a full blown trooper? They are the most annoying people.

They have all these stupid names for the most inane, specific things that could only describe a handful of situations in the entirety of manmade media. They will painstakingly explain how what you're trying to do has been done before and take the most patronizing tone when you don't immediately see the light or agree with their "classification system." God help you if you actually continue to show resistance, as they'll start acting like you're the retarded one as they explain the merits of using jargon only their community understands instead of simple descriptive phrases that anyone could understand. Go try and find a 10 year old and have him explain what let's plays are as you feign ignorance, because it's a lot like that. The troopers will defend their "system" to death and just can't understand why people are adverse to adopting strange jargon.

I'm having so much difficulty imagining the reverse.

>Oh no! Jostled by the cart, the wizard drops his spell component pouch, leaving it in the dust behind the group!

But people like that are easy to ignore. Where do you go in real life that tropers are that unavoidable?

Some context. The argument in the thread goes on to discuss this in the context of everyone's home games, not just the comic. I'm talking about it in that greater context.

Goblins and other evil races are always evil because, in RAW, they are servants/creations of a dark god and have a general tendency towards unpleasantness as a result. Rich reduces ALL reasons players might have to kill goblins into "because they look funny" to push the idea that including always evil races makes you an actual real-life racist.

I'm not saying goblins can't be good so fucken murderhobo em, I'm saying that the premise is flawed at best, even if it could be stretched to have some merit. I'll hazard a guess that not even everyone who murderhobos goblins because they look funny in an RPG is anywhere approaching racist in real life.

When they're one of the other players at the table for the only PnP, you either put up with their shit, which is constant, or you don't get to play PnP.

In Pathfinder at least, you'd be expecting to hit triple digits around level 10, so he'd be well beyond that.

>Have you ever actually talked to a full blown trooper?
It sounds like I'm talking to a "trooper" right now. Whatever cause you're trying to fight against is nowhere near as annoying as your complaints.

>Rich reduces ALL reasons players might have to kill goblins into "because they look funny" to push the idea that including always evil races makes you an actual real-life racist.
I find both of those to be hard to believe.

Firstly, "other reasons" don't change the fact that an entire race is said to have an inherent tendency towards evil. A lot of real life racial propaganda makes the same claims of its targets. That doesn't mean they're one and the same, but what you're left with is still a fantasy setting where you can safely judge people by their race and/or culture.

Second, just because a literary convention implies wrong or harmful ideas doesn't mean that everyone who reads or writes it must believe those ideas wholeheartedly. It's entirely possible for something to suggest harmful ideas like racism with an imperfect success rate, or even without the author intending to do so.

They've got multiple flying characters in the party. I don't see why one of them couldn't pick him up on their way back to the airship.

>You can safely judge people by their race and/or culture

Gee user, it's almost as if these are large group types entirely defined by that which makes them distinct from others and therefore they can safely be judged to be.

>"Just because he's Arab with a long beard and an AK-47 screaming allah akbar doesn't mean he's a muslim, bigot."