VanFanel
2013-05-14, 03:47 PM
(:elan: Praise, praise, praise the excellent webcomic! Apologize, apologize, apologize in advance for a less-than-perfect English!)
I stumbled upon OOTS some years ago (out-of-comic years, Oracle fans!). I don't remember the first page I read, maybe I followed a link to the "Greg Initiative" from a Lost fansite? Or maybe "A Gallehault indeed" was Redcloak's lampshade linked from TvTropes? Of course, those strips made little or no sense to me as I did not know the whole story.
Unfortunately, I have a very poor D&D knowledge so when I tried to read the webcomic from strip 1 I did not understand the jokes. Forgive me, I only played OD&D (not even AD&D, there were just 3 alignments IIRC) three or four times many years ago, I also played a few videogames (Hillsfar, Dragons of Flame, Eye of the Beholder II and Baldur's Gate I. Consider that, when I first played Hillsfar, my English was sooooo baaaaad that I misinterpreted "alignment" as something related to food or magical energy source).
Back to Strip 1, "New Edition", I was so dumb that I did not understand that it was an "In medias res" beginning, I mistook it for the beginning of the "second season" of a webcomic where the first part was nowhere to be found. So I forgot about it. Shame on me!
Then, after some time, I decided to give it another try, I don't remember exactly when and why, probably a voice sang in my head "Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy this funny story!".
So I started reading the whole comic from strip 1.
And! I! Could! Not! Stop!
It took time for me to catch up, sometimes I rushed, sometimes I went more slowly, and sometimes I "archive binged" again, then at last I got to "current strip" (which was the "current strip" at that time? I don't remember, maybe before, during or after the arena fight?). Then I checked for new strips every now and then; at least I decided to register to the forum. I'm sorry for Sir Thumb and I'm glad you're recovering. I haven't bought any of your books yet, but if some day, when the story is over, you publish "Order of the Stick The Complete Collection", I'll surely purchase it! (Well, I first have to persuade my wife, she doesn't like OOTS and in the matter of Team Family budget I'm Redcloak and she's Xykon).
Just kidding!
Or was I ?
She doesn't even like the OOTS fridge magnets, and she LOVES, WORSHIPS and ADORES any kind of fridge magnet! As V would say: "Damnations!"
While reading OOTS, I felt sad I had not discovered such long-running webcomic before. It's really funny, fascinating, enchanting.
My D&D ignorance turned out to be an obstacle at some points: it's the problem with the stuff that Italian screenwriter Vincenzo Cerami calls "extratext", something which is not in the text but is implied, the reader must already know it and "decode" it. Luckily there are the SDR website and the OOTS Wikia that helped me to understand many jokes and game mechanics (oh, BTW, THANKS to anyone who wrote the wikia pages that translate Haley's cryptograms!) And still I probably missed a lot of other jokes and puns due to my abysmal English and poor knowledge of English-speaking pop culture.
But the overarching story is very good and entertaining independently from the D&D details.
You also improved my English as I learnt words I did not know such as "snarl" or "ruse"; furthermore you also forced me to "think in English", as my sister's English teacher used to say, because many jokes and puns are absolutely untranslatable in Italian, my native language.
I love OOTS because it can be amusing and dramatic as well. I like how you developed the characters, at first they were just flat parodies of RPG stereotypes, now they have fully-fledged personalities... and nevertheless they still manage to parody their own stereotypes! I like the humour (when I get the jokes or course!), I like the pop culture references (when I understand them!), I like the breakings of the fourth wall, I like how the story evolved from one-D&D-gag-a-day to the current complex plot. I like when you surprise me with twists I didn't see coming: I suspect you can do Sneak Attacks like Haley or utter the Power Word Stun like V!
I like the art, you cure for details, I find amazing how you manage to make charachters expressive, sometimes you make me forget that they're just stick figures.
My favourite parts? It's difficult to say. I rejoice the times when Elan (in spite of his low Int score and high naivety) "wins" against his "Wile E. Coyote"-ish evil twin, with puns, genre savvyness and the ability to jump unscratched throught windows; before the end of comic I do hope to see Elan use his bard skills effectively (and without V's advice such in the celestial lion scene). Tarquin is right, bards should rule the world!
Arcs that I liked in especially are also: the epic Battle of Azure City; the Oracle using precog powers to take his revenge on Belkar and the "on acid" dialogue between the halfling and Lord Shojo; the Darth V arc; the special bond between MITD and O-Chul (and the Darth V and O-Chul arcs colliding). These are random thoughts, not in order of importance, I don't mean that the other parts are no good, they are very good indeed!
Of course, there also some parts that I don't like, but that's normal, we know that no author can satisfy "all the people all the time", don't we? And by reading some forum comments I guess your audience can be very picky sometimes :P
But details are easily forgotten and I think you are a great storyteller.
So, Rich, thank you very much for creating OOTS and for sharing it with us.
Ok, and now, after my "Kudos, Giant!" post I can start nitpicking just like any other forum user...
Just kidding!
Or was I ?
I don't like the font size in speech balloons, which got smaller and smaller over time, yes I know I can zoom the strips, but the more I zoom, the more they blur - Cue to some crime-tv-serie absurd tech guy typing frantically and randomly and saying "I'm enhancing the zoomed picture!.
I don't like all strips where I don't get the jokes but, as I said, it's probably my fault (it happens also with other works such as "The Simpsons")
I don't like... some strips that surely other people already said they don't like, in threads such as "Best and worst strip(s)" and "If you were going to rewrite part of the comic what would you change?", and it would be pointless to repeat them over and over again.
There are also other thing I did not like but at the moment I don't remember them, and the very fact I don't remember them means they are not so important after all!
Believe it or not, I HATE one thing that I mentioned as a GOOD thing: the "think in English" one. Since most jokes are untranslatable in my native language, I'm sad that an Italian edition of OOTS will probably never ever exist because it would not be as funny (I realized that, when I watch Italian dubs of English-speaking tv series, cartoons or live-action, sometimes there are jokes that I get only when I manage to cast "Quickened Re-translate The Italian Dub To English" in my mind).
I hate the fact that I'll probably never be able to comment your strips as soon as you publish them, I was about to write something about 886, and I was thinking "Well, there already N thousand pages of comments, I risk saying something that someone else already said before..." and then suddenly 887 pops out, and there are already N hundred pages of comments! noooooo!
BTW, wonderful swirling layout, even my wife liked it when I showed her, even if she does not like OOTS)
p.s. Thanks to all forum user who created and maintain the Index of Giant Comments, the Geek thread, the MitD thread and so on, so I won't ask questions that have already been answered.
I stumbled upon OOTS some years ago (out-of-comic years, Oracle fans!). I don't remember the first page I read, maybe I followed a link to the "Greg Initiative" from a Lost fansite? Or maybe "A Gallehault indeed" was Redcloak's lampshade linked from TvTropes? Of course, those strips made little or no sense to me as I did not know the whole story.
Unfortunately, I have a very poor D&D knowledge so when I tried to read the webcomic from strip 1 I did not understand the jokes. Forgive me, I only played OD&D (not even AD&D, there were just 3 alignments IIRC) three or four times many years ago, I also played a few videogames (Hillsfar, Dragons of Flame, Eye of the Beholder II and Baldur's Gate I. Consider that, when I first played Hillsfar, my English was sooooo baaaaad that I misinterpreted "alignment" as something related to food or magical energy source).
Back to Strip 1, "New Edition", I was so dumb that I did not understand that it was an "In medias res" beginning, I mistook it for the beginning of the "second season" of a webcomic where the first part was nowhere to be found. So I forgot about it. Shame on me!
Then, after some time, I decided to give it another try, I don't remember exactly when and why, probably a voice sang in my head "Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy this funny story!".
So I started reading the whole comic from strip 1.
And! I! Could! Not! Stop!
It took time for me to catch up, sometimes I rushed, sometimes I went more slowly, and sometimes I "archive binged" again, then at last I got to "current strip" (which was the "current strip" at that time? I don't remember, maybe before, during or after the arena fight?). Then I checked for new strips every now and then; at least I decided to register to the forum. I'm sorry for Sir Thumb and I'm glad you're recovering. I haven't bought any of your books yet, but if some day, when the story is over, you publish "Order of the Stick The Complete Collection", I'll surely purchase it! (Well, I first have to persuade my wife, she doesn't like OOTS and in the matter of Team Family budget I'm Redcloak and she's Xykon).
Just kidding!
Or was I ?
She doesn't even like the OOTS fridge magnets, and she LOVES, WORSHIPS and ADORES any kind of fridge magnet! As V would say: "Damnations!"
While reading OOTS, I felt sad I had not discovered such long-running webcomic before. It's really funny, fascinating, enchanting.
My D&D ignorance turned out to be an obstacle at some points: it's the problem with the stuff that Italian screenwriter Vincenzo Cerami calls "extratext", something which is not in the text but is implied, the reader must already know it and "decode" it. Luckily there are the SDR website and the OOTS Wikia that helped me to understand many jokes and game mechanics (oh, BTW, THANKS to anyone who wrote the wikia pages that translate Haley's cryptograms!) And still I probably missed a lot of other jokes and puns due to my abysmal English and poor knowledge of English-speaking pop culture.
But the overarching story is very good and entertaining independently from the D&D details.
You also improved my English as I learnt words I did not know such as "snarl" or "ruse"; furthermore you also forced me to "think in English", as my sister's English teacher used to say, because many jokes and puns are absolutely untranslatable in Italian, my native language.
I love OOTS because it can be amusing and dramatic as well. I like how you developed the characters, at first they were just flat parodies of RPG stereotypes, now they have fully-fledged personalities... and nevertheless they still manage to parody their own stereotypes! I like the humour (when I get the jokes or course!), I like the pop culture references (when I understand them!), I like the breakings of the fourth wall, I like how the story evolved from one-D&D-gag-a-day to the current complex plot. I like when you surprise me with twists I didn't see coming: I suspect you can do Sneak Attacks like Haley or utter the Power Word Stun like V!
I like the art, you cure for details, I find amazing how you manage to make charachters expressive, sometimes you make me forget that they're just stick figures.
My favourite parts? It's difficult to say. I rejoice the times when Elan (in spite of his low Int score and high naivety) "wins" against his "Wile E. Coyote"-ish evil twin, with puns, genre savvyness and the ability to jump unscratched throught windows; before the end of comic I do hope to see Elan use his bard skills effectively (and without V's advice such in the celestial lion scene). Tarquin is right, bards should rule the world!
Arcs that I liked in especially are also: the epic Battle of Azure City; the Oracle using precog powers to take his revenge on Belkar and the "on acid" dialogue between the halfling and Lord Shojo; the Darth V arc; the special bond between MITD and O-Chul (and the Darth V and O-Chul arcs colliding). These are random thoughts, not in order of importance, I don't mean that the other parts are no good, they are very good indeed!
Of course, there also some parts that I don't like, but that's normal, we know that no author can satisfy "all the people all the time", don't we? And by reading some forum comments I guess your audience can be very picky sometimes :P
But details are easily forgotten and I think you are a great storyteller.
So, Rich, thank you very much for creating OOTS and for sharing it with us.
Ok, and now, after my "Kudos, Giant!" post I can start nitpicking just like any other forum user...
Just kidding!
Or was I ?
I don't like the font size in speech balloons, which got smaller and smaller over time, yes I know I can zoom the strips, but the more I zoom, the more they blur - Cue to some crime-tv-serie absurd tech guy typing frantically and randomly and saying "I'm enhancing the zoomed picture!.
I don't like all strips where I don't get the jokes but, as I said, it's probably my fault (it happens also with other works such as "The Simpsons")
I don't like... some strips that surely other people already said they don't like, in threads such as "Best and worst strip(s)" and "If you were going to rewrite part of the comic what would you change?", and it would be pointless to repeat them over and over again.
There are also other thing I did not like but at the moment I don't remember them, and the very fact I don't remember them means they are not so important after all!
Believe it or not, I HATE one thing that I mentioned as a GOOD thing: the "think in English" one. Since most jokes are untranslatable in my native language, I'm sad that an Italian edition of OOTS will probably never ever exist because it would not be as funny (I realized that, when I watch Italian dubs of English-speaking tv series, cartoons or live-action, sometimes there are jokes that I get only when I manage to cast "Quickened Re-translate The Italian Dub To English" in my mind).
I hate the fact that I'll probably never be able to comment your strips as soon as you publish them, I was about to write something about 886, and I was thinking "Well, there already N thousand pages of comments, I risk saying something that someone else already said before..." and then suddenly 887 pops out, and there are already N hundred pages of comments! noooooo!
BTW, wonderful swirling layout, even my wife liked it when I showed her, even if she does not like OOTS)
p.s. Thanks to all forum user who created and maintain the Index of Giant Comments, the Geek thread, the MitD thread and so on, so I won't ask questions that have already been answered.