OOTS #1281 - The Discussion Thread

[The Giant]

New comic is up.

[Shining Wrath]

Every artist knows the hands are the most difficult thing to draw. Rich is just showing off his superlative digital skills.

Do those hands stick out like a sore thumb?

Anyway, a mimic isn't a high level monster, but if it can keep, say, Greyview busy for a few rounds that might help.

[H_H_F_F]

Hooray! Thanks, giant.

Kind of a blow to the "Serini poisoned the soup" crowd, but we'll keep watching.

The AI joke was clever.

[Tzardok]

That reminds me of the guy who drew phantom pictures with noses.

[Satherian]

Rich out here showing off his hand drawing skills!

[Ruck]

Okay, at first I was reminded of the introductory section to Utterly Dwarfed where Rich printed some of the rejected upgrade character designs (specifically, the one with Roy with full five-fingered hands), and then it hit me: AI art joke!

[Zyzzyva]

Now I'm imagining an AI that draws everything with beady little Ditto eyes.

[Peelee]

Well, you've gotta hand it to 'em.

[hroþila]

Every artist knows the hands are the most difficult thing to draw
Horses with hands

[Psyren]

I guess Mimi is fired (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0339.html) :smallbiggrin:

(Can someone explain the joke in the title?)

[Ivrytwr]

Captialization and Counting!
Loving it!

Thanks Giant.

[Sir_Norbert]

(Can someone explain the joke in the title?)

Like the main joke of the strip, it's ribbing on how AI art programs are known to struggle with getting hands right.

[H_H_F_F]

I guess Mimi is fired (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0339.html) :smallbiggrin:

(Can someone explain the joke in the title?)

AI "art" currently has a really hard time with hands. Usually a nightmare with too many fingers.

But it gets better every generation.

[hagnat]

Do those hands stick out like a sore thumb?

ixnay on the umb-thay

[Peelee]

AI "art" currently has a really hard time with hands. Usually a nightmare with too many fingers.

But it gets better every generation.

Eh, I'll call it art. If Andy Warhol's works are art, so is a computer's.

[Fyraltari]

I'm sure Mimi will prove herself to be very handy.

[Peelee]

I'm sure Mimi will prove herself to be very handy.

She just wants to give them a hand.

[IHaveNOIdeas2]

I wonder if Bloodfeast is trying to tell everyone about what he saw in #1276. I heard someone say that Belkar has gained a bit of Wisdom through his character development and will surprise everyone by casting Speak With Animals, still hoping that will happen.

[fox1212]

So what happens with Bloodfeast? Is this the Giant pointing out that it's outside the bag, or am I missing something?

[enq]

Couldn't help but feel that Elan's reaction is meaner than Belkar's.


So what happens with Bloodfeast? Is this the Giant pointing out that it's outside the bag, or am I missing something?

Maybe he's stressed out about Eugene?

[Frozenstep]

I've heard AI art actually messes up the details on a lot of things, but it's just hands that we as humans notice most because we're very familiar with them.

Poor Mimi isn't wrong, just ahead of their time...

[Tzardok]

She just wants to give them a hand.

Give the man a big hand for these quality jokes.

[t209]

Well, other than certain medium of art, first time seeing five fingered hands in OOtS.

[Peelee]

Give the man a big hand for these quality jokes.

Only if you actually appreciate them, I'm not looking for any handouts.

[Tzardok]

Only if you actually appreciate them, I'm not looking for any handouts.

You won't notice any handouts on my part; I'm pretty good at Sleight of Hands.

Unless someone fingers me, of course.

[H_H_F_F]

Eh, I'll call it art. If Andy Warhol's works are art, so is a computer's.

Don't make me derail this whole thread, Peelee :smalltongue:

[Psyren]

Like the main joke of the strip, it's ribbing on how AI art programs are known to struggle with getting hands right.


AI "art" currently has a really hard time with hands. Usually a nightmare with too many fingers.

But it gets better every generation.

Thanks, I didn't spot the AI connection at all.


Eh, I'll call it art. If Andy Warhol's works are art, so is a computer's.

+1


So what happens with Bloodfeast? Is this the Giant pointing out that it's outside the bag, or am I missing something?


Maybe he's stressed out about Eugene?

I think it's Eugene that has him spooked as well.

[Ruck]

Don't make me derail this whole thread, Peelee :smalltongue:

I didn't want to say it, but now that you've said it...

[hamishspence]

I like the art joke.

[Metastachydium]

AI "art" currently has a really hard time with hands. Usually a nightmare with too many fingers.

I had more issues with floppy extra limbs myself, to be honest.


I think it's Eugene that has him spooked as well.

Well, he is kind of a ghost.

[Peelee]

Don't make me derail this whole thread, Peelee :smalltongue:

I dont know why you think id be playing a hand in it if you did.

[Fyraltari]

I dont know why you think id be playing a hand in it if you did.

You could take a hands-off approach.

[Pax1138]

I have to admit, it took me a minute before I realized what was "wrong" with Mimi's hands. I just stared at them trying to figure out what the joke was, until I looked back at the others'. :smallbiggrin:

[enq]

So... do mimics need to have seen what they want to imitate? Can we have some wild speculations about who Mimi is copying?

[rasborry]

She's a horrible freak with green skin, no overbite and five fingers on each hand! :smalleek:

[Peelee]

You could take a hands-off approach.

If possible. Sometimes there's no choice but to play the hand you're dealt.

[ZhonLord]

So... do mimics need to have seen what they want to imitate? Can we have some wild speculations about who Mimi is copying?

I think she looks like the dead mail carrier (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1279.html), personally.


Also I gotta hand it to Giant, this is a handy way to identify Mimi being abnormal and keep a good grip on the context. But she IS a mimic, so let's hope she doesn't get some sticky fingers or else Haley will hand her a blob-whooping.

[Psyren]

Assuming it is Eugene that has Bloodfeast antsy... how does that work? I thought nobody else could see him without the sword. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0292.html) And even with Roy thinking it was really a Sending from Julia, nobody else can (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0337.html) see those either. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1110.html) Maybe animals can see ghosts? (Now I'm worried about my cat staring at the wall all the time :smalleek:)

[MReav]

But is it the Final Dungeon? There's still Xykon's Astral Plane Fortress.

[H_H_F_F]

I actually wondered if Mimi took someone's shape, but it doesn't look quite like anyone we've seen so far, I don't think.

[ZhonLord]

But is it the Final Dungeon? There's still Xykon's Astral Plane Fortress.

Irrelevant. The astral fortress is only an obstacle if xykon's phylactery is actually there. Redcloak swapped them so it's a fake in the fortress. The real one is still here on the PMP somewhere.

[Onyavar]

We're only mid-journey to the final dungeon, and this thread had already quite a handful of finger-jokes by now. But Mimi's just drawn that wAI!

[Emperor Time]

But is it the Final Dungeon? There's still Xykon's Astral Plane Fortress.

But going there will be unnecessary since only the decoy is there. Unless something occurs that causes the party to go over there as well which probably won't happen right?

[Shining Wrath]

As a rule of thumb, there can never be too many puns in a OotS discussion thread. Even if Palm Sunday has passed, and the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate is no longer recalled by most playground denizens, and these jokes are clinging to the precipice of unfunny by their fingernails, in this digital demesne, our punish reach can never exceed our grasp.

[Fyraltari]

If possible. Sometimes there's no choice but to play the hand you're dealt.

That could be a handful, though. How do you handle it?

[MReav]

I wonder if Mimi's hands are a mythology gag referring to Rich's art experiments before settling on the new style.


But going there will be unnecessary since only the decoy is there. Unless something occurs that causes the party to go over there as well which probably won't happen right?


Irrelevant. The astral fortress is only an obstacle if xykon's phylactery is actually there. Redcloak swapped them so it's a fake in the fortress. The real one is still here on the PMP somewhere.

Right, Chekhov's gun was that ensign from Star Trek's sidearm. Who's up for some kippers in tomato sauce?

[Peelee]

That could be a handful, though. How do you handle it?
Throw hands.

I wonder if Mimi's hands are a mythology gag referring to Rich's art experiments before settling on the new style.

Really think we can shave with Occam's Razor here.

[Fyraltari]

So, mimics can take humanoid shapes, but they can't talk? Also, do you think Serini knew what she was saying? Telepathy? "Body" language?

[Joe the Rat]

This one killed me. Completely. I am now lying dead, and my ghost is possessing my computer keyboard to type this. So many levels. perfect.

(Plus it shows Rich can do "normal" hands if he wants to.)


It's always surprised me that AI has such a hard time with hands. It is a digital media, after all.

[Aquillion]

I've heard AI art actually messes up the details on a lot of things, but it's just hands that we as humans notice most because we're very familiar with them.It's more that hands are something that are:

1. Easy to get definitively "wrong", in that there are strict rules that govern what a hand can be and the positions it can take, which an AI can easily break, and,

2. Tend to be, in the training set, in a variety of positions that prevents the AI from getting a clear set of weights defining how one ought to look - the rules are hard to learn from existing works of art.

The rest of a human is not as difficult because the weights that define the shape of a human are more coherent - humans can be in all sorts of positions but there's a comparatively limited set of basic outlines that the AI can learn.

A tree is not as difficult because while the weights for the branches might be a bit incoherent, that doesn't matter; there's fewer strict rules for trees, with a much wider variety in how a tree's branches can grow, so it's harder to draw one in a clearly-wrong manner.

But hands, in the training set, can be in a wide variety of positions, while also having strict rules and a limited range of motion that won't necessarily be obvious from the training set. So it's much easier for the AI to produce a hand that is obviously wrong.

(This is not that different from why hands are different for newly-learning human artists, really. But a human artist can learn about the underlying skeletal structure and already has a basic intuition of what hands look like, while the AI can't.)

[H_H_F_F]

So, mimics can take humanoid shapes, but they can't talk? Also, do you think Serini knew what she was saying? Telepathy? "Body" language?

She could be technically a Phasm, perhaps. Those tend to prefer telepathic communication, and their abilities are a better match for what's going on here.

[Peelee]

This one killed me. Completely. I am now lying dead, and my ghost is possessing my computer keyboard to type this. So many levels. perfect.

(Plus it shows Rich can do "normal" hands if he wants to.)


It's always surprised me that AI has such a hard time with hands. It is a digital media, after all.

A lot of artists in general can have issues with hands and feet. And since AI art works by taking other art, then such problems carry over.

[Gift Jeraff]

So Belkar is this franchise's Lillie.

[Shining Wrath]

A lot of artists in general can have issues with hands and feet. And since AI art works by taking other art, then such problems carry over.

Having a good input data set would be handy, then.

[Draconi Redfir]

OOTS mimic waifu confirmed.

that is all.

[Arin]

Man, that Fourth Wall is in so many fragments that it might need V's special elven stonemasonry skills (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0427.html).

Also given that Thor literally identified this world as self-aware (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1140.html), maybe they don't have a Fourth Wall because bypassing it is basically part of their reality?

Oh God, my head hurts.

[Mic_128]

Irrelevant. The astral fortress is only an obstacle if xykon's phylactery is actually there.

I still reckon it'll be used as a lifeboat when the final gate is inevitably broken.


That reminds me of the guy who drew phantom pictures with noses.

I wonder if he's still doing his webcomic 17 years later. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0339.html)

[Wildstag]

Now prove you can do FEET.

[Peelee]

I still reckon it'll be used as a lifeboat when the final gate is inevitably broken.

What makes that fortress any more of a lifeboat than literally anywhere else on any other outer plane?

[Ionathus]

Okay, at first I was reminded of the introductory section to Utterly Dwarfed where Rich printed some of the rejected upgrade character designs (specifically, the one with Roy with full five-fingered hands), and then it hit me: AI art joke!


I wonder if Mimi's hands are a mythology gag referring to Rich's art experiments before settling on the new style.


Really think we can shave with Occam's Razor here.

I agree: the simplest explanation is that the artist did a ton of work on workshopping those realistic hands and never got a chance to show them off!

Speaking as someone who's had to cut entire beloved paragraphs and scenes from my writing, I will always bet on the artist finding an opportunity to sneak in their unused hard work wherever it fits, even as a gag :smalltongue:

It's a fun bonus that Rich is both making a joke about AI and poking fun at his own art experiments by depicting them as obviously unnatural-looking and ill-fitting for the art style :smallbiggrin:

[Peelee]

I agree: the simplest explanation is that the artist did a ton of work on workshopping those realistic hands and never got a chance to show them off!

Speaking as someone who's had to cut entire beloved paragraphs and scenes from my writing, I will always bet on the artist finding an opportunity to sneak in their unused hard work wherever it fits, even as a gag :smalltongue:

It's a fun bonus that Rich is both making a joke about AI and poking fun at his own art experiments by depicting them as obviously unnatural-looking and ill-fitting for the art style :smallbiggrin:
Why would he have ever worked on realistic hands during an art upgrade? Every upgrade has kept the main anesthetic of stick figures with three-fingered hands.

[Ionathus]

Why would he have ever worked on realistic hands during an art upgrade? Every upgrade has kept the main anesthetic of stick figures with three-fingered hands.

Not sure if you're doing a bit, but there's a commentary section in Utterly Dwarfed near the start where he talks about why he did the art upgrade and shows a bunch of rejected designs of Roy in the new styles. One of them is the spitting image (creepy realistic hands included) of what this mimic looks like now!

[KorvinStarmast]

Strip 1281 puts the are into self aware...

and then it hit me: AI art joke! Took me a sec to get that also.

Don't make me derail this whole thread, Peelee :smalltongue: I second your motion

She's a horrible freak with green skin, no overbite and five fingers on each hand! :smalleek: She dreams of becoming shehulk

Maybe animals can see ghosts? (Now I'm worried about my cat staring at the wall all the time :smalleek:) Might be the mimic that got Bloodfeast antsy, but I like where you are headed with this.

.. and the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate is no longer recalled by most playground denizens... I remember it well. :smallsmile: Sadly, so too does the local proctologist.

It's always surprised me that AI has such a hard time with hands. It is a digital media, after all. A hand is so much more than a collection of fingers. :smallsmile: To be fair, we can't all be Albrecht Dürer. (https://www.thehistoryofart.org/albrecht-durer/Praying%20Hands%20Albrecht%20Durer.jpg?ezimgfmt=ng cb14/notWebP)

[bunsen_h]

But going there will be unnecessary since only the decoy is there. Unless something occurs that causes the party to go over there as well which probably won't happen right?

I'm holding out for some kind of alarm being triggered there, which will induce Xykon to rush out to see what's happening. "Don't split the party!" applies to Team Evil too.


Assuming it is Eugene that has Bloodfeast antsy... how does that work? I thought nobody else could see him without the sword. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0292.html) And even with Roy thinking it was really a Sending from Julia, nobody else can (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0337.html) see those either. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1110.html) Maybe animals can see ghosts? (Now I'm worried about my cat staring at the wall all the time :smalleek:)

We've been told that only the holder of the sword can see him. I don't think we have independent confirmation of that. At any rate, he also seems to have been creating an illusion here, and we don't know what the limits are on people seeing that.


Why would he have ever worked on realistic hands during an art upgrade? Every upgrade has kept the main anesthetic of stick figures with three-fingered hands.

I feel that you've typoed there. :smallbiggrin:

[gbaji]

AI "art" currently has a really hard time with hands. Usually a nightmare with too many fingers.

As a couple people have commented on, fingers are notoriously difficult for human artists as well. Especially in a variety of positions and in more active use (as opposed to say a portrait of a person with their hands in a resting position). There's a reason why pretty much all figures in classic cartoons have just four fingers (counting the thumb). It's easy to draw a row of three similar things (left, right, middle), But when there are two "middle" fingers, things get difficult proportion wise (thumb is kinda separate here since it's angled the other way). Usually, you can draw the first three, but the fourth ends up looking like it's attached strangely, or out of position, or something (usually, the pinkie looks like it's an extra digit instead of actually part of the hand). It's just not how the human brain works when we arrange things, so it takes extra affort to properly space the fingers. So if you are drawing a lot of figures in different positions, over and over (like say a cartoon, or comic), it's easier to just reduce the number to three.

AI has an even harder time with it. I've seen some really hillarious art fails. Like a stump with a buch of thick bristlebrush things sticking out in all directions kind of funny. Things that look obviously "wrong" to the human eye, an AI just can't recognize. And trying to write "rules" for fingers that an AI can actually follow and do something useful with? Trickier than one might think. Basically, if you treat it as a single thumb, and a single "set of fingers" all connected and wrapped in the same way, it'll work fine (and will basically look like poor artwork). The moment you try to tell the AI that there are four individual digits there, with different lengths and articulations, and treat them as separate objects to draw, hillarity ensues. And yeah, I think someone commented that at least part of the problem is that because this is difficult for humans to do, most art tends to put the hands in positions that "hides" the fingers, which makes AI trying to imitate art and then modify it, do "odd things" with those fingers.



It's always surprised me that AI has such a hard time with hands. It is a digital media, after all.

Hahaha. Ok. I've gotta hand it to you, that was funny.


Oh. And you know that now we all have to properly write "Final Dungeon" from this point on, right? Sheesh!

[Peelee]

Not sure if you're doing a bit, but there's a commentary section in Utterly Dwarfed near the start where he talks about why he did the art upgrade and shows a bunch of rejected designs of Roy in the new styles. One of them is the spitting image (creepy realistic hands included) of what this mimic looks like now!
Nah, i just didn't remember that. Regardless, though, an in-joke just for the author and a small percent of people who know about that extra content isn't going to be a page-ending punchline. That may well be the author amusing himself by referencing work he did once but the main joke for the broad audience is clearly riffing on AIs.

I feel that you've typoed there. :smallbiggrin:

Well, my phone did, but that's splitting hairs. :smalltongue:

[Bacon Elemental]

Good job Elan, now we've all got Final Dungeon capitalizing itself all over the place.

Also I laughed out loud at the punchline and I'm still grinning.

[Zhorn]

Final Dungeon and IA hands. I give those jokes a *chef's kiss*

But Bloodfeast has me worried... If this just establishing where he is with the traveling group... or is this setting up for a moment where the little guy's behaviour is going to become very plot relevant...

[Ionathus]

Nah, i just didn't remember that. Regardless, though, an in-joke just for the author and a small percent of people who know about that extra content isn't going to be a page-ending punchline. That may well be the author amusing himself by referencing work he did once but the main joke for the broad audience is clearly riffing on AIs.

Yep. The main punchline is the AI thing, and then there's basically an Easter Egg where Rich is going "ha ha, these hands that I considered using are such Uncanny Valley territory"

[Psyren]

We've been told that only the holder of the sword can see him. I don't think we have independent confirmation of that. At any rate, he also seems to have been creating an illusion here, and we don't know what the limits are on people seeing that.

For the former, you need both the sword and the bloodline IIRC. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0534.html)

For the latter - you're right about the illusion potentially breaking that, but then, Bloodfeast shouldn't have been able to see anything once the illusion dropped. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1276.html) Unless, again, animals are an exception of some kind.

[Ionathus]

There is only one possible explanation: Bloodfeast is a long-lost Greenhilt descendant who was polymorphed into a T-Rex, who was polymorphed into a lizard.

[gatemansgc]

That reminds me of the guy who drew phantom pictures with noses.

oh yeah, nale and thog in realistic style!

[faustin]

I'm with Elan. The idea of the heroes teaming up with the in-story dungeon master and her creatures as friends and allies, cooperating in the protection of the dungeon against the Big Bad, is actually refreshing.

Hell, Pixar could make a movie about it.

[DaOldeWolf]

Ah! :smalleek: Its realistic human hands. One of the scariest things in fiction. My eyes want to look away but they just cant. Its like a curse.

[Dentarthur]

We don't get to see Roy's aside with Durkon? Interesting....

[Resileaf]

We don't get to see Roy's aside with Durkon? Interesting....

Of course not. It's a secret for the future. :smallcool:

[Laurentio III]

We don't get to see Roy's aside with Durkon? Interesting....Of course not. It's a secret for the future. :smallcool:
As every reader knows, a plan that is shown to the audience is bound to fail. So, if you want it to work, it must be keep a secret.
Elan did it before battling his father - and so did him.

I'm tempted to link the appropriate TvTropes page, but I assume it would be unpolite.

[Doug Lampert]

So, mimics can take humanoid shapes, but they can't talk? Also, do you think Serini knew what she was saying? Telepathy? "Body" language?


Mimics speak Common.

Probably she simply chooses not to talk, like blackwing.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Don't make me derail this whole thread, Peelee :smalltongue:

Please, do derail the whole thread, H_H_F_F.

Art is something that is made with intention to pass a message without (or with no primary) concern of usefulness. How is asking a computer to draw a castle with wings made out of skeletal hands different from using a graphic pad to draw the same thing?

[ZhonLord]

I don't think anyone has noted the callback to this page, yet. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0339.html)

[Tzardok]

I don't think anyone has noted the callback to this page, yet. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0339.html)


That reminds me of the guy who drew phantom pictures with noses.

:smalltongue:

[Peelee]

:smalltongue:

Dangit, you beat me to it!

ETA: Also,
I guess Mimi is fired (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0339.html) :smallbiggrin:

[brian 333]

But is it the Final Dungeon? There's still Xykon's Astral Plane Fortress.

While I agree, many others believe the Final Dungeon is where Xykon is defeated forever.

I happen to feel these posters mistakenly believe the quest is to 'Save The World', and that once that is done the game is over. But the quest is, and has always been to destroy Xylon and fulfill Eugene's blood oath.

If Xykon is close to being vanquished, why wouldn't he retreat to his fortress? Especially if Redcloak has turned on him, (or the other way around.)

Finally, capitalizing Final Dungeon only cements, in my mind, the idea that it is not, in fact, the final dungeon at all.


As a rule of thumb, there can never be too many puns in a OotS discussion thread. Even if Palm Sunday has passed, and the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate is no longer recalled by most playground denizens, and these jokes are clinging to the precipice of unfunny by their fingernails, in this digital demesne, our punish reach can never exceed our grasp.

The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate was a class act that almost didn't make it past the censors in 1969. I feel it would make it as a concept today, but the subjects it pointed out would be cancelled faster than a Saturday morning soap opera.

Nowadays, the Farkel Family would be enough to get the show in trouble. Oh, wait, it did back then too. Some things never change.

[Tzardok]

Dangit, you beat me to it!


Ninja-ed. And swordsage-d, like a ninja swordsage class combination. Optimize that! :smallbiggrin:

[snafuy]

What makes that fortress any more of a lifeboat than literally anywhere else on any other outer plane?


The other outer planes are aligned, hostile to some visitors. (AFAIK, Sigil doesn't exist in OOTS-verse.)
The Astral is unaligned territory and not inherently hazardous (unlike many elemental planes).
The fortress in specific presumably has sturdy defenses.
But mainly because Chekhov. It's one of the most story-relevant, reachable locations never visited by the party. It ought to make an appearance, as a lifeboat or otherwise.


Speaking of the rules of storytelling, I eagerly await Bloodfeast resuming his huge dinosaur form during the Final Battle.

[Tzardok]

The other outer planes are aligned, hostile to some visitors. (AFAIK, Sigil doesn't exist in OOTS-verse.)


Sigil may not, but the Outlands as the Plane of Neutrality do. (It's the one labeled with "Hey, let's not get carried away." in this strip (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1138.html).)

[Quizatzhaderac]

Now that the Final DungeonTM is capitalized I'm going to be upset if there's another book going to Xykon's astral fortress. I guess it would make a decent DLC for the video game; which is not a thing, but I think we all have ideas for it.

The paladin's cloaks (to the best of my non-artiest judgment) are definitely shaded on the underside, since their hair an boots seem to be as bright as always. For a second I was worried that Rich was making the series darker and grittier (https://www.reddit.com/r/moviescirclejerk/comments/tg46g0/lets_make_it_darker_and_grittier/).

[Beni-Kujaku]

But mainly because Chekhov. It's one of the most story-relevant, reachable locations never visited by the party. It ought to make an appearance, as a lifeboat or otherwise.


If we're speaking of the laws of storytelling, the fortress has already been lampshaded here (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1137.html) by Thor and in the strip's title. I know that's a pretty big "probably", but there's no "guarantee" that there will be more payoff than that.

[Peelee]

The other outer planes are aligned, hostile to some visitors. (AFAIK, Sigil doesn't exist in OOTS-verse.)
The Astral is unaligned territory and not inherently hazardous (unlike many elemental planes).
The fortress in specific presumably has sturdy defenses.
But mainly because Chekhov. It's one of the most story-relevant, reachable locations never visited by the party. It ought to make an appearance, as a lifeboat or otherwise.


Speaking of the rules of storytelling, I eagerly await Bloodfeast resuming his huge dinosaur form during the Final Battle.

To your first two points, how is this relevant to whether the main characters can escape to them? There are several the main characters could escape to with no problem. That there are some they cannot doesn't make the Astral any more likely than the others.

To your third point, how would anyone except Xykon get in? The purpose is to hide his phylactery, Xkyon knows the location and has teleport, everyone else would need to deal with those sturdy defenses. Which would be useless against the Snarl and only useful against other normal characters, so even if the main characters got in, the defenses are irrelevant.

Finally, itd barely story relevant at all. Its sole purpose is to make Xykon think his phylactery is safe while it is actually not. Thats it. If it never appears ever again (which I think is highly likely), the narrative still concludes perfectly fine. And, to reiterate above, even if they wanted to use it, how would they get to it? Its in a random spot on an infinite plane. Its neither story-relevant not particularly reachable. Other planes, or anywhere else on the Astral plane, is more reachable than that.

[gbaji]

While I agree, many others believe the Final Dungeon is where Xykon is defeated forever.

I happen to feel these posters mistakenly believe the quest is to 'Save The World', and that once that is done the game is over. But the quest is, and has always been to destroy Xylon and fulfill Eugene's blood oath.

If Xykon is close to being vanquished, why wouldn't he retreat to his fortress? Especially if Redcloak has turned on him, (or the other way around.)

Assuming that the Final Dungeon is located within the same stone that blocks like divinations, ghost form, teleportation effects, etc, how exactly is he going to do this? Let's assume that it's been built so that the only way in our out is through the swapovers (or equivalent that redirects them to there instead of to the normal dungeon you'd go to). I can't say for 100% certain that he can't gate out if he wants, but there's no reason to assume he can either.

The bigger point is that Xykon should have no reason to feel he has to "retreat to the fortress" since he believes his phylactery is in the fortresss. He can be destroyed safe in the knowledge that he'll reform there and life (or unlife in his case) will go on.

Put me firmly in suport of: "the fortress will only come up in dialogue, and then only in the context of how Xykon *wont* be going there since his phylactery is really with Redcloak". Acually traveling there would more or less stomp on the entire pacing of the story.

Eh. I also disagree that the mission is "defeat Xykon". It started out as that. But that was the "hook" that got the Order into a larger and more important mission. I happen to agree that Xykon will be destroyed before completion of the story, but the reality is that if the Order saves the world but fails to destroy Xykon, that only affects Eugene and his family, while the other way around, everyone is dead (or worse, which is actually a thing here). One of these things is of vastly greater importance and immediacy than the other.

Again though. It's irrelevant, because it's almost certainly not a condition that is going to happen.

[Ionathus]

Put my money on "we're never going to Xykon's Astral Fortress, it was useful to occupy Big X's time and show his loss of trust in Redcloak but it will never come up again."

[Peelee]

If Xykon is close to being vanquished, why wouldn't he retreat to his fortress?

Im sorry im having trouble with this. Why would he?

Imean, hes a lich. His body can be completely eradicated and he will regenerate at his phylactery. Distance doesn't matter. Being on the same plane doesn't matter. Why, if he's in danger of being vanquished, run to the one place where he thinks he will go regardless?

Put my money on "we're never going to Xykon's Astral Fortress, it was useful to occupy Big X's time and show his loss of trust in Redcloak but it will never come up again."

Seconded.

[OvisCaedo]

If anything, retreating back to his astral fortress would only make it more likely that his enemies discover his phylactery's hiding place. Thor might have spoiled it, but the party should have had zero way of knowing "astral fortress" was even a possibility of where Xykon might regenerate next if he's beaten up.

[elros]

Thanks for explaining the AI joke- I don’t use it so I didn’t get it.
I am surprised that Belkar noticed the hands. Would that be a spot check? He must have spent skill points in it since the early strips.

[Kish]

[...]
Fifty gold says the world the Order is currently standing on will not be destroyed, and there will thus be no need for a "lifeboat."

[Psyren]

Put my money on "we're never going to Xykon's Astral Fortress, it was useful to occupy Big X's time and show his loss of trust in Redcloak but it will never come up again."


Seconded.

It'll be doubly hilarious when Xykon is long forgotten and rando adventurers are raiding his Astral Tomb of Horrors with no clue as to where it came from or why.

[Wintermoot]

It'll be doubly hilarious when Xykon is long forgotten and rando adventurers are raiding his Astral Tomb of Horrors with no clue as to where it came from or why.

You just described where 83% of dungeons come from.

[BloodSquirrel]

Retreating to his astral fortress would make sense if Xykon figures out that his phylactery isn't there, since that will both raise the stakes of his body being destroyed and mean he wouldn't be potentially leading his enemies to his phylactery.

But I'm already on record saying that, whatever happens, dealing with the Snarl will be the climax of the story. Going to the astral plane to fight Xykon again would just be clean-up.

[Shining Wrath]

If the god's memorials to each lost world survive in the Astral Plane, then Xykon's fortress survives, too.
Which means it's at least possible that the denouement of OotS will be Elan and Haley reaching Xykon's fortress and becoming the Adam and Eve of a new race of humans as the Snarl destroys everything else. The prophet said that Elan would get a happy ending, and that might qualify.
It also means that if Xykon learns the truth and is convinced of the reality of the Snarl and the gods judgment upon this iteration of the world, he might flee to his fortress - rendering Redcloak's Plan infeasible, which means he might listen to Durkon.

[H_H_F_F]

Please, do derail the whole thread, H_H_F_F.

Art is something that is made with intention to pass a message without (or with no primary) concern of usefulness. How is asking a computer to draw a castle with wings made out of skeletal hands different from using a graphic pad to draw the same thing?

I don't agree that your definition is sufficient, or that it fully encompasses the full nature of art, but I'm very glad we agree that intention is a vital part of what makes art. That means the AI itself cannot be said to be an artist. Which you're not claiming, which is great. Think we're in agreement on that part, and are only disagreeing about the human component.

Now, if I ask my (extremely talented, by the way) younger brother to draw a castle with wings made out of skeletal hands, am I doing any art?

I'd wager that no one would say yes, and if you're tempted to say yes, ask yourself whether you'd ever consider that to be doing art outside the bounds of this conversation. And I think it's obviously a far closer analogue to what's going on here than using a graphic pad.

I'd argue that "expressing a will for something to exist, with the intention of the expression itself to cause that thing to manifest" isn't "doing art".

There'll be edge cases, obviously - but at its heart, at its ideal form, procedurally generated imagery cannot be said to be art IMO.

[Peelee]

If the god's memorials to each lost world survive in the Astral Plane, then Xykon's fortress survives, too.
Which means it's at least possible that the denouement of OotS will be Elan and Haley reaching Xykon's fortress and becoming the Adam and Eve of a new race of humans as the Snarl destroys everything else. The prophet said that Elan would get a happy ending, and that might qualify.
It also means that if Xykon learns the truth and is convinced of the reality of the Snarl and the gods judgment upon this iteration of the world, he might flee to his fortress - rendering Redcloak's Plan infeasible, which means he might listen to Durkon.

The question isn't "do things survive in the astral plane?" Of course they do, the Snarl is only on the Material Plane. It can't get to other planes. Redcloak/TDO's entire plan is to enable the Snarl to be loose on another plane because it can't do it on its own. The Astral Plane, as a whol,e is already safe. They dont need to go to the fortress - calking it a lifeboat is like saying you need a lifeboat in the middle of a field - there's no difference being in the boat or out of the boat.

Also, Xykon doesn't strike me as the retreating type.

[Provengreil]

If the god's memorials to each lost world survive in the Astral Plane, then Xykon's fortress survives, too.
Which means it's at least possible that the denouement of OotS will be Elan and Haley reaching Xykon's fortress and becoming the Adam and Eve of a new race of humans as the Snarl destroys everything else. The prophet said that Elan would get a happy ending, and that might qualify.
It also means that if Xykon learns the truth and is convinced of the reality of the Snarl and the gods judgment upon this iteration of the world, he might flee to his fortress - rendering Redcloak's Plan infeasible, which means he might listen to Durkon.

I guess such a turn of events isn't entirely impossible, but I just don't see it.

Xykon would NEVER have brooked Redcloak swapping the amulet, which means he bought the fake. He thinks it's still safe in the fortress, so there's no reason to retreat. In fact, retreat only increases likelihood of discovery, as dying to regen at the fortress leaves no trail. Do remember here that he can be tracked with detect evil and knows it, so even flying would plausibly leave a trail.

Second, Xykon is in no way in on the Gods' plan. If he was, he may well have pulled the plug on the plan already, realizing that he can't take all 3 pantheons unmaking reality at once. So again, from his point of view, fighting, dying, and retrying is a workable play.

Then, he believes MitD is still fully on his own side, complete with anti-betrayal features. From what we've seen that's enough to trash the Order in about 6 rounds on its own. Again, even at the absolute worst, he'd just have to hold out while that goes down. Again, no reason to retreat.

So really, he just has no motivation to leave even if things turn sour.

[Psyren]

You just described where 83% of dungeons come from.

Exactly. And much like the Big Bads of yore, Xykon probably never considered the possibility that his Astral Fortress will end up as little more than an Ozymandian monument to empty hubris.


If the god's memorials to each lost world survive in the Astral Plane, then Xykon's fortress survives, too.
Which means it's at least possible that the denouement of OotS will be Elan and Haley reaching Xykon's fortress and becoming the Adam and Eve of a new race of humans as the Snarl destroys everything else. The prophet said that Elan would get a happy ending, and that might qualify.
It also means that if Xykon learns the truth and is convinced of the reality of the Snarl and the gods judgment upon this iteration of the world, he might flee to his fortress - rendering Redcloak's Plan infeasible, which means he might listen to Durkon.

I highly doubt Elan would consider an ending where only he and Haley survive to be happy, to say nothing of the fact that the gods would likely "cash in their chips" and make something other-than-fantasy-human for round eleventy-googol -and-three.

[pearl jam]

Eh, I'll call it art. If Andy Warhol's works are art, so is a computer's.

Shots fired. lol

Also, it depends on how you define art. Is it the end result or the do the process and decisions of the artist matter? I think there is something different about the choices made by an artist when constructing a piece and an ai generating an image based on some kind of algorithmic analysis of the images created by the choices of a multitudes of artists, even if the end result is similar.

[Ruck]

Who's up for some kippers in tomato sauce?

Kippers for breakfast? Is it St. Swithin's Day already?

[brian 333]

Im sorry im having trouble with this. Why would he?

Imean, hes a lich. His body can be completely eradicated and he will regenerate at his phylactery. Distance doesn't matter. Being on the same plane doesn't matter. Why, if he's in danger of being vanquished, run to the one place where he thinks he will go regardless?

This presumes that by the time of his retreat he has not discovered Redcloak's duplicity.

Assuming Redcloak's betrayal and the failure of his plan to have MitD eat him, and faced with potentially being beaten to a pile of dust by Sir Girdhart or Greenskirt, or whatever his name is, Xykon will choose to remain animate. He will need a safe place to make a new phylactery. What safer place does he know?

And what better place to strip the OotS of all support so that the final showdown is between Roy and Xykon?

The Astral Fortress is my guess for the location of Xykon's ultimate defeat. I believe the logic that leads me to this conclusion is sound. I understand that others disagree.

Let's see what happens.

[Peelee]

This presumes that by the time of his retreat he has not discovered Redcloak's duplicity.

Assuming Redcloak's betrayal and the failure of his plan to have MitD eat him, and faced with potentially being beaten to a pile of dust by Sir Girdhart or Greenskirt, or whatever his name is, Xykon will choose to remain animate. He will need a safe place to make a new phylactery. What safer place does he know?

And what better place to strip the OotS of all support so that the final showdown is between Roy and Xykon?

The Astral Fortress is my guess for the location of Xykon's ultimate defeat. I believe the logic that leads me to this conclusion is sound. I understand that others disagree.

Let's see what happens.
Assume, for the moment, that Xykon is nearly destroyed, and knows thay Redcloak has his phylactery, and still has a high enough level spell slot to teleport, and is able to cast it through Roy's Spellsplinter ability. A lot of assumptions there, but let's go with it. This highly specific scenario happens, and Xykon nopes out to his fortress.

Again, i ask, how does anyone else find it? It's in a random spot on an infinite plane, and only Xykon knows where it is. Even if he retreats to a fortress to hide (which really doesn't seem like Xykon's style, he's never done that before that i can recall), and even if the finale is dungeon of traps to get through to find Xykon (which IMO would be a painfully dull idea and basically a rehash of the Dungeon of Dorukan), how in the Nine Hells are Roy and Co. supposed to find the damn thing?

[Psyren]

This presumes that by the time of his retreat he has not discovered Redcloak's duplicity.

Assuming Redcloak's betrayal and the failure of his plan to have MitD eat him, and faced with potentially being beaten to a pile of dust by Sir Girdhart or Greenskirt, or whatever his name is, Xykon will choose to remain animate. He will need a safe place to make a new phylactery. What safer place does he know?

And what better place to strip the OotS of all support so that the final showdown is between Roy and Xykon?

The Astral Fortress is my guess for the location of Xykon's ultimate defeat. I believe the logic that leads me to this conclusion is sound. I understand that others disagree.

Let's see what happens.

idk, I prefer the dramatic subversion of having Xykon's Ultimate Gambit end up being completely irrelevant. Not to mention the universe having both capitalized Final Dungeon in their speech bubbles in this strip and spawned Potion Guy prior. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1201.html) But sure, we'll see.



Again, i ask, how does anyone else find it? It's in a random spot on an infinite plane, and only Xykon knows where it is. Even if he retreats to a fortress to hide (which really doesn't seem like Xykon's style, he's never done that before that i can recall), and even if the finale is dungeon of traps to get through to find Xykon (which IMO would be a painfully dull idea and basically a rehash of the Dungeon of Dorukan), how in the Nine Hells are Roy and Co. supposed to find the damn thing?

To be fair, Thor knows where it is (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1137.html), and Xykon's fortress isn't under the same gag order as anything Snarl-related (especially if he breaks away from Redcloak.) So finding it is a Commune away, or possibly even a Legend Lore given Xykon's level.

Having said all that, I'm on your side, the astral fortress is a narrative red herring. (And note the title of the linked strip)

[gbaji]

Retreating to his astral fortress would make sense if Xykon figures out that his phylactery isn't there, since that will both raise the stakes of his body being destroyed and mean he wouldn't be potentially leading his enemies to his phylactery.

Except that retreating to his astral fortress does him no good in that case. It's his phylactery being destroyed that is the risk to his unlife, not his physical body. So moving his physical body out of harms way while leaving the phylactery right there, in Redcloak's hands, and at risk of being taken/destroyed by the Order would make no sense. Not "leading his enemies to his pylactery" is meanginless if he's leaving it right there, with his enemies.

I suppose out of pure completenesses sake, there is one and only one condition in which Xykon would retreat to his astral fortress. If, at some point along the way he discovers that Redcloak has the phylactery *and* he believes that they are in imminent danger of being defeated, he might very well grab the phylactery from Redcloak and retreat to the fortress with it. But he would only ever go there if he had his phylactery with him. And the reason would not be for him to go there, but to get his phylactery there so it will be safe. And again, he would only do that if he felt that he was in danger of being destroyed. Let's not forget that the guy has been running around for many years now, engaging in all sorts of conflicts with tons of different people, all with his phylactery right there around Redcloak's neck. So we somewhat have to assume he's got a pretty healthy dose of "I can handle pretty much anyone who comes my way" eqo thing going, so "retreat" would be unlikely to be his first go-to option here.

As long as he believes the phylactery is safe in the fortress he has zero reason to go there until after their plan/ritual is complete. And if he discovers it isn't, he'll still likely try to fight his way through his enemies instead of just running away. That's just his nature.


It also means that if Xykon learns the truth and is convinced of the reality of the Snarl and the gods judgment upon this iteration of the world, he might flee to his fortress - rendering Redcloak's Plan infeasible, which means he might listen to Durkon.

Again though, if he believes his phylactery is safe in his astral fortress, he has no reason to do that. He would be much more likely to just hang around and kill everyone for wasting his time all these years. Especially Redcloak. I just don't see Xykon as the type to go "Huh. I guess our plan wouldn't have worked anyway. Guess I'll just go home now instead of killing these annoying people standing around right in front of me".

I'm very certain that whatever conflict is going to occur between the Order and Xykon will occur in the Final Dungeon and/or near the Final Gate (capitalized for increased drama of course!). Because that's the key focus point of the conflict. It would be an incredible record scraching break of pacing to have the Final Battle in the Final Dungeon for the Final Gate end with "Oh. I guess now that we've talked Redcloak out of implementing the ritual, we'll have to track down Xykon on the Astral plane and destroy him there". Uh... No. Xykon will be destroyed right there. The entire setup is so that he thinks he'll survive that destruction, but will actually not because in the same location that they destroy him, they also have his phylactery, so they destroy that as well, thus ending his threat.

[Jay R]

Thanks for explaining the AI joke- I don’t use it so I didn’t get it.
I am surprised that Belkar noticed the hands. Would that be a spot check? He must have spent skill points in it since the early strips.

It's the Roger Rabbit principle:

"Only when it's funny."


It'll be doubly hilarious when Xykon is long forgotten and rando adventurers are raiding his Astral Tomb of Horrors with no clue as to where it came from or why.

And they spend lots of money and spells trying to understand the purpose of the "holy symbol" that was kept in the most highly protected place in the fortress -- never knowing that Xykon thought it was his phylactery.

[Peelee]

To be fair, Thor knows where it is (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1137.html), and Xykon's fortress isn't under the same gag order as anything Snarl-related (especially if he breaks away from Redcloak.) So finding it is a Commune away, or possibly even a Legend Lore given Xykon's level.

Having said all that, I'm on your side, the astral fortress is a narrative red herring. (And note the title of the linked strip)

Sure, but "I'll just get the gods to tell me where to go" isn't terribly great storytelling, especially for what's supposed to be the climax.

[Psyren]

Sure, but "I'll just get the gods to tell me where to go" isn't terribly great storytelling, especially for what's supposed to be the climax.

Again, no argument here. His dungeon definitely won't be the climax.

I'm just pointing out that if they need to find it for some non-climax-related reason, they can.

[Peelee]

Again, no argument here. His dungeon definitely won't be the climax.

I'm just pointing out that if they need to find it for some non-climax-related reason, they can.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that technically it shouldn't be possible. But it would be like the Oracle (who could also tell them): it wouldn't happen due to the narrative rules of the universe.

[Wraithfighter]

I think the main purpose for the Astral Fortress, at least right now, is that it's a place that Xykon thinks is utterly impregnable where his Phylactery is unquestioningly safe. Thus, he's almost encouraged to be even more reckless than he normally would be. The destruction of the world wouldn't even be all that much of a problem for him, I mean, it'd be incredibly inconvenient, but the only thing he really cares about isn't anywhere near it, so all that's lost is a massive source of power, he'll just have to find something else to do instead, ho hum.

That said, given everything we don't know about the gates and the world on the other side of it and, oh yeah, the Snarl, things could change very abruptly, and could create issues that the Astral Fortress might be needed to solve. Its just too hard to predict where things are going with such a heavy collection of unknowns hanging overhead.

[Jasdoif]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that technically it shouldn't be possible. But it would be like the Oracle (who could also tell them): it wouldn't happen due to the narrative rules of the universe.Well, while we're talking about long shots that bring the astral fortress into play....

What if it isn't Xykon who retreats to the fortress, but Redcloak? He cast the spell to get there (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0833.html); and he was there while Xykon unloaded his scrolls and he unloaded his own spells, so he knows where (most of?) the traps are. We've already seen that scrying can locate someone (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1108.html). And sealing the rifts needs a spell slot from Redcloak, so they'll need to track him down if he leaves and can't be convinced over communication spells. (Please, appease if he flees before he agrees?)

[Peelee]

Well, while we're talking about long shots that bring the astral fortress into play....

What if it isn't Xykon who retreats to the fortress, but Redcloak? He cast the spell to get there (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0833.html); and he was there while Xykon unloaded his scrolls and he unloaded his own spells, so he knows where (most of?) the traps are. We've already seen that scrying can locate someone (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1108.html). And sealing the rifts needs a spell slot from Redcloak, so they'll need to track him down if he leaves and can't be convinced over communication spells. (Please, appease if he flees before he agrees?)

Fair on Reddie knowing where it is, but if he's still under Cloister effect, then they can't scry on him (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0504.html). And he has even less reason to go to the fortress. He may be able to find the place, but Xykon says that nobody would be able to enter it anyway, and that's before our green goblin was roped into getting his clerical mojo in on the action.

[Jasdoif]

Fair on Reddie knowing where it is, but if he's still under Cloister effect, then they can't scry on him (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0504.html). And he has even less reason to go to the fortress. He may be able to find the place, but Xykon says that nobody would be able to enter it anyway, and that's before our green goblin was roped into getting his clerical mojo in on the action.Weirdly enough, the possibility exists that cloister's effect would end if Xykon was fully destroyed (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0532.html)...which I guess is just as well, as Redcloak losing his arcane caster for the Plan is the only reason I can think of why he would even consider retreating.

So I guess now we're down to how literally Xykon meant no one would be able to "gain entrance" (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0833.html), or questioning how well his other spells hold if he were to be fully destroyed (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1131.html) (as of course he was thinking that wasn't possibile with the fauxlactery there)...and still ahead of "Xykon retreats to his own fortress".

[BloodSquirrel]

Except that retreating to his astral fortress does him no good in that case. It's his phylactery being destroyed that is the risk to his unlife, not his physical body. So moving his physical body out of harms way while leaving the phylactery right there, in Redcloak's hands, and at risk of being taken/destroyed by the Order would make no sense. Not "leading his enemies to his pylactery" is meanginless if he's leaving it right there, with his enemies.

That is explicitly not how it works, as direction demonstrated in when Redcloak threatened to destroy Xykon's phylactery and he responded by saying that his phylactery being destroyed wouldn't do anything unless his body was destroyed first.

If his phylactery is not safe, then he needs to make sure that his body isn't destroyed until he can recover it. Retreating rather than letting his body get destroyed again when his phylactery is or will immediately wind up in the hands of his enemies would be the overwhelmingly logical thing to do.

[Psyren]

I think the main purpose for the Astral Fortress, at least right now, is that it's a place that Xykon thinks is utterly impregnable where his Phylactery is unquestioningly safe. Thus, he's almost encouraged to be even more reckless than he normally would be. The destruction of the world wouldn't even be all that much of a problem for him, I mean, it'd be incredibly inconvenient, but the only thing he really cares about isn't anywhere near it, so all that's lost is a massive source of power, he'll just have to find something else to do instead, ho hum.

This is indeed the primary (narrative) purpose behind the fortress AFAICT.


That said, given everything we don't know about the gates and the world on the other side of it and, oh yeah, the Snarl, things could change very abruptly, and could create issues that the Astral Fortress might be needed to solve. Its just too hard to predict where things are going with such a heavy collection of unknowns hanging overhead.

I really don't see how it would be relevant to any of those, but the Giant's surprised me before.


That is explicitly not how it works, as direction demonstrated in when Redcloak threatened to destroy Xykon's phylactery and he responded by saying that his phylactery being destroyed wouldn't do anything unless his body was destroyed first.

If his phylactery is not safe, then he needs to make sure that his body isn't destroyed until he can recover it. Retreating rather than letting his body get destroyed again when his phylactery is or will immediately wind up in the hands of his enemies would be the overwhelmingly logical thing to do.

In addition, the Giant is appearing to use Libris Mortis rules, whereby the lich can't make a replacement.

[Peelee]

That is explicitly not how it works, as direction demonstrated in when Redcloak threatened to destroy Xykon's phylactery and he responded by saying that his phylactery being destroyed wouldn't do anything unless his body was destroyed first.

If his phylactery is not safe, then he needs to make sure that his body isn't destroyed until he can recover it. Retreating rather than letting his body get destroyed again when his phylactery is or will immediately wind up in the hands of his enemies would be the overwhelmingly logical thing to do.

While true, once his phylactery is actually in danger in the online comic, he treats it with utmost seriousness. And, again, Xykon isn't the retreating type. He is the "crush all resistance" type. When Soon revealed he knew what the phylactery was? Xykon didn't try to escape, he tried to get Redcloak to escape (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0462.html). When he loses it in a random sewer? He is absolutely (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0661.html) enraged (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0662.html), arguably angrier than we've ever seen him be. Despite how cavalier he acts in SoD, where he knows he has Redcloak in his pocket, he has shown that he considers his phylactery of absolutely utmost importance. If hes about to be destroyed and he knows his enemies have rhe phylactery? No way eouldyhe cut and run. He does that and his precious phylactery is gone. It doesn't matter that he'd be fine. He wouldn't let that happen. He'd go all out to get it back.

[Mic_128]

What makes that fortress any more of a lifeboat than literally anywhere else on any other outer plane?

It's something loaded with defences, for one. Secondly, it's been name dropped so that the protagonists know of it, and was even hinted at them discovering it in the future. Also, if the gate is broken with Team Evil still alive, they could Gate their way there (perhaps with a hostage?) giving V a clue about how to get there - if not simply bullrushing the gate and diving in while it's still open

[BloodSquirrel]

While true, once his phylactery is actually in danger in the online comic, he treats it with utmost seriousness. And, again, Xykon isn't the retreating type. He is the "crush all resistance" type. When Soon revealed he knew what the phylactery was? Xykon didn't try to escape, he tried to get Redcloak to escape (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0462.html). When he loses it in a random sewer? He is absolutely (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0661.html) enraged (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0662.html), arguably angrier than we've ever seen him be. Despite how cavalier he acts in SoD, where he knows he has Redcloak in his pocket, he has shown that he considers his phylactery of absolutely utmost importance. If hes about to be destroyed and he knows his enemies have rhe phylactery? No way eouldyhe cut and run. He does that and his precious phylactery is gone. It doesn't matter that he'd be fine. He wouldn't let that happen. He'd go all out to get it back.

Xykon has retreated twice now after suffering a defeat; once at Dorukan's gate, and once at Soon's gate.

Xykon does, in fact, take the safety of his phylactery very seriously. That's because he takes preventing his final destruction very seriously. He won't be happy about his phylactery winding up in the Order's hands, but he'll be even less happy with his phylactery winding up in the Order's hands with his soul inside of it.

[brian 333]

Assume, for the moment, that Xykon is nearly destroyed, and knows thay Redcloak has his phylactery, and still has a high enough level spell slot to teleport, and is able to cast it through Roy's Spellsplinter ability. A lot of assumptions there, but let's go with it. This highly specific scenario happens, and Xykon nopes out to his fortress.

Again, i ask, how does anyone else find it? It's in a random spot on an infinite plane, and only Xykon knows where it is. Even if he retreats to a fortress to hide (which really doesn't seem like Xykon's style, he's never done that before that i can recall), and even if the finale is dungeon of traps to get through to find Xykon (which IMO would be a painfully dull idea and basically a rehash of the Dungeon of Dorukan), how in the Nine Hells are Roy and Co. supposed to find the damn thing?

Durkon knows that it exists.

Want to know a weird fact about Astral Travel? It is as easy as wanting to be there. Knowing it is there and wanting to get to it is sufficient directions. You don't even have to take that left turn at Albuquerque.


Except that retreating to his astral fortress does him no good in that case. It's his phylactery being destroyed that is the risk to his unlife, not his physical body. So moving his physical body out of harms way while leaving the phylactery right there, in Redcloak's hands, and at risk of being taken/destroyed by the Order would make no sense. Not "leading his enemies to his pylactery" is meanginless if he's leaving it right there, with his enemies.

I suppose out of pure completenesses sake, there is one and only one condition in which Xykon would retreat to his astral fortress. If, at some point along the way he discovers that Redcloak has the phylactery *and* he believes that they are in imminent danger of being defeated, he might very well grab the phylactery from Redcloak and retreat to the fortress with it. But he would only ever go there if he had his phylactery with him. And the reason would not be for him to go there, but to get his phylactery there so it will be safe. And again, he would only do that if he felt that he was in danger of being destroyed. Let's not forget that the guy has been running around for many years now, engaging in all sorts of conflicts with tons of different people, all with his phylactery right there around Redcloak's neck. So we somewhat have to assume he's got a pretty healthy dose of "I can handle pretty much anyone who comes my way" eqo thing going, so "retreat" would be unlikely to be his first go-to option here.

As long as he believes the phylactery is safe in the fortress he has zero reason to go there until after their plan/ritual is complete. And if he discovers it isn't, he'll still likely try to fight his way through his enemies instead of just running away. That's just his nature.



Again though, if he believes his phylactery is safe in his astral fortress, he has no reason to do that. He would be much more likely to just hang around and kill everyone for wasting his time all these years. Especially Redcloak. I just don't see Xykon as the type to go "Huh. I guess our plan wouldn't have worked anyway. Guess I'll just go home now instead of killing these annoying people standing around right in front of me".

I'm very certain that whatever conflict is going to occur between the Order and Xykon will occur in the Final Dungeon and/or near the Final Gate (capitalized for increased drama of course!). Because that's the key focus point of the conflict. It would be an incredible record scraching break of pacing to have the Final Battle in the Final Dungeon for the Final Gate end with "Oh. I guess now that we've talked Redcloak out of implementing the ritual, we'll have to track down Xykon on the Astral plane and destroy him there". Uh... No. Xykon will be destroyed right there. The entire setup is so that he thinks he'll survive that destruction, but will actually not because in the same location that they destroy him, they also have his phylactery, so they destroy that as well, thus ending his threat.

And what if his phylactery is destroyed and his allies have betrayed him?

Reconsider his position assuming that he knows his phylactery is in the hands of someone who wants to destroy him, of has already been destroyed.


Well, while we're talking about long shots that bring the astral fortress into play....

What if it isn't Xykon who retreats to the fortress, but Redcloak? He cast the spell to get there (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0833.html); and he was there while Xykon unloaded his scrolls and he unloaded his own spells, so he knows where (most of?) the traps are. We've already seen that scrying can locate someone (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1108.html). And sealing the rifts needs a spell slot from Redcloak, so they'll need to track him down if he leaves and can't be convinced over communication spells. (Please, appease if he flees before he agrees?)

Redcloak retreating there had not occurred to me. Gracias, Senor Banana.


That is explicitly not how it works, as direction demonstrated in when Redcloak threatened to destroy Xykon's phylactery and he responded by saying that his phylactery being destroyed wouldn't do anything unless his body was destroyed first.

If his phylactery is not safe, then he needs to make sure that his body isn't destroyed until he can recover it. Retreating rather than letting his body get destroyed again when his phylactery is or will immediately wind up in the hands of his enemies would be the overwhelmingly logical thing to do.

That's my assumption.


Xykon has retreated twice now after suffering a defeat; once at Dorukan's gate, and once at Soon's gate.

Xykon does, in fact, take the safety of his phylactery very seriously. That's because he takes preventing his final destruction very seriously. He won't be happy about his phylactery winding up in the Order's hands, but he'll be even less happy with his phylactery winding up in the Order's hands with his soul inside of it.

And this is why I made the above assumption. Xykon's goal is to avoid the Great Fire Below. Once he realizes his real phylactery is not safe he will either render it safe immediately or run away to make a new one and make it safe.

I don't have Libre Mortis, but by 3.5 rules a lich can make as many phylacteries as he can afford. Only the last one counts. It renders all previous ones useless.

Just knowing Redcloak deceived him would be reason enough to make a new one.

And just for fun, consider that Xykon is neither stupid nor trusting. Perhaps he was creating a new phylactery while away on the Astral, and the one Redcloak now carries is not the real one any more.

[Aa602213x1023]

I've heard AI art actually messes up the details on a lot of things, but it's just hands that we as humans notice most because we're very familiar with them.

You're saying we know our hands . . . like the backs of our hands?

[Crusher]

Xykon has retreated twice now after suffering a defeat; once at Dorukan's gate, and once at Soon's gate.

Eh. I dunno that Dorukan's counted as a retreat, more Redcloak wheeled Xykon's phylactery out in a cart. The point being, in the moment I think it was more a Redcloak decision than a Xykon decision.

[nleseul]

I've heard AI art actually messes up the details on a lot of things, but it's just hands that we as humans notice most because we're very familiar with them.

As far as I understand it, hands specifically are an architecturally difficult case for current image synthesizers. Readable text is another particularly difficult one.

Neural networks that do image synthesis right now are generally built around convolution layers. Roughly, that means that they only really process local clusters of pixels, and don't necessarily make any large-scale decisions about the overall structure of the image. With text, they have some of the small-scale patterns that tend to appear in the word "pizza" memorized, but don't commit to the idea that the "P" goes on the left side of the image and the "A" goes on the right side. So they just scatter around some of those small-scale patterns and stitch them together in ways that don't really make sense.

With hands, similarly, they just generate some locally-plausible patterns that tend to occur somewhere in hand images, and connect them together in awkward ways. Plus, there's a lot of hidden information about how objects occlude each other in 3D space that goes into evaluating the plausibility of a hand pose, and models that operate on 2D matrices don't have access to that information.

[Crimsonmantle]

Toormuck is from Minnesota? Figures.

(Sorry if it's been pointed out before, haven't read the entire thread.)

[Clistenes]

A cute girlie humanoid intelligent Mimic called "Mimi"? Be careful, Rich, you are crossing into monstergirl territory! Next comes the Harpy, the Lamia, the Drider and the female Centaur!

[BloodSquirrel]

Eh. I dunno that Dorukan's counted as a retreat, more Redcloak wheeled Xykon's phylactery out in a cart. The point being, in the moment I think it was more a Redcloak decision than a Xykon decision.

Xykon is quite clearly calling the shots here (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0117.html).

[Peelee]

Xykon has retreated twice now after suffering a defeat; once at Dorukan's gate, and once at Soon's gate.
In neither case does Xykon himself retreat. In the first case, his body is already destroyed. In the second, he orders Redcloak to retreat, because Redcloak has his phylactery. I even linked that comic in the post you quoted.

He doesn't give two whits about his body being destroyed. He cares a great deal about his phylactery. He wouldn't just book it to let enemies destroy it.

It's something loaded with defences, for one. Secondly, it's been name dropped so that the protagonists know of it, and was even hinted at them discovering it in the future. Also, if the gate is broken with Team Evil still alive, they could Gate their way there (perhaps with a hostage?) giving V a clue about how to get there - if not simply bullrushing the gate and diving in while it's still open
Whatever defenses are on it ain't peanuts to the Snarl. Its not a "lifeboat" for the Snarl any more than any random spot on the Astral Plane is. Or Celestia, or Arborea, or the Beastlands, or anywhere else they can go. And "Durkon knows about it"? So what? He also knows about planes in general. And I could just as easily say the title of that strip hints at that they will never discover it.

I say again: what makes that fortress any more of a lifeboat than literally anywhere else on any other outer plane?

[KorvinStarmast]

While I agree, many others believe the Final Dungeon is where Xykon is defeated forever.

I happen to feel these posters mistakenly believe the quest is to 'Save The World', and that once that is done the game is over. But the quest is, and has always been to destroy Xylon and fulfill Eugene's blood oath. I don't think so. As with Tolkien' magnum opus, the tale in OotS has grown in telling.
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0672.html
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0900.html
and a bit more importantly
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0945.html

The stakes have been raised substantially since DCF's mission statement
https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0013.html


Finally, capitalizing Final Dungeon only cements, in my mind, the idea that it is not, in fact, the final dungeon at all. Yes. It's a bit of misdirection.

The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate was a class act that almost didn't make it past the censors in 1969. I feel it would make it as a concept today, but the subjects it pointed out would be cancelled faster than a Saturday morning soap opera.
It worked because it was funny and alluded to something else: back then, giving someone the finger was very much bad manners.

You just described where 83% of dungeons come from. In OD&D, yes. The Dying Earth/Remnants of an Early Age/Lovecraft-Weird Tales/Archeology with actual Magic theme lent itself to that set up.

If the god's memorials to each lost world survive in the Astral Plane, then Xykon's fortress survives, too. Good point.
Which means it's at least possible that the denouement of OotS will be Elan and Haley reaching Xykon's fortress and becoming the Adam and Eve of a new race of humans as the Snarl destroys everything else.
And then the human race fails within two generations due to genetic predisposition towards stupidity unless Haley's Intelligence is passed along to their offspring. It's a bit risky ... but maybe XX will overcome.

he might flee to his fortress - rendering Redcloak's Plan infeasible, which means he might listen to Durkon. Hmm, interesting synthesis there, but I think that the showdown (third time's a charm) with Xykon is a mortal lock. It is a part of the resolution of all of the plot threads.

Assume, for the moment, that Xykon is nearly destroyed, and knows thay Redcloak has his phylactery, and still has a high enough level spell slot to teleport, and is able to cast it through Roy's Spellsplinter ability. A lot of assumptions there, but let's go with it. This highly specific scenario happens, and Xykon nopes out to his fortress.

Again, i ask, how does anyone else find it? It's in a random spot on an infinite plane, and only Xykon knows where it is. Even if he retreats to a fortress to hide (which really doesn't seem like Xykon's style, he's never done that before that i can recall), and even if the finale is dungeon of traps to get through to find Xykon (which IMO would be a painfully dull idea and basically a rehash of the Dungeon of Dorukan), how in the Nine Hells are Roy and Co. supposed to find the damn thing?

And they spend lots of money and spells trying to understand the purpose of the "holy symbol" that was kept in the most highly protected place in the fortress -- never knowing that Xykon thought it was his phylactery. Hehe, sly DM approach is noted. :smallsmile:

I think the main purpose for the Astral Fortress, at least right now, is that it's a place that Xykon thinks is utterly impregnable where his Phylactery is unquestioningly safe. Thus, he's almost encouraged to be even more reckless than he normally would be. That's kind of where I stand on that tidbit form the meeting with Thor and Xykon's little journey to the Astral from Azure City.

[brian 333]

In neither case does Xykon himself retreat. In the first case, his body is already destroyed. In the second, he orders Redcloak to retreat, because Redcloak has his phylactery. I even linked that comic in the post you quoted.

He doesn't give two whits about his body being destroyed. He cares a great deal about his phylactery. He wouldn't just book it to let enemies destroy it.

Whatever defenses are on it ain't peanuts to the Snarl. Its not a "lifeboat" for the Snarl any more than any random spot on the Astral Plane is. Or Celestia, or Arborea, or the Beastlands, or anywhere else they can go. And "Durkon knows about it"? So what? He also knows about planes in general. And I could just as easily say the title of that strip hints at that they will never discover it.

I say again: what makes that fortress any more of a lifeboat than literally anywhere else on any other outer plane?

In the past he has not cared about his body being destroyed because he has had a phylactery to create a new body. If his phylactery has been destroyed he will demonstrate a great deal more concern about his HP score.

The moment Thor said it probably wouldn't come up I knew it would. The Astral Fortress is the one place Xykon would safe, and it would give him every advantage in the final showdown. It is the exact place heroic fantasy would go for the ultimate confrontation: where the hero is weakest and the villain strongest.

And it is the one place that TDO would not send The Snarl. He would not care enough about Xykon to waste his one 'nuke' on him. It would be a perfect lifeboat because the gods wouldn't care and The Snarl would never be directed to go there. The only entities who would care and have the means to get there would be Roy & Co.

[KorvinStarmast]

It is the exact place heroic fantasy would go for the ultimate confrontation: where the hero is weakest and the villain strongest. Frodo didn't head to Barad Dur, though. :smallwink:

And it is the one place that TDO would not send The Snarl. He would not care enough about Xykon to waste his one 'nuke' on him. It would be a perfect lifeboat because the gods wouldn't care and The Snarl would never be directed to go there. The only entities who would care and have the means to get there would be Roy & Co. I like how you put this together, with the caveat being Peelee's well couched concern on how Roy and Haley, et al, get there. Does Durkon ask Thor for a steer to the location?

[Precure]

Now prove you can do FEET.

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1278.html

[brian 333]

Frodo didn't head to Barad Dur, though. :smallwink:
I like how you put this together, with the caveat being Peelee's well couched concern on how Roy and Haley, et al, get there. Does Durkon ask Thor for a steer to the location?

No, he went to Mordor, Sauron's stronghold. Specifically, to Mt.Orodruin, where the One Ring was forged. Frodo's quest was to destroy the ring, not destroy Sauron. The Ring, not Sauron, was his nemesis. At every step The Ring made his journey more difficult until, at the end, Frodo was defeated by it, only to have Gollum accidentally fulfill his quest for him.

The 'right direction' is not relevant on the Astral Plane, where distance and direction are meaningless. Desire to be at a place and you will be there. Astral Travel is weird that way. One can stand perfectly still and the distance to the object of his destination can shrink by simply wanting to be there.

[Peelee]

It worked because it was funny and alluded to something else: back then, giving someone the finger was very much bad manners.
It is today, too. It's just more commonm

In the past he has not cared about his body being destroyed because he has had a phylactery to create a new body. If his phylactery has been destroyed he will demonstrate a great deal more concern about his HP score.
Ok, so you're changing the scenario now to "Redcloak destroys the phylactery before destroying Xykon"? Sorry, its hard to keep up with the constantly shifting multitude of hypotheticals that require Xykon to be put into this position.

And, of course, ignoring that "The Order must fight through the Dungeon of Dorukan's Xykon in order to get to the end tk fight the evil lich Xykon" has already been done before. And also, why wouldn't Xykon simply teleport out of that dungeon and to another random place on the Astral plane, or another plane, and just keep 'porting out whenever he gets in danger?


The 'right direction' is not relevant on the Astral Plane, where distance and direction are meaningless. Desire to be at a place and you will be there. Astral Travel is weird that way. One can stand perfectly still and the distance to the object of his destination can shrink by simply wanting to be there.

I'm gonna need a citation here.

[brian 333]

It is today, too. It's just more commonm

Ok, so you're changing the scenario now to "Redcloak destroys the phylactery before destroying Xykon"? Sorry, its hard to keep up with the constantly shifting multitude of hypotheticals that require Xykon to be put into this position.

It was my original position. Not sure how you missed it, but I always considered that Xykon would retreat only after he knew he had been betrayed and was on the verge of being defeated.


And, of course, ignoring that "The Order must fight through the Dungeon of Dorukan's Xykon in order to get to the end tk fight the evil lich Xykon" has already been done before. And also, why wouldn't Xykon simply teleport out of that dungeon and to another random place on the Astral plane, or another plane, and just keep 'porting out whenever he gets in danger?

Spells per day limits.

Consider the original D&D Astral Travel rules which state that beings on the Astral Plane can travel freely to their desired destination, and add in OotS canon about the Astral Plane being a plane of ideas. Travel on the Astral Plane is not tiring or taxing in any way. All you need to do is desire to be at your chosen destination. If you imagine it as far away and requiring lots of walking, that's what it will be. If you imagine it as just past that fluffy cloud, there it is.

[Laurentio III]

My humble opinion: both the Astral fortress and the fake phylactery won't have any weight in the story. I think they have been shown only to let readers know the lack of trust and collaboration in Team Evil. Mind, the two back-plotting are in the same chapter of Redcloak killing Tsukiko while she tries tò narco him.
Bonus, the astral fortress served the purpose of adding and hint about MitD.

[Tzardok]

I'm gonna need a citation here.

A Guide to the Astral Plane, pg. 10 ff. (AD&D 2e Planescape sourcebook).
I don't remember wether this trait is included in the 3.x version of the plane

[Peelee]

It was my original position. Not sure how you missed it, but I always considered that Xykon would retreat only after he knew he had been betrayed and was on the verge of being defeated.
So that's the thing, you said "knew he had been betrayed". If he finds out Redcloak has the phylactery? He knows he has been betrayed. Doesn't need to be destroyed for that to happen.

Spells per day limits.
So Xykon will be so paranoid that he will always teleport out if in danger, but not paranoid enough to always make sure to have a teleport spell prepared. That is a very specific level of paranoid.


Consider the original D&D Astral Travel rules which state that beings on the Astral Plane can travel freely to their desired destination.
Yes, that is what i would like a citation on.


A Guide to the Astral Plane, pg. 10 ff. (AD&D 2e Planescape sourcebook).
I don't remember wether this trait is included in the 3.x version of the plane

Don't have it, if you don't mind can you quote the passage?

[Quizatzhaderac]

Now, if I ask my (extremely talented, by the way) younger brother to draw a castle with wings made out of skeletal hands, am I doing any art?

Would you say in this situation no art is produced? Or that art can be produced without anyone "doing art"? Just like the AI situation one person has an intention, and another agent has drawing technique but no intention.

If you're definition of "doing art" is intention through one's own drawing technique, then neither is art. But then many group endeavors produce art without any artists.

As I see it, creating a verbal image is art (in the sense of a conscious production, not specifically in any one medium). You and your brother create art (in the double definition sense). Your brother might qualify as an artistdouble by himself, depending on how he does it; specifically if there's intention in the details.

[Ionathus]

It'll be doubly hilarious when Xykon is long forgotten and rando adventurers are raiding his Astral Tomb of Horrors with no clue as to where it came from or why.

200 years in the future
Epic-level Wizard: Okay gang, I've finally completed my study of the ancient artifact that rested in the heart of the Astral Crypt.
Epic-level Paladin: The one hidden behind a billion traps and spells and whatever?
Epic-level Rogue: Oh man, haha I hated that place, it was such a pain in the ass!
Epic-level Wizard: The very same.
Epic-level Paladin: Finally! We've been waiting for a reward from that quest for ages.
Epic-level Rogue: What does the necklace do? Shoot Meteor Swarms? Raise the dead? Command the elements? Challenge the gods themselves?
Epic-level Wizard: I have finally concluded that this ancient artifact is...a very, very, very good nonmagical replica of a lich's phylactery.
Epic-level Paladin: ...
Epic-level Rogue: ...
Epic-level Wizard: The craftsmanship on it is exquisite. It should retail for well over 200gp. Maybe even 250.

[Wildstag]

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1278.html

Yeah, but those are three-toed things. Not like the feet the mimics would make.

[danielxcutter]

I found the strip amusing.

I cackled when I opened the thread and realized it was an AI joke.

[Fyraltari]

200 years in the future
Epic-level Wizard: Okay gang, I've finally completed my study of the ancient artifact that rested in the heart of the Astral Crypt.
Epic-level Paladin: The one hidden behind a billion traps and spells and whatever?
Epic-level Rogue: Oh man, haha I hated that place, it was such a pain in the ass!
Epic-level Wizard: The very same.
Epic-level Paladin: Finally! We've been waiting for a reward from that quest for ages.
Epic-level Rogue: What does the necklace do? Shoot Meteor Swarms? Raise the dead? Command the elements? Challenge the gods themselves?
Epic-level Wizard: I have finally concluded that this ancient artifact is...a very, very, very good nonmagical replica of a lich's phylactery.
Epic-level Paladin: ...
Epic-level Rogue: ...
Epic-level Wizard: The craftsmanship on it is exquisite. It should retail for well over 200gp. Maybe even 250.

Epic-level Wizard: It appears to be a common Holy Symbol of the clergy of the Dark One. Not one particularly fancy or anything. The kind an acolyte would get the day they receive their White Cloak.
Epic-level Paladin: So this is...
Epic-level Wizard: ... completely useless to anyone who isn't a Cleric of the Dark One, yes. And those who are probably already have their own.
Epic-level Rogue: You're telling me this is a masterly crafted replica of a random piece of junk gear?
Epic-level Wizard: Of a very specific piece of junk gear. The divination tells me that most of effort went into simulating the wear and tear.
Epic-level Rogue: Who the hell came up with this adventure!?

[Tzardok]

Don't have it, if you don't mind can you quote the passage?

On page 10 the chapter on Astral Movement starts; I'll try to parse it down to the parts relevant to the conversation:



Movement through the Astral Plane differs from what most folks are used to. There’s no walking, running, flying, or swimming here (at least, not for the most part — see below). Moving is not a physical thing. It's all done with the mind. If a body just thinks where she wants to go, she's on her way. The smarter she is, the faster she moves.



Long-Distance Movement
All of the above types of movement and maneuvers concern small areas, such as in a combat or around (and in) a structure. Over long distances, astral movement becomes more abstract. Travel time is based not on distance (for really, there is no distance on the Astral). Instead, it is based — like everything - on the mind, and how well a body knows the destination. It takes the following travel times to move from one point on the Astral to another:

6 + 1d6 hours to travel to a known color pool
6 x 1d4 hours to travel to an unknown color pool
10 x 1d4 hours to travel to any location visited before
20 x 1d6 hours to travel to any location described to the traveler in detail
50 x 1d10 hours to travel to any location that’s never been described or visited before


As a body can see from the above travel times, it is almost always easier to find a way out of the Astral (a color pool) than to find something on the Astral. Graybeards use this to support the idea that beings were never supposed to be there in the first place.


Also, I found the relevant passage in the 3.0 Manual of the Planes:



Distances are deceptive on the Astral Plane, and maps are aalmost completely useless in the hazy expanse. The time it takes an individual or a group of individuals to reach a particular part of the Astral Plane depends on how familiar the travelers are with that area.


Familiarity
Travel Time


Very familiar
2d6 hours


Studied carefully
1d4 x 6 hours


Seen casually
1d4 x 10 hours


Viewed once
1d6 x 20 hours


Description only
1d10 x 50 hours

[KorvinStarmast]

A Guide to the Astral Plane, pg. 10 ff. (AD&D 2e Planescape sourcebook).
I don't remember wether this trait is included in the 3.x version of the plane Thank you. Thor flies from place to place though ...


200 years in the future
{snip}
Epic-level Wizard: The craftsmanship on it is exquisite. It should retail for well over 200gp. Maybe even 250. Which for an edition based on WBL, is a Tomb of Horrors level of pain. Gary G. would approve. :smallcool:

[SlashDash]

Noted that we never got to see what Roy wanted to talk to Durkon about in the previous comics.

Obviously we'll get back to it at some point. There are two possibilities here:

1) Roy wanted to talk to Durkon about his mission with Redcloak. Either an idea or to verify that Durkon isn't going to sabotage them again.

2) Roy had another idea that he wanted to try. Possibly similar to Elan talking to Durkon in the desert as a "secret plan" (calling Julio).

Though if he wanted to contact someone - who could that be? I assume someone should inform Hinjo that Lien and O-Chul are safe at the very least.

[BloodSquirrel]

In neither case does Xykon himself retreat. In the first case, his body is already destroyed. In the second, he orders Redcloak to retreat, because Redcloak has his phylactery. I even linked that comic in the post you quoted.

He doesn't give two whits about his body being destroyed. He cares a great deal about his phylactery. He wouldn't just book it to let enemies destroy it.


I've already linked to the comic showing that Xykon was calling the shots at Dorukan's gate. He is the one who explains to the MitD why they're retreating.

At Soon's gate, Xykon grabs Redcloak and flies off as soon as Soon is distracted.

This entire line of argument is silly. Xykon has repeatedly shown that he is more cunning than he lets on once the situation gets serious, and he's never been shown to just suicide himself into a bunch of enemies when low on HP. He's often cavalier because he can afford to be. When he senses a serious threat, he protects himself, often showing cleverness and discretion.

It would totally be in character for Xykon to retreat if he was in a fight he couldn't win and he knew he couldn't rely on his phylactery.

Hell, when Redcloak suggests he destroys himself as a means of finding his phylactery, he refuses. He directly shows that he is more cautious when he doesn't know that his phylactery is secure.

[Peelee]

On page 10 the chapter on Astral Movement starts; I'll try to parse it down to the parts relevant to the conversation:





Also, I found the relevant passage in the 3.0 Manual of the Planes:

Ok, perfect. That's what I thought it said. Because that does not say " beings on the Astral Plane can travel freely to their desired destination" like brian 333's been claiming.

On the Astral plane, movement isn't a physical thing, as in you don't move with your limbs, but you still move. You just choose the direction you want to move in and you move in that direction. It even specifies that smarter minds move faster.

[H_H_F_F]

Would you say in this situation no art is produced? Or that art can be produced without anyone "doing art"? Just like the AI situation one person has an intention, and another agent has drawing technique but no intention.

No, my position is that my brother is producing art, and that he brings much more to the table than "technique", and that my suggestion/request does not change the fact that there's intention in what he's doing. My position is that my brother produced an art piece, and I didn't. I just asked for it / financed it/ whatever. Julius II wasn't an artist, and didn't make any art. Michelangelo did.

My brother is a full human, and brings much more to the table than "drawing technique", which is itself not in any way equitable to what the AI brings forward. They have nothing in common, and the fact that a similar visual effect is produced doesn't change that.


If your definition of "doing art" is intention through one's own drawing technique, then neither is art. But then many group endeavors produce art without any artists.

It isn't, and I don't intend to try to provide a quick and easy definition of art that'll be sufficient for this discussion. I am saying that art is an activity that always done by a conscious mind. If we're in agreement that that is not what an AI is, and we're not trying to say that the Sistine Chapel ceiling is "an art-piece by Michelangelo, the Underwear Painter, and Julius II", then there's no art produced by these images.

And again, I obviously don't deny that pope Julius had a role to play in the ceiling painting coming into being - but I honestly believe that unless you already had a horse in this race, you wouldn't dream of calling him "one of the artists who made the paintings".


As I see it, creating a verbal image is art (in the sense of a conscious production, not specifically in any one medium). You and your brother create art (in the double definition sense). Your brother might qualify as an artistdouble by himself, depending on how he does it; specifically if there's intention in the details.

There is no "if", in my view, about intention by a human painter. Again, it's just not even remotely the same process. There is no doer in AI generated imagery. The ONLY part that can be compared is me in both scenarios. My brother and the AI aren't, and can never, be discussed as equivalent. That's my point about AI "art" not being art: if I'm the only point of comparison, and I reject the notion that by saying "hey, take a picture of something" to a rando on the street I was doing art, then there is no art to be found in the ideal form of AI generated imagery.

[Kish]

If the Order goes to the Astral Plane without being carried they're going to have problems.

"There's Xykon! We're being attacked! Ack, Vaarsuvius is a mile ahead of Elan!"

[Tzardok]

Ok, perfect. That's what I thought it said. Because that does not say " beings on the Astral Plane can travel freely to their desired destination" like brian 333's been claiming.

On the Astral plane, movement isn't a physical thing, as in you don't move with your limbs, but you still move. You just choose the direction you want to move in and you move in that direction. It even specifies that smarter minds move faster.

Huh. I must have misread brian's posts. I thought he was just claiming that moving to a place required wanting to go there without needing all this pesky "direction".


Thank you. Thor flies from place to place though ...


Possibility a: That's just how movement looks for him. Nothing keeps you from lying in the Supermann pose when travelling the Astral.
Possibility b: The Astral in OOTS follows the 3.5 rules, which threw out all of that movement stuff and replaced it Subjective Gravity (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/planes.htm#subjectiveDirectionalGravity).

[Peelee]

On page 10 the chapter on Astral Movement starts; I'll try to parse it down to the parts relevant to the conversation:





Also, I found the relevant passage in the 3.0 Manual of the Planes:

Ok, perfect. That's what I thought it said. Because that does not say " beings on the Astral Plane can travel freely to their desired destination" like brian 333's been claiming.

On the Astral plane, movement isn't a physical thing, as in you don't move with your limbs, but you still move. You just choose the direction you want to move in and you move in that direction. It even specifies that smarter minds move faster. To even get there, as it's only heem described to Durkon, it takes an absolutely minimum of 50 hours, and an average of 275 hours.

Assuming liches can heal by resting, an 8 hour rest restores 2 hit points per level, or probably around 50-ish hit points. Let's say hes level 25 to make the math easy. He restores 50 HP per 24 hours on an average full HP pool of 175. Hes at over half strength after 48 hours. Four days is 96 hours, and hes at 100% strength. Again, average time to reach his fortress for the Ordee is 275 hours. They're not even halfway to fortress when he can just up and leave because hes not hurt at all anymore. Even if they come in at the absolute minimum time, and make it through the entire dungeon almost immediately, then he's at half strength, and by brian's own logic would nope outta dodge to some other place anyway, and the fortress was nothing more than a diversion that could have never even happened for all that it matters.

Assuming that liches cannot heal by resting (as per SRD they can only heal by negative energy), then one of two cases exists: there is some source of negative energy healing for him in the fortress, at which point he heals faster and still leaves before the Order can get there, or he cannot heal in the fortress, and thus going there to recuperate is pointless and he never goes back anyway.

All roads lead to Rome away from the fortress here.


Huh. I must have misread brian's posts. I thought he was just claiming that moving to a place required wanting to go there without needing all this pesky "direction".



Possibility a: That's just how movement looks for him. Nothing keeps you from lying in the Supermann pose when travelling the Astral.
Possibility b: The Astral in OOTS follows the 3.5 rules, which threw out all of that movement stuff and replaced it Subjective Gravity (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/planes.htm#subjectiveDirectionalGravity).

Apparently i posted that halfway through writing it? I knew i nessed up on my phone somehow but i didnt realize it was to that extent. Oops.

Anyway, subjective gravity is worse, because again, they're on an infinite plane with the only knowledge of the fortress being "it exists, apparently" and 300ft per round movement speed with no knowledge of how far away it is or even what direction its in.

[Tzardok]

Ok
Assuming liches can heal by resting, an 8 hour rest restores 2 hit points per level, or probably around 50-ish hit points. Let's say hes level 25 to make the math easy. He restores 50 HP per 24 hours on an average full HP pool of 175. Hes at over half strength after 48 hours. Four days is 96 hours, and hes at 100% strength. Again, average time to reach his fortress for the Ordee is 275 hours. They're not even halfway to fortress when he can just up and leave because hes not hurt at all anymore. Even if they come in at the absolute minimum time, and make it through the entire dungeon almost immediately, then he's at half strength, and by brian's own logic would nope outta dodge to some other place anyway, and the fortress was nothing more than a diversion that could have never even happened for all that it matters.

Assuming that liches cannot heal by resting (as per SRD they can only heal by negative energy), then one of two cases exists: there is some source of negative energy healing for him in the fortress, at which point he heals faster and still leaves before the Order can get there, or he cannot heal in the fortress, and thus going there to recuperate is pointless and he never goes back anyway.


*snerk* I'm being a quotation machine today, am I? Intelligent undead have "natural healing" according to Libris Mortis, pg. 10.



Necromantic Healing: With 8 or more consecutive hours of inactivity in any 24-hour period, an undead with an Intelligence score recovers 1 hit point per Hit Die. If such an undead is completely inactive for a full 24-hour period, it recovers 2 hit points per Hit Die.

[Peelee]

*snerk* I'm being a quotation machine today, am I? Intelligent undead have "natural healing" according to Libris Mortis, pg. 10.

Thanks! So, that's four days to full strength. Either time enough to get to full strength and leave the fortress, making it useless as a final location, or somehow the Order gets there early and gets past all the defenses before hes healed up and he leaves the fortress for safety to finish healing, making it useless as a final location.

The fortress is useless as a final location in every scenario. Except, maybe, "the Snarl somehow can now reach into all planes and also the fortress has some sort of anti-Snarl protections and also everyone got there in time and also they still need to solve this whole Snarl issue which is now a significantly larger problem than before".

[bunsen_h]

For the former, you need both the sword and the bloodline IIRC. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0534.html)

For the latter - you're right about the illusion potentially breaking that, but then, Bloodfeast shouldn't have been able to see anything once the illusion dropped. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1276.html) Unless, again, animals are an exception of some kind.

I just remembered that there was a period when Eugene was wanting to visit Roy, but couldn't because the sword was broken. It's not very plausible that Eugene was lying about that point. So it does seem that it's necessary for the sword to be intact for Eugene to manifest. And we know that Eugene would prefer to be relying on Julia than on Roy, but doesn't, which does support the assertion that he can only appear before Roy. I don't think we've ever seen Eugene appearing when Roy wasn't alone, apart from just now, so we don't have confirmation that Eugene (when he does manifest) is visible only to Roy.


I suppose out of pure completenesses sake, there is one and only one condition in which Xykon would retreat to his astral fortress. If, at some point along the way he discovers that Redcloak has the phylactery *and* he believes that they are in imminent danger of being defeated, he might very well grab the phylactery from Redcloak and retreat to the fortress with it. But he would only ever go there if he had his phylactery with him. And the reason would not be for him to go there, but to get his phylactery there so it will be safe. And again, he would only do that if he felt that he was in danger of being destroyed. Let's not forget that the guy has been running around for many years now, engaging in all sorts of conflicts with tons of different people, all with his phylactery right there around Redcloak's neck. So we somewhat have to assume he's got a pretty healthy dose of "I can handle pretty much anyone who comes my way" eqo thing going, so "retreat" would be unlikely to be his first go-to option here.

Xykon knows that the phylactery is his main point of weakness, the thing that makes harm to his current body of limited consequence. He believes that his phylactery is in his fortress. If a series of alarms go off in his fortress, leading him to think that there's someone going through the place, I think that he'll drop whatever he's doing to check out what's going on. Regardless of what he might be doing at the time: in the middle of a fight, part way through the Gate ritual, whatever, he's out of there. The fortress can be a crucial distraction. Sauron's forces were on the verge of wiping out Aragorn's party, when Frodo put on the Ring on the verge of the Cracks of Doom. "[...] Throughout his realm a tremor ran, his slaves quailed, and his armies halted, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired."

[KorvinStarmast]

Xykon knows that the phylactery is his main point of weakness, the thing that makes harm to his current body of limited consequence. He believes that his phylactery is in his fortress. If a series of alarms go off in his fortress, leading him to think that there's someone going through the place, I think that he'll drop whatever he's doing to check out what's going on. Regardless of what he might be doing at the time: in the middle of a fight, part way through the Gate ritual, whatever, he's out of there. The fortress can be a crucial distraction. Sauron's forces were on the verge of wiping out Aragorn's party, when Frodo put on the Ring on the verge of the Cracks of Doom. "[...] Throughout his realm a tremor ran, his slaves quailed, and his armies halted, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired." The Ring was an amplification of the innate power Sauron had to compel and dominate others, in large groups or in small. I am not seeing the parallel to Xykon's phylactery (in a mechanical sense).

[Peelee]

The Ring was an amplification of the innate power Sauron had to compel and dominate others, in large groups or in small. I am not seeing the parallel to Xykon's phylactery (in a mechanical sense).

That's because its narrative, not mechanical. The parallel isn't what the macguffin does, its how the antagonist feels about it. It's really the best argument for seeing the fortress again that I've encountered.

[Psyren]

200 years in the future
Epic-level Wizard: Okay gang, I've finally completed my study of the ancient artifact that rested in the heart of the Astral Crypt.
Epic-level Paladin: The one hidden behind a billion traps and spells and whatever?
Epic-level Rogue: Oh man, haha I hated that place, it was such a pain in the ass!
Epic-level Wizard: The very same.
Epic-level Paladin: Finally! We've been waiting for a reward from that quest for ages.
Epic-level Rogue: What does the necklace do? Shoot Meteor Swarms? Raise the dead? Command the elements? Challenge the gods themselves?
Epic-level Wizard: I have finally concluded that this ancient artifact is...a very, very, very good nonmagical replica of a lich's phylactery.
Epic-level Paladin: ...
Epic-level Rogue: ...
Epic-level Wizard: The craftsmanship on it is exquisite. It should retail for well over 200gp. Maybe even 250.

They should have brought a cleric of Loki :smallbiggrin:

[BloodSquirrel]

Thanks! So, that's four days to full strength. Either time enough to get to full strength and leave the fortress, making it useless as a final location, or somehow the Order gets there early and gets past all the defenses before hes healed up and he leaves the fortress for safety to finish healing, making it useless as a final location.

The fortress is useless as a final location in every scenario. Except, maybe, "the Snarl somehow can now reach into all planes and also the fortress has some sort of anti-Snarl protections and also everyone got there in time and also they still need to solve this whole Snarl issue which is now a significantly larger problem than before".

You are backing yourself into an increasingly untenable position when it is neither necessary nor helpful to argue for your original point. There are plenty of good reasons to say that Xykon retreating to his fortress would be narratively clunky and unlikely- pacing issues, lack of compelling stakes, there's nothing interesting there that isn't already at Kraggor's gate, etc. But to convincingly argue that there's no mechanically plausible series of events that could lead to such an outcome is just impossible.

Case in point: There are plenty of good reasons why Xykon might retreat at Kraggor's gate but not again at his fortress, especially considering that his enemies would go from welcoming his retreat in the first case (protecting the gate is a higher priority) to wanting to prevent it and having the time to plan to do so.

-Xykon is only likely to retreat after taking significant damage or otherwise having a reason to think he can't wi-The . He will likely fight first in both places, and will simply be unable to retreat the second time, for a reason such as having his spell interrupted.

-The Order manages to fool Xykon into thinking that his phylactery is safe, making him more willing to risk physical destruction.

-Xykon might know that the Order is prepared to locate and pursue him if he retreats again, making it a less viable tactic.

-The Order aquires sufficient bait to lure him into a confrontation.

If the battle doesn't move to the astral fortress, it will be because the author, who has control of the story, will ensure that events conspire to keep it at Kraggor's gate, not because there are in-universe reasons that it can't happen. Right now, he has plenty of tools that could be employed to make either ending happen.

This is like arguing that the Order will defeat Xykon because Xykon can't logically win a fight against them. He obviously can, and the only reason we know he won't kill them all is narrative convention.

[Doug Lampert]

So Xykon will be so paranoid that he will always teleport out if in danger, but not paranoid enough to always make sure to have a teleport spell prepared. That is a very specific level of paranoid.

He's a sorcerer, he can use any slot of level 5 or higher to teleport (assuming he knows the spell), any slot of 7 or higher to plane shift or greater teleport (assuming spell known), and any slot of level 9 to gate (ditto knowing the spell). He can also have objects to allow any of these actions.

Note that getting to the fortress needs one of plane shift or gate.

He almost certainly has 7+ spells of each of these levels. Assuming no extras, he has 4 spells known at level 5, and 3 at each of 6-9.

He is known to have some method of planeshifting, and to have teleport, so he probably pretty well always has a teleport available till fully tapped out.

[Note: This in no way disagrees with the idea that we'll probably never see the astral fortress again, it has fulfilled it's obvious function in the story.]

Edited to add: X's nineths are soul bind, enervation, and meteor swarm; so no gate for him. He presumably needs to plane-shift to near the fortress and then travel there through the astra.

[Psyren]

I just remembered that there was a period when Eugene was wanting to visit Roy, but couldn't because the sword was broken. It's not very plausible that Eugene was lying about that point. So it does seem that it's necessary for the sword to be intact for Eugene to manifest. And we know that Eugene would prefer to be relying on Julia than on Roy, but doesn't, which does support the assertion that he can only appear before Roy. I don't think we've ever seen Eugene appearing when Roy wasn't alone, apart from just now, so we don't have confirmation that Eugene (when he does manifest) is visible only to Roy.

You make a valid point, every time he's appeared before Roy he was alone*. So he may just be visible and it's never come up.

*(The one exception being when Shojo could see him too, but Eugene was hijacking a Planar Binding then.)

[Dragonus45]

Would you say in this situation no art is produced? Or that art can be produced without anyone "doing art"? Just like the AI situation one person has an intention, and another agent has drawing technique but no intention.

If you're definition of "doing art" is intention through one's own drawing technique, then neither is art. But then many group endeavors produce art without any artists.

As I see it, creating a verbal image is art (in the sense of a conscious production, not specifically in any one medium). You and your brother create art (in the double definition sense). Your brother might qualify as an artistdouble by himself, depending on how he does it; specifically if there's intention in the details.

Yea collaboration in art is 100% a thing, that scenario sounds a lot like a comic book writer giving instruction for paneling to the artist. It's not 100% relevant to AI drawing though. The AI is more like a pencil that does most of the work for you once you have what you want envisioned then it is a collaborative partner in the art created.

[Peelee]

You are backing yourself into an increasingly untenable position when it is neither necessary nor helpful to argue for your original point.

I'm not, though. If Xykon can escape to the fortress, then Xykon can escape from the fortress, and even then, there is no reason for him to spend extended amounts of time at the fortress. Thr position is not untenable to start with, let alone increasingly so - the only reason people think the fortress will matter at all is because we've seen it, with nothing else to back that up. There is nothing mechanically useful at the fortress. There is nothing thematically useful at the fortress. There is nothing narratively useful at the fortress. The sole use the fortress has is in Xykon's mind, and the second he realizes even that is gone? Its just another dungeon, one of any number in Stickworld.

[BloodSquirrel]

Yea collaboration in art is 100% a thing, that scenario sounds a lot like a comic book writer giving instruction for paneling to the artist. It's not 100% relevant to AI drawing though. The AI is more like a pencil that does most of the work for you once you have what you want envisioned then it is a collaborative partner in the art created.

I think this discussion is predicated on some assumptions about how much intentionally can be given to AI versus human consciousness that may need to be question as AI grows more sophisticated.

[Laurentio III]

Epic-level Wizard: It appears to be a common Holy Symbol of the clergy of the Dark One. Not one particularly fancy or anything. The kind an acolyte would get the day they receive their White Cloak.
Epic-level Paladin: So this is...
Epic-level Wizard: ... completely useless to anyone who isn't a Cleric of the Dark One, yes. And those who are probably already have their own.
Epic-level Rogue: You're telling me this is a masterly crafted replica of a random piece of junk gear?
Epic-level Wizard: Of a very specific piece of junk gear. The divination tells me that most of effort went into simulating the wear and tear.
Epic-level Rogue: Who the hell came up with this adventure!?
This reminds me of "Knights of the Dinner Table"''s dialogues.
I can see them questioning the DM's real intentions and spending time and resources to further investigate the junk gear.

[Dragonus45]

I think this discussion is predicated on some assumptions about how much intentionally can be given to AI versus human consciousness that may need to be question as AI grows more sophisticated.

AI can have "intentionality" in a sense that it often inherits whatever bias or presumptions slip in either from the date it works from or the people who made it but that's about it for now and probably for a very very long time.

[BloodSquirrel]

I'm not, though. If Xykon can escape to the fortress, then Xykon can escape from the fortress,

If Xykon escaped from Dorukan's gate, he can escape from Kraggor's gate. If Xykon killed Roy at Azure City he can kill Roy at Kraggor's gate. If Belkar didn't get killed at Girard's gate he won't die in any battle.

This kind of argument fails the instant specific circumstances are taken into account. You can easily come up a hundred versions of a battle at Kraggor's gate and a hundred more at the fortress with Xykon escaping in a third of them, winning in a third, being destroyed in a third, plus a rew bonus scenarios where the Snarl gets loose and kills everyone.

[Peelee]

If Xykon escaped from Dorukan's gate, he can escape from Kraggor's gate. If Xykon killed Roy at Azure City he can kill Roy at Kraggor's gate. If Belkar didn't get killed at Girard's gate he won't die in any battle.

This kind of argument fails the instant specific circumstances are taken into account. You can easily come up a hundred versions of a battle at Kraggor's gate and a hundred more at the fortress with Xykon escaping in a third of them, winning in a third, being destroyed in a third, plus a rew bonus scenarios where the Snarl gets loose and kills everyone.

Xykon escaped from Dorukan's Gate via Redcloak carrying him kn the phylactery, which is no longer an option. Your suggestion is Xykon being nearly destroyed but still with a high level spell to teleport to the fortress (despite Roy knowing Spellsplinter) and then being nearly destroyed but somehow unable to teleport out of the fortress. The situations would be otherwise identical, unlike the analogy you attempted with the Dungeon of Dorukan, and the only difference would be in your premise Xykon escapes one and doesn't escape the other solely because your desired plot calls for it. It's a weak argument to start with, and is even moreso when i continue to ask why Xykon would stay at the fortress for any extended length of time (ie either he gets to full strength before they arrive and he doesn't need to stay, or he is still weak when they arrive and he leaves to return to full strength because he can't do it there).

Notwithstanding everything else i said that's gone unaddressed.

[brian 333]

I'm not, though. If Xykon can escape to the fortress, then Xykon can escape from the fortress, and even then, there is no reason for him to spend extended amounts of time at the fortress. Thr position is not untenable to start with, let alone increasingly so - the only reason people think the fortress will matter at all is because we've seen it, with nothing else to back that up. There is nothing mechanically useful at the fortress. There is nothing thematically useful at the fortress. There is nothing narratively useful at the fortress. The sole use the fortress has is in Xykon's mind, and the second he realizes even that is gone? Its just another dungeon, one of any number in Stickworld.

You make some good points, but one easily overlooked issue is, where is he going to go? Detroit?

The Fortress has a pile of magic items, magical traps, and presumably other monsters. Xylon has the home-field advantage there. He's smart enough to recognize that if he is betrayed and almost beaten, he needs force multipliers. (Because he has no friends.)

Where else could he go that gives him even a fraction of the advantages of his fortress?

I get that you, and many others, think the astral fortress is done. I never gave it much thought either, until Thor let knowledge of its existence slip to Durkon. Since then I have thought about it.

The gate's sole importance is as a place that Xykon has to go, where The Order can confront him. Assuming that The Order saves the last gate and Xykon is faced with defeat, he certainly won't give up. And he's not going to Detroit.

[gbaji]

And what if his phylactery is destroyed and his allies have betrayed him?

Reconsider his position assuming that he knows his phylactery is in the hands of someone who wants to destroy him, of has already been destroyed.

That's a pretty unlikely sequence of events though. Is it possible? Yes. Is it probable? Not really.

The far more likely scenario is that he will only discover that his phylactery isn't in the astral fortress *after* he dies (or some dramatic dialogue right as he is being killed and when it's too late for him to do anything about it).

Your scenario assumes that somewhere in the middle of a battle, he will discover that Redcloak has his phylactery instead of it being at the fortress, and Redcloak has betrayed him, and have time and spellcasting capability to retreat to his astral fortress but *not* blast Redcloak into a smear and take his phylactery first? That's a pretty narrow window of probabilities there. And all for what? So the very author who would have to contrive this sequence of events can shift the final conflict from the literal centerpiece of the story drama (Final Dungeon at the Final Gate) to some other location instead, effectively stomping all over the last 15+ years of storytelling that has brought the heroes and the villains (and others) all to one place at one time?

Possible, but seems "odd". It's the kind of thing I expect to see in badly written fanfic, where writers of such things really do think tossing new/different/interesting things at the reader is more important than having coherent storyline pacing (seriously, there's a lot of what I call "kitchen sink writing" in fan fic, and it's... bad). Could Rich do something like this and still pull it off? Yeah. Probably. But I don't think there's enough story left. We still have to resolve the conflict between the Order and TE. We have to resolve the issue with the IFCC. We have to resolve the issue with the snarl and the gates (and the gods having to destroy the world every time).

If there is any detour from the Final Dungeon here, it will be to the world in the rift (which I've proposed as a possibility) and not to the astral fortress. The former ties into the need to resolve the snarl and the gates. The latter is just another location to have the same conflict they could otherwise have right there in the Final Dungeon and just serves to drag out the story for no real reason at all.


And just for fun, consider that Xykon is neither stupid nor trusting. Perhaps he was creating a new phylactery while away on the Astral, and the one Redcloak now carries is not the real one any more.

Another possibility. But here's the thing. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that in stickverse, creating a replacement phylactery is not that easy or quick (original being created in an underground trap/dungeon aside). If that was really such a trivial thing, Xykon would have done that instead of bothering to have folks looking for the original for months in Azure City. He could have simply forced Redcloak to make another one (an additional tax for failing to protect it in the first place).

I mean, sure, it would be an amusing double-zing bit. Xykon is about to be killed, brags about how "I'll just rise again at my phylactery located in my secret fortress, muahahah!", only for Redcloak to say something like "Oh. You mean this phylactery?". Beat. Xykon response: "Yeah. I made another you idiot, I just had you guys searching the sewers for the original for months cause I thought it was funny. Muahahaha". Yeah. Would be classic. And yeah. Would require at some point that the Order go to the fortress to destroy Xykon.

But here's the thing. If that sequence were to occur, then it would mean that Redcloak had already betrayed Xykon. Which means either the ritual is completed, and we move directly into whatever that means for the story (which will not involve any detours to the astral plane), or it occurs prior to the ritual being completed and "The Plan" is already abandoned at this point, at which point we move to "Redcloak and the Order move to seal the rifts together" part of the story, which also isn't going to lend itself to a side trip to the astral plane to destroy Xykon.

Xykon becomes a footnote to the story in either case. Something to be cleaned up *after* they resolve the issue with the rifts, the gates, the IFCC, and the snarl. And I just don't see Xykon's destruction being left that way. But there's no way to narratively tie in "go to the astral fortress and fight Xykon" in with any of those other storyline resolution bits.


So Xykon will be so paranoid that he will always teleport out if in danger, but not paranoid enough to always make sure to have a teleport spell prepared. That is a very specific level of paranoid.

Someone else pointed this out, but I already had you quoted so... In addition to your point, he's also a sorcerer, so "preparing" isn't an issue. As long as he has spell slots (and why wouldn't he), he can always escape.

Xykon wants to "win" at gaining control of the gate. That's his motivation here. To destroy him, you must force him into a combat where he's going to stick around and risk being destroyed *and* where his phylactery is somewhere you can get to it to destroy it as well. Those conditions exist right now in the Final Dungeon. He's got motivation to stick around to fight "to the finish" because that's literally the brass ring right there in front of him. And his phylactery is right there, so it can be destroyed. Moving that conflict anywhere else (like the astral fortress) removes those conditions and makes it less likely that he can reasonably be destroyed. There's literally zero reason for him to stick around to let someone kill him. If he'll run away when "control of the gate" is on the line, he'll absolutely run away when there's nothing one the line at all except some random thing he buiilt in a few months on the astral plane.



Xykon knows that the phylactery is his main point of weakness, the thing that makes harm to his current body of limited consequence. He believes that his phylactery is in his fortress. If a series of alarms go off in his fortress, leading him to think that there's someone going through the place, I think that he'll drop whatever he's doing to check out what's going on. Regardless of what he might be doing at the time: in the middle of a fight, part way through the Gate ritual, whatever, he's out of there. The fortress can be a crucial distraction. Sauron's forces were on the verge of wiping out Aragorn's party, when Frodo put on the Ring on the verge of the Cracks of Doom. "[...] Throughout his realm a tremor ran, his slaves quailed, and his armies halted, and his captains suddenly steerless, bereft of will, wavered and despaired."

This is an interesting theory actually. And certainly, if the Order knew that Xykon keeps his phylactery in this fortress, they could go there, threaten it, and hope that Xykon will abandon the gate and go there instead to defend it. Maybe. That's a lot of "ifs" though. And would require a several day detour for the Order, while TE is progressing towards the gate. And a lot of speculation on their part. I'm not seeing how they would learn that information unless it came from Redcloak. And if it did come from him, it would mean that they are now working together in some way (Redcloak wouldn't do this since he needs Xykon for the ritual, so would only conspire to pull Xykon away from that *if* he's chosen to abandon TDO's plan). And if Redcloak somehow choses to abandon the plan, and communicates this to the Order, why bother with this? Wouldn't it work better to just dogpile on Xykon instead?

Redcloak is the lynchpin here. And he's got Xykon's phylactery. He would not want Xykon to escape, since that would mean an angry lich coming after him later. He'd want Xykon destroyed. So he would not work with the Order to distract Xykon to get him away. He'd work with the Order to destroy Xykon instead. And the best place to do that is right there, in the Final Dungeon, by turning the tables on Xykon in the middle of a fight with the Order.


If the battle doesn't move to the astral fortress, it will be because the author, who has control of the story, will ensure that events conspire to keep it at Kraggor's gate, not because there are in-universe reasons that it can't happen. Right now, he has plenty of tools that could be employed to make either ending happen.

Correct. But I think you have the order of "conspiring" backwards. The battle will only move to the astral fortress if the author creates events that conspire to move it there. And that would require some pretty extreme plot gymnastics to pull off, and would have little to no payoff for doing. Also, it's a backwards move. The author has already "conspired" to create the conditions in which both the phylactery and Xykon will be at the same place during a big final battle with the Order. That's what the entire "phylactery lost, then found, then swapped with a fake" bit serves to do. That entire story sequence sets up the conditions where Xykon can be destroyed while thinking he's safe because his phyalctery is in his fortress, but it really isn't. Why spend time on that much set up for this scenario and then throw it all away? Which is why many of us are saying that's very unlikely to happen.

There's a point in a story where the elements of that story that have been building up all combine together. That's the point where you have your conflict and resolution. Everything in this story has been moving to aim all of the story elements to one point. Right there at Kragar's gate. That's where the story will be resolved.


This is like arguing that the Order will defeat Xykon because Xykon can't logically win a fight against them. He obviously can, and the only reason we know he won't kill them all is narrative convention.

Sure. But that narrative convention says that he will be defeated as part of the big dramatic confluence of story elements, and not as a side story. The IFCC's plans do not involve Xykon. They involve the final gate. Redcloak's plans do not involve Xykon. They involve the final gate. The gods destruction or not of the world does not revolve around Xykon. They revolve around the final gate. Whatever the snarl is doing, or the world within the rift is, also revolves around the final gate. Xykon is only relevant to any of these things to the degree to which he is relevant to the conflict involving that final gate.

One you remove him from that conflict, he becomes irrelevant to the story and its resolution. Rich *could* do that, but I don't think he will. Xykon's destruction will happen during that conflict. And that conflict will occur at or near the final gate.

[Jasdoif]

If Xykon can escape to the fortress, then Xykon can escape from the fortress....Not necessarily. As I think you mentioned, Xykon designed the fortress with the intent that he'd get there by popping directly into his phylactery. If we're (back to) talking about an outlandish scenario where's he's retreating to it more conventionally, it's now a question of if/how his own defenses against will be working against him getting in; and if it's an ordeal to get in, it's now a question of whether he leaves left a path open to be followed, and/or a question of if it'll be more of an ordeal to escape the same way while being pursued....And will quickly devolve into a complicated fiasco from there.

For example, note that cloister does not prevent (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0532.html) "inside-to-inside" teleportation (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0513.html); it'll be just as convenient for Xykon as it would anyone who knows where the fortress is (at the very least, I have serious doubts Xykon trusts Redcloak). If he doesn't want to risk having someone able to teleport on top of him, it'd need to be backed up with something more conventional in the anti-teleport department (like forbiddance (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/forbiddance.htm) or dimensional lock (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/dimensionalLock.htm)), which will block anyone else from teleporting in just as it does him. Of course, Team Evil teleported there (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0833.html); implementing a teleportation lockdown would involve covering nearly every area with those "conventional" means, then Xykon casting cloister, moving to an uncovered area (preferably nondescript to interfere with specifying it as a teleportation destination if it's ever un-cloister-ed), and then teleporting away since as cloister doesn't block "inside-to-outside" teleportation either.

...I did mention "complicated fiasco", right? :smalltongue:

[Peelee]

You make some good points, but one easily overlooked issue is, where is he going to go? Detroit?

The Fortress has a pile of magic items, magical traps, and presumably other monsters. Xylon has the home-field advantage there. He's smart enough to recognize that if he is betrayed and almost beaten, he needs force multipliers. (Because he has no friends.)

Where else could he go that gives him even a fraction of the advantages of his fortress?

I get that you, and many others, think the astral fortress is done. I never gave it much thought either, until Thor let knowledge of its existence slip to Durkon. Since then I have thought about it.

The gate's sole importance is as a place that Xykon has to go, where The Order can confront him. Assuming that The Order saves the last gate and Xykon is faced with defeat, he certainly won't give up. And he's not going to Detroit.

First off, i think Xykon would quite like Detroit. Imean, someone has to, presumably.

But yeah, I'll totally grant you that as far as defending himself from active threats, yes, that is a good defense for him. My biggest issue with it is that it would be boring - again, as described, it's basically Dungeon of Dorukan redux. There's already been a full book on that. And while small facets have occurred twice in the story - eg the protagonists on trial, they tend to be fundamentally different outside of the absolute broadest of strokes - eg Azurite trial was an exposition dump where the heroes were never in any real danger at all (excepting Miko) and served to unveil the larger story behind the scenes of what was happening in the world, both to the protagonists and the audience. Conversely, the Bleedingham trial was about as far away from this as it could be, a simple tossing of two protags aside from the rest of the party. From the Doylist view, the purpose of the Azurite trial was to instigate them to quest more and the purpose of the Bleedingham trial was to delay their questing more.

As opposed to that, the Dungeon of Dorukan arc was the Order going through a dungeon of magical items, magical traps, and other monsters to make their way towards Xykon to defeat him once and for all, wbole a Xykon's Fortress arc would be the Order going through a dungeon of magical items, magical traps, and other monsters to make their way towards Xykon to defeat him once and for all. Sure, it's possible for that to happen, and even for it to be narratively satisfying. But i think its exceedingly unlikely. I just dont peg the author as a "there's a second Death Star" type.

[brian 333]

First off, i think Xykon would quite like Detroit. Imean, someone has to, presumably.

But yeah, I'll totally grant you that as far as defending himself from active threats, yes, that is a good defense for him. My biggest issue with it is that it would be boring - again, as described, it's basically Dungeon of Dorukan redux. There's already been a full book on that. And while small facets have occurred twice in the story - eg the protagonists on trial, they tend to be fundamentally different outside of the absolute broadest of strokes - eg Azurite trial was an exposition dump where the heroes were never in any real danger at all (excepting Miko) and served to unveil the larger story behind the scenes of what was happening in the world, both to the protagonists and the audience. Conversely, the Bleedingham trial was about as far away from this as it could be, a simple tossing of two protags aside from the rest of the party. From the Doylist view, the purpose of the Azurite trial was to instigate them to quest more and the purpose of the Bleedingham trial was to delay their questing more.

As opposed to that, the Dungeon of Dorukan arc was the Order going through a dungeon of magical items, magical traps, and other monsters to make their way towards Xykon to defeat him once and for all, wbole a Xykon's Fortress arc would be the Order going through a dungeon of magical items, magical traps, and other monsters to make their way towards Xykon to defeat him once and for all. Sure, it's possible for that to happen, and even for it to be narratively satisfying. But i think its exceedingly unlikely. I just dont peg the author as a "there's a second Death Star" type.

Agreed. It always has to be different the second time.

[137beth]

I'm a day late, but...
this strip feels like a callback to the style of Book 1. Jokes about language patterns, the art style, and D&D-isms?

[pearl jam]

No, he went to Mordor, Sauron's stronghold. Specifically, to Mt.Orodruin, where the One Ring was forged. Frodo's quest was to destroy the ring, not destroy Sauron. The Ring, not Sauron, was his nemesis. At every step The Ring made his journey more difficult until, at the end, Frodo was defeated by it, only to have Gollum accidentally fulfill his quest for him.

The 'right direction' is not relevant on the Astral Plane, where distance and direction are meaningless. Desire to be at a place and you will be there. Astral Travel is weird that way. One can stand perfectly still and the distance to the object of his destination can shrink by simply wanting to be there.

This is, I think, the common interpretation of events, and one that I held myself for a long time. But I watched a video on YouTube sometime during the last few years of corona that offered another view. Although no ring bearer exercised the same level of control over the ring that Sauron might, as the current wielder of the Ring Frodo did have the ability to wield some measure of its power. When Frodo warns Gollum on the ascent of Mt. Doom that if he ever betrays him the Ring will destroy his words have power more than just a prediction that someone might make about the winner of some sporting event, but they carry a doom that means it will come true. It's only a few days later when Gollum does betray Frodo and seize the Ring, but the doom that Frodo spoke comes to pass destroying him and the Ring together. Through the pity and compassion Frodo showed to Gollum combined with the warning not to attempt to take the Ring from him, Frodo is actually the agent of the Ring's demise, though he was unable to physically throw it in the fire himself. I thought it was an interesting interpretation and certainly seems to be in keeping with the spirit of the way things happen within Tolkien's world.

[Kantaki]

Didn't know mimics can imitate people*.
Mimi's cute though, even with her weird hands.

Which actually look pretty good. The only reason they stick out is that everyone else doesn't have five fingers.

Embarrassingly it took Belkar's comment for me to notice.
And even then I had to check the other characters' hands.

*They probably act a bit wooden.

[TuringTest]

For some reason, I don't think this strip's joke has been prepared for years until it was time to deliver it :-P



I thought it was an interesting interpretation and certainly seems to be in keeping with the spirit of the way things happen within Tolkien's world.
I've recently read that Tolkien said destroying the Ring required direct intervention from Eru. It *might* be that this intervention manifested by Eru forcing the Ring to act that way, but I find it unlikely (even though it's an interesting interpretation nevertheless, just somehow incompatible with Word from Author).

[Tzardok]

Didn't know mimics can imitate people*.
Mimi's cute though, even with her weird hands.

Which actually look pretty good. The only reason they stick out is that everyone else doesn't have five fingers.

Embarrassingly it took Belkar's comment for me to notice.
And even then I had to check the other characters' hands.

*They probably act a bit wooden.

Normally they can't in 3.x:


Mimic Shape (Ex)
A mimic can assume the general shape of any object that fills roughly 150 cubic feet (5 feet by 5 feet by 6 feet), such as a massive chest, a stout bed, or a wide door frame. The creature cannot substantially alter its size, though. A mimic’s body is hard and has a rough texture, no matter what appearance it might present.

[Fish]

The fortress is useless as a final location in every scenario. Except, maybe, "the Snarl somehow can now reach into all planes and also the fortress has some sort of anti-Snarl protections and also everyone got there in time and also they still need to solve this whole Snarl issue which is now a significantly larger problem than before".
There is also the endgame scenario of "Gee, this would be a great place to store a Gate that would destroy the world. Can we move them to this plane and call it a day?"

I mean, what better place, right?

[pearl jam]

No, my position is that my brother is producing art, and that he brings much more to the table than "technique", and that my suggestion/request does not change the fact that there's intention in what he's doing. My position is that my brother produced an art piece, and I didn't. I just asked for it / financed it/ whatever. Julius II wasn't an artist, and didn't make any art. Michelangelo did.

My brother is a full human, and brings much more to the table than "drawing technique", which is itself not in any way equitable to what the AI brings forward. They have nothing in common, and the fact that a similar visual effect is produced doesn't change that.



It isn't, and I don't intend to try to provide a quick and easy definition of art that'll be sufficient for this discussion. I am saying that art is an activity that always done by a conscious mind. If we're in agreement that that is not what an AI is, and we're not trying to say that the Sistine Chapel ceiling is "an art-piece by Michelangelo, the Underwear Painter, and Julius II", then there's no art produced by these images.

And again, I obviously don't deny that pope Julius had a role to play in the ceiling painting coming into being - but I honestly believe that unless you already had a horse in this race, you wouldn't dream of calling him "one of the artists who made the paintings".



There is no "if", in my view, about intention by a human painter. Again, it's just not even remotely the same process. There is no doer in AI generated imagery. The ONLY part that can be compared is me in both scenarios. My brother and the AI aren't, and can never, be discussed as equivalent. That's my point about AI "art" not being art: if I'm the only point of comparison, and I reject the notion that by saying "hey, take a picture of something" to a rando on the street I was doing art, then there is no art to be found in the ideal form of AI generated imagery.

I wonder if it isn't more accurate to think of the AI in AI generated art not as equivalent to the painter of a painting but as the brush, paints, etc. The AI image generators don't decide they want to make and image of a cat, for example, but they are prompted to generate it by a user, as far as I know. So generating an image with AI is more equivalent to choosing paint vs. pencil or some other medium of expression. Where a painter might demonstrate skill through their use of different strokes etc, perhaps someone using AI might demonstrate it by their ability to choose the right prompts to generate the outcome they desired. (I don't have any experience with AI image generators to know how much of a role this can play, but I would suspect that it might be possible.) Under this view the images generated could be viewed as art, but the artist is the person employing the AI, not the AI itself.

[Fyraltari]

This is, I think, the common interpretation of events, and one that I held myself for a long time. But I watched a video on YouTube sometime during the last few years of corona that offered another view. Although no ring bearer exercised the same level of control over the ring that Sauron might, as the current wielder of the Ring Frodo did have the ability to wield some measure of its power. When Frodo warns Gollum on the ascent of Mt. Doom that if he ever betrays him the Ring will destroy his words have power more than just a prediction that someone might make about the winner of some sporting event, but they carry a doom that means it will come true. It's only a few days later when Gollum does betray Frodo and seize the Ring, but the doom that Frodo spoke comes to pass destroying him and the Ring together. Through the pity and compassion Frodo showed to Gollum combined with the warning not to attempt to take the Ring from him, Frodo is actually the agent of the Ring's demise, though he was unable to physically throw it in the fire himself. I thought it was an interesting interpretation and certainly seems to be in keeping with the spirit of the way things happen within Tolkien's world.

That's not Frodo speaking. Sam sees Frodo as white-clad grim figure wearing a wheel of fire upon his breast, and it is from the fire that the Doom is spoken. The Ring is forbidding Gollum from intervening further. The Ring knows that Frodo cannot resist him once he is at the Cracks of Doom and will put It on rather than casting it in the Fire. This will alert Sauron to his position and allow the Ring to come back to his Master at last. This has been the Ring's intention ever since it made Frodo volunteer for the Quest all the way in the House of Elrond. However, Gollum would not take the Ring to the Cracks, he would attempt to flee Mordor again so the Ring orders him away.

Sauron is undone not because of the valour of Men and Hobbits (well, not just) but because Bilbo, Frodo and Sam all chose to spare Gollum when they had the chance and this came back to them in mysterious ways, mercy was rewarded, but Evil only knew to curse and threaten Gollum and in doing so, unwittingly caused its own demise too.

[Emberlily]

honestly I figured bloodfeast is adamant about not going into the bag of holding because being an animal in a bag of holding that unexpectedly enters an anti-magic zone is scary, uncomfortable, or both

there might be some sort of Twist this is foreshadowing, or some way to connect it with Eugene, but I'm not seeing one at the moment, but I am seeing something that makes sense as someone who's been around a lot of pets

as to why it's being called out, making sure we're aware bloodfeast is permanently on the board now seems enough for me

[Kish]

honestly I figured bloodfeast is adamant about not going into the bag of holding because being an animal in a bag of holding that unexpectedly enters an anti-magic zone is scary, uncomfortable, or both

there might be some sort of Twist this is foreshadowing, or some way to connect it with Eugene, but I'm not seeing one at the moment, but I am seeing something that makes sense as someone who's been around a lot of pets

as to why it's being called out, making sure we're aware bloodfeast is permanently on the board now seems enough for me
I'm pretty sure the idea is that Bloodfeast is desperately trying to convey that he saw something relevant, and Belkar is misunderstanding it as "I don't want to go back in the bag."

Since this Bag of Holding, unlike official D&D ones, apparently has air, there's no reason for Bloodfeast to have noticed that the Prime Material Plane end of the bag was in an anti-magic zone; the end he was in remained on a different plane of existence from the anti-magic zone.

[brian 333]

That's not Frodo speaking. Sam sees Frodo as white-clad grim figure wearing a wheel of fire upon his breast, and it is from the fire that the Doom is spoken. The Ring is forbidding Gollum from intervening further. The Ring knows that Frodo cannot resist him once he is at the Cracks of Doom and will put It on rather than casting it in the Fire. This will alert Sauron to his position and allow the Ring to come back to his Master at last. This has been the Ring's intention ever since it made Frodo volunteer for the Quest all the way in the House of Elrond. However, Gollum would not take the Ring to the Cracks, he would attempt to flee Mordor again so the Ring orders him away.

Sauron is undone not because of the valour of Men and Hobbits (well, not just) but because Bilbo, Frodo and Sam all chose to spare Gollum when they had the chance and this came back to them in mysterious ways, mercy was rewarded, but Evil only knew to curse and threaten Gollum and in doing so, unwittingly caused its own demise too.

Gollum was the only one stronger than the ring!

(Bilbo was frightened into giving it up, but he did give it up. Gollum disobeyed it.)

[H_H_F_F]

I wonder if it isn't more accurate to think of the AI in AI generated art not as equivalent to the painter of a painting but as the brush, paints, etc. The AI image generators don't decide they want to make and image of a cat, for example, but they are prompted to generate it by a user, as far as I know. So generating an image with AI is more equivalent to choosing paint vs. pencil or some other medium of expression. Where a painter might demonstrate skill through their use of different strokes etc, perhaps someone using AI might demonstrate it by their ability to choose the right prompts to generate the outcome they desired. (I don't have any experience with AI image generators to know how much of a role this can play, but I would suspect that it might be possible.) Under this view the images generated could be viewed as art, but the artist is the person employing the AI, not the AI itself.

My point exactly is that the AI isn't equivalent to a painter, because it's not a person and not anything approaching one. However, it's also not a brush. It has no equivalent - which in my view is why it makes things that we tend to equate with art. We've never needed the heuristics it takes to differentiate art from whatever that is before.

As I've said, there'll obviously be edge cases, but saying "paradox of the heap!" and running away doesn't make a convincing argument, in my view.

Let's take this one step further to the extreme.

It's 2027, in the Smith household. The Smiths are a wealthy family, with a smart home. The smiths have a two year old child. Before bed, he says "mom, tell me a fairytale", and mom does. Usually, she reads to him from a book of fairytales she got from her great grandmother.

One night, the toddler asks mom to tell him a story. Mom says "I'm too busy, ask ChatGPT."

The Kid doesn't know what ChatGPT is, but he's familiar with it as a voice coming from the walls. He doesn't differentiate between the way his Mom talks to ChatGPT, Alexa, or her friends on the speaker phone. They're all people his mom sometimes talks to, and their voice comes from the walls. He's met some, but not others. No one ever told him ChatGPT wasn't just a weird name.

The toddler is a bit shy. He doesn't know ChatGPT very well. It's his mom's friend, and a stranger adult. But he can't fall asleep without a bedtime story.

So the kid says "ChatGPT, tell me a fairytale".

ChatGPT makes a string of coherent sentences that no one has ever heard before, with a recognizable plot and some classical themes. As far as the kid can tell, it's just another story he's never heard before. He falls asleep.

Is that story art made by the toddler? Did he write the story, using ChatGPT as a tool, equivalent to a brush?

I think not, and I think if you look at it honestly, you'll have a hard time saying otherwise.

You might not think this way on pieces of "art" that I would. You might even say that we're not there yet, and that nothing even approaching this has ever happened.

But I think you'd simply have to recognize that we're living in a world were AI can generate things that would look to us like art - but aren't.

[Kish]

I'm reminded of when someone asked ChatGPT about the creature in the darkness.

As an AI language model, I cannot provide opinions or preferences, but I can provide you with information about D&D creatures that could potentially fit the description of the "Monster in the Darkness" character from the "Order of the Stick" webcomic.

Based on the character's appearance, behavior, and abilities, there are several D&D species that could potentially fit:

Beholder: Beholders are floating, spherical creatures with numerous eyes and powerful magical abilities. They are notorious for their paranoid and manipulative nature, which could fit the "Monster in the Darkness" character's behavior. The character's ability to cast a wide variety of spells and control powerful creatures could also be reminiscent of a beholder's magical abilities.

Mind Flayer: Mind flayers, also known as illithids, are intelligent, squid-like creatures with psionic abilities. They are known for their mastery of mind control and manipulation, which could be a good fit for the "Monster in the Darkness" character's behavior. Mind flayers are also known for their ability to control and manipulate other creatures, which could explain the character's control over powerful monsters.

Aboleth: Aboleths are ancient, underwater creatures with powerful psychic abilities. They are known for their manipulation of memory and ability to control others, which could fit the "Monster in the Darkness" character's behavior. Aboleths are also known for their connection to powerful, underwater creatures, which could explain the character's control over powerful monsters.

Slaad: Slaads are chaotic, frog-like creatures with the ability to transform other creatures into slaads. They are known for their unpredictability and their chaotic nature, which could fit the "Monster in the Darkness" character's behavior. Slaads are also known for their ability to control and manipulate other creatures, which could explain the character's control over powerful monsters.

These are just a few examples of D&D creatures that could potentially fit the description of the "Monster in the Darkness" character. Ultimately, the identity of the character's species is a mystery and may be left up to the interpretation of the reader.
Based on my knowledge of things ChatGPT specifically has done and of currently functional "AI," if Kid Smith said "ChatGPT, tell me a fairy tale," ChatGPT would tell a common version of a public domain fairy tale.

If Kid Smith phrased it in a way that clearly wanted a new fairy tale, ChatGPT would combine elements of existing fairy tales in a way that might look like a coherent story but probably wouldn't. Characters would appear and disappear, unheralded.

If someone asked ChatGPT to produce a painting in the style of Leonardo da Vinci, ChatGPT would trace one of his existing works.

If someone asked ChatGPT to produce a painting of Rich Burlew, well. This one's been tried, not to my knowledge of Rich, but with lots of people. It might produce a decent though amateurish mockup up the specific person named; it might accidentally produce something grotesque and disturbing, probably in a relatively subtle way...like what the current strip references actually. And whether a human viewer was going, "Yes, I can see that's meant to look like him" or "gack, why is his neck that long and that thin?" ChatGPT would be wholly unable to tell the difference. As far as it would be concerned it would have done what was asked for.

AI isn't I, and so AI art isn't art. We're still hundreds of years out from producing anything that could pass for Lieutenant Commander Data, even in dim light, without a huge dollop of wishful thinking.

[Jasdoif]

I wonder if it isn't more accurate to think of the AI in AI generated art not as equivalent to the painter of a painting but as the brush, paints, etc. The AI image generators don't decide they want to make and image of a cat, for example, but they are prompted to generate it by a user, as far as I know. So generating an image with AI is more equivalent to choosing paint vs. pencil or some other medium of expression. Where a painter might demonstrate skill through their use of different strokes etc, perhaps someone using AI might demonstrate it by their ability to choose the right prompts to generate the outcome they desired. (I don't have any experience with AI image generators to know how much of a role this can play, but I would suspect that it might be possible.) Under this view the images generated could be viewed as art, but the artist is the person employing the AI, not the AI itself.There's creativity in arrangement, in visions being sought, in tailoring output to fit those visions. That's why 3D artists are artists; even though the final images are produced wholly by a series of calculations, it's an artist who has the vision and adjusts the inputs of those calculations to conform to it. That's why movie directors are artists; even though it's a lot of other artists who produce what ultimately goes on screen, it's another artist who guides and arranges them together to advance a vision. That's why procedural generation is art; even though it's literally a bunch of random numbers filtered through a set of rules, it's an artist who defined those rules to produce results in line with their vision.

Ultimately, art results from arranging objective components in a way that implies a human perspective. It is entirely true that a single roll on a fully-randomly-chosen random table does not make a campaign; and similarly an image rendered without input does not make art. But this is not an inherent fact of the roll's result, or the image's nature. Rather it's the absence of the human element over it, and that can be added on...just like how adding a second random roll and tying its result together with the first can form the foundation of an entire session, or adventure, or campaign.

It's one thing to say an image isn't art. It's quite another to say that same image can't be art.

[nleseul]

If anyone should wish to put some real pretend money down on the question of the Order visiting Xykon's astral fortress, I've created a market for it (https://manifold.markets/NLeseul/order-of-the-stick-will-the-order-v?r=Tkxlc2V1bA) over on Manifold Markets (https://manifold.markets/home)! 😉

(Rumor has it that there's an awful lot of talk about AI art over there as well...)

[Psychronia]

The Giant is just flexing with this one.

Sure, let's draw the notoriously difficulty part for the joke of calling it easy.

[pearl jam]

There's creativity in arrangement, in visions being sought, in tailoring output to fit those visions. That's why 3D artists are artists; even though the final images are produced wholly by a series of calculations, it's an artist who has the vision and adjusts the inputs of those calculations to conform to it. That's why movie directors are artists; even though it's a lot of other artists who produce what ultimately goes on screen, it's another artist who guides and arranges them together to advance a vision. That's why procedural generation is art; even though it's literally a bunch of random numbers filtered through a set of rules, it's an artist who defined those rules to produce results in line with their vision.

Ultimately, art results from arranging objective components in a way that implies a human perspective. It is entirely true that a single roll on a fully-randomly-chosen random table does not make a campaign; and similarly an image rendered without input does not make art. But this is not an inherent fact of the roll's result, or the image's nature. Rather it's the absence of the human element over it, and that can be added on...just like how adding a second random roll and tying its result together with the first can form the foundation of an entire session, or adventure, or campaign.

It's one thing to say an image isn't art. It's quite another to say that same image can't be art.

Yeah, I think the last bit sums up my feelings quite well.

As for the toddler, you could say the same about anything produced by a toddler with instruments they are capable of wielding, whether that be a brush, a pencil or just a hand or foot dipped into paint, etc. Is what they produce art? As it is, perhaps not, but if an adult then arranges it for display in some manner is it art then? Perhaps? I think like many things there are different standards based on context. I'm not necessarily convinced that AI generated images are art, but I hesitate to unequivocally say they can't be.

[RatElemental]

I know it's a pretty generic design by this comic's standards but I can't help but find Mimi's humanoid form adorable. Might be the expression in the initial panel.

[danielxcutter]

So far, I believe the "put request into AI tool and literally post the unaltered result" isn't really art, and it definitely isn't drawing. But photographs and digital formats took a while to become art too... and frankly, I don't have an issue with them being used in general, especially non-profit uses such as generating initial images for your newest character. (Especially if you don't immediately have the money to afford commissions.)

[Kantaki]

Normally they can't in 3.x:

So either a "houserule"/Mimi's a special case or maybe she's cheating by imitating a doll, marionette, mannequin or something like that.

Or the dead postman.
Corpses count as objects, right? :smallamused:

[otakuryoga]

how would you even use that many fingers?

[The MunchKING]

Watch out, Mimi!! That's how entire species get stereotyped as bad at shapeshifting. :p (And yes, I realize that the comic says that explicitly, but I wanted to rant about Ditto.)

Like Ditto from Pokémon! Originally it was one specific Ditto that couldn't transform its face right, and it got over its shortcomings by the end of the episode. But then "Ditto face" became a thing, and then ALL Dittos in spin-off games like Snap and merchandising couldn't transform their faces! And then it just became a thing everywhere except the main games (Where it would be extra spritework) for Dittos to not do faces.

SO your bad at hands now, but soon people will be saying ALL shapeshifters can't do their hands right, and then all of you will be FORCED to do hands wrong, because it's merchandisable!! :smallyuk:

[brian 333]

So either a "houserule"/Mimi's a special case or maybe she's cheating by imitating a doll, marionette, mannequin or something like that.

Or the dead postman.
Corpses count as objects, right? :smallamused:

Or Mimi's leveled up enough to get an extra feat and she took Humanoid Shape, which enables her to use humanoid movement, tools, and communication.

[KorvinStarmast]

There is also the endgame scenario of "Gee, this would be a great place to store a Gate that would destroy the world. Can we move them to this plane and call it a day?"

I mean, what better place, right? The gate ends up in the demi plane, and the phylactery doesn't? Is that what your post suggests?
Hmm, how does one convince Redcloak to get on board with that plan?

I'm pretty sure the idea is that Bloodfeast is desperately trying to convey that he saw something relevant, and Belkar is misunderstanding it as "I don't want to go back in the bag." Yes, which means that Belkar's speak with animals ranger skill (which he used in the Arena1with an Allosaurus) may be on display again soon.

1Or, was that him faking it, and not actually speaking with animals?

[Tzardok]

The gate ends up in the demi plane, and the phylactery doesn't? Is that what your post suggests?
Hmm, how does one convince Redcloak to get on board with that plan?

I don't think Xykon's fortress is a demiplane. It seems to be a physical place on the Astral.


Yes, which means that Belkar's speak with animals ranger skill (which he used in the Arena1with an Allosaurus) may be on display again soon.

1Or, was that him faking it, and not actually speaking with animals?

You are mixing up the Handle Animal skill with the speak with animal spell.

[theNater]

My point exactly is that the AI isn't equivalent to a painter, because it's not a person and not anything approaching one. However, it's also not a brush. It has no equivalent - which in my view is why it makes things that we tend to equate with art. We've never needed the heuristics it takes to differentiate art from whatever that is before.
AI is more like a camera than a brush. Most of what it does is akin to taking photographs of one or more existing pieces of art, and laying them on top of each other.


Is that story art made by the toddler? Did he write the story, using ChatGPT as a tool, equivalent to a brush?
Yes and yes, in the same way that a toddler who opened all his favorite storybooks to random pages, photographed them, and had a parent read the photographs would have created a new story. As Kish notes, with modern AI it's likely to either be mostly one pre-existing story or largely incoherent.


As for the toddler, you could say the same about anything produced by a toddler with instruments they are capable of wielding, whether that be a brush, a pencil or just a hand or foot dipped into paint, etc. Is what they produce art?
Yes, though it may not be particularly high quality art.

[Fish]

The gate ends up in the demi plane, and the phylactery doesn't? Is that what your post suggests?
Hmm, how does one convince Redcloak to get on board with that plan?
The Order doesn’t know the fortress exists (except maybe Durkon, depending whether Thor’s joke was meant to be informative). I’m unclear on the Astral Plane and what, exactly, Xykon did to build that place, and whether it will long outlast him if he were to be completely destroyed. Is it based on Xykon’s thoughts? Is it real? Are the spells permanent? I don’t know.

In any case, my post presumes that Xykon is at least defeated, and Redcloak is converted, so he can assist in moving the gate there. The phylactery is more or less a bonus.

That is to say, I don’t think Xykon’s fortress necessarily appears as a Final Dungeon; but it could appear briefly as a location for other reasons.

[Aquillion]

I wonder if it isn't more accurate to think of the AI in AI generated art not as equivalent to the painter of a painting but as the brush, paints, etc. The AI image generators don't decide they want to make and image of a cat, for example, but they are prompted to generate it by a user, as far as I know. So generating an image with AI is more equivalent to choosing paint vs. pencil or some other medium of expression. Where a painter might demonstrate skill through their use of different strokes etc, perhaps someone using AI might demonstrate it by their ability to choose the right prompts to generate the outcome they desired. (I don't have any experience with AI image generators to know how much of a role this can play, but I would suspect that it might be possible.) Under this view the images generated could be viewed as art, but the artist is the person employing the AI, not the AI itself.
One thing which is often left out of this is that there's another, more important step.

The person who designs and trains the AI is really contributing more to it, because they're the one who defines "art" (and, indirectly, everything else) to it by choosing what to put in its training set and deciding how it is used, how it's given emphasis, and so on by the rules they set for training. This is where the human / creative aspect unique to a particular model comes from.

In that respect creating an AI model is like creating a weird multidimensional holistic collage, and the question of how independent it is from the individual items in its training set becomes complicated (and can, like a collage, vary depending on the exact process they use.)

[Provengreil]

Or Mimi's leveled up enough to get an extra feat and she took Humanoid Shape, which enables her to use humanoid movement, tools, and communication.

Instruction from Serini, perhaps? She clearly has a talent for getting her monster friends to work with her on stuff, maybe other mimics just never get the help.

[H_H_F_F]

I'm reminded of when someone asked ChatGPT about the creature in the darkness.

Based on my knowledge of things ChatGPT specifically has done and of currently functional "AI," if Kid Smith said "ChatGPT, tell me a fairy tale," ChatGPT would tell a common version of a public domain fairy tale.

If Kid Smith phrased it in a way that clearly wanted a new fairy tale, ChatGPT would combine elements of existing fairy tales in a way that might look like a coherent story but probably wouldn't. Characters would appear and disappear, unheralded.

If someone asked ChatGPT to produce a painting in the style of Leonardo da Vinci, ChatGPT would trace one of his existing works.

If someone asked ChatGPT to produce a painting of Rich Burlew, well. This one's been tried, not to my knowledge of Rich, but with lots of people. It might produce a decent though amateurish mockup up the specific person named; it might accidentally produce something grotesque and disturbing, probably in a relatively subtle way...like what the current strip references actually. And whether a human viewer was going, "Yes, I can see that's meant to look like him" or "gack, why is his neck that long and that thin?" ChatGPT would be wholly unable to tell the difference. As far as it would be concerned it would have done what was asked for.

Note that I said 2027. You're referencing limitations that aren't the point. I think it's completely feasible that by 2027, ChatGPT could respond to that kind of request by producing an amalgamation of fairytales that'd pass as a story to a casual listener. To me that doesn't change the main point:


AI isn't I, and so AI art isn't art.

Yeah, and that's true regardless of whether or not it can "pass" as art.


There's creativity in arrangement, in visions being sought, in tailoring output to fit those visions. That's why 3D artists are artists; even though the final images are produced wholly by a series of calculations, it's an artist who has the vision and adjusts the inputs of those calculations to conform to it. That's why movie directors are artists; even though it's a lot of other artists who produce what ultimately goes on screen, it's another artist who guides and arranges them together to advance a vision. That's why procedural generation is art; even though it's literally a bunch of random numbers filtered through a set of rules, it's an artist who defined those rules to produce results in line with their vision.

Ultimately, art results from arranging objective components in a way that implies a human perspective. It is entirely true that a single roll on a fully-randomly-chosen random table does not make a campaign; and similarly an image rendered without input does not make art. But this is not an inherent fact of the roll's result, or the image's nature. Rather it's the absence of the human element over it, and that can be added on...just like how adding a second random roll and tying its result together with the first can form the foundation of an entire session, or adventure, or campaign.

It's one thing to say an image isn't art. It's quite another to say that same image can't be art.

So, I mentioned edge cases a lot here, so it's time to make it clear that I'm definitely not saying AI can't be used while making art. I'm not saying AI generated imagery cannot be used in an art-piece. I'm saying "AI art" isn't a thing, and that we're currently comfortable calling plenty of things that aren't art art, and provide categorical defenses of AI "art" that don't stand to reason.


As for the toddler, you could say the same about anything produced by a toddler with instruments they are capable of wielding, whether that be a brush, a pencil or just a hand or foot dipped into paint, etc. Is what they produce art? As it is, perhaps not, but if an adult then arranges it for display in some manner is it art then? Perhaps? I think like many things there are different standards based on context. I'm not necessarily convinced that AI generated images are art, but I hesitate to unequivocally say they can't be.

I honestly can't grasp the comparison. At all. In my example, the toddler didn't grab a tool and randomly swing it. There is no discussion to be made on whether or not something was intentional. He just asked an adult to tell him a story. There is no differentiation in his intention, nor in the actuality of his action, to when he's asking his mother to do so. If that's "debatebly art, toddlers are an edge case", than him asking his mother to read him a story is also "debatebly art".

Change ChatGPT to a competing future system called "Allen", make the smith kid a 60 year old man that wasn't properly given context for what was going on and thought he was on a voice-call with one of his daughter's friends, whatever. I just don't think your argument works, or that the comparison is apt.

I just looked up "beautiful art" on google. Clicked the first option that came up:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGW5MnFU5pmb3Wj61w7HVEb3z7UnTEL AdQr5pfnBDGA683LcH96U8LR-bSp9z2zjyjJVU&usqp=CAU

Did I just do art? I wanted to have "beautiful art" to post here. Do I have some claim to being an artist involved in creating this piece?

If not, then I can hardly see how going to Dall-E 2 for the exact same purpose, and doing the exact same thing, changes things.

To give an actual example: this (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?640260-Iron-Chef-Optimization-Challenge-in-the-Playground-CXVII&p=25332081&viewfull=1#post25332081) is an Iron Chef entry of mine, from way back. I'd say the story I wrote there qualifies as an artistic endeavor, even if not one I'm particularly fond of.

You could also perhaps claim that I "did art" while deciding on the arrangement of my entry - at least, when I busied myself with parts of that task for purely aesthetic purposes. One of the things I wanted for the entry was a picture. I thought (and think) that a picture can greatly complement an optimization competition entry. It makes the character pop-out, it helps imbue a certain vibe, and it also makes the arrangement itself more easy for digestion - it provides sort of a break point, an opportunity to reflect on what you've read so far, and to prepare yourself for the lion's share of the entry ahead.

So I googled "bald woman with a sword" or something like that, and picked the photo that best suited me (despite being way too horny, as I mention in the entry). I picked out a drawing that suited what I was doing best, and combined it into the work.

Now, that drawing is definitively a part of an art-piece by me. No question. But if you right-click the image, and select "open image in a new tab", and sit there looking at this (https://i.imgur.com/qSJKPmL.jpg)- you're not looking at a work by me, in any sense. Whatever intention I may have had, what you're looking at is not an art-piece I made, or took any part in making. Me spending time and effort on google, with artistic intention, isn't relevant.

That doesn't change if instead of google, I would've used an AI. There'd be an image there. The image would be a part of an art piece by me. And if you were to right click it, and select "open image in a new tab", you'd no longer be looking at an art-piece by me. You'd no longer be looking at an art-piece by anyone.

You'd no longer be looking at art.

[Mic_128]

Or Mimi's leveled up enough to get an extra feat

No, it's extra fingers that she has.

[Fyraltari]

No, it's extra fingers that she has.

You don't know how tall she used to be!

[Quizatzhaderac]

Epic-level Wizard: It appears to be a common Holy Symbol of the clergy of the Dark One. Not one particularly fancy or anything. The kind an acolyte would get the day they receive their White Cloak.
Epic-level Paladin: So this is...
Epic-level Wizard: ... completely useless to anyone who isn't a Cleric of the Dark One, yes. And those who are probably already have their own.
Epic-level Rogue: You're telling me this is a masterly crafted replica of a random piece of junk gear?
Epic-level Wizard: Of a very specific piece of junk gear. The divination tells me that most of effort went into simulating the wear and tear.
Epic-level Rogue: Who the hell came up with this adventure!?Reminds me of the Dwarf Fortress Let's play Boatmurdered:

We all know our people like to engrave historical events, so I've included a few charcoal rubbings of some typical engravings here:

Apparently the 2 most significant historical events here in Boatmurdered are elephants and cheese. Take a close look at the cheese ones actually, they aren't even carvings of cheese, but renditions of some other image of a cheese. They're freaking homages!

Intrigued, I investigated the art history of the settlement further. I discovered this artifact which I can only presume was the inspiration for all the imitators.

Having viewed it for myself, I must agree that this image of a cheese speaks to the dwarven spirit, and will be a cultural treasure for generations to come.

[Precure]

Telling AI to draw something is like Stan Lee telling Jack Kirby to draw him a comic book, except, in this case, Kirby is tracing from other comic books.

[Peelee]

I just looked up "beautiful art" on google. Clicked the first option that came up:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGW5MnFU5pmb3Wj61w7HVEb3z7UnTEL AdQr5pfnBDGA683LcH96U8LR-bSp9z2zjyjJVU&usqp=CAU

Did I just do art? I wanted to have "beautiful art" to post here. Do I have some claim to being an artist involved in creating this piece?

No, because you just shared something. If you altered it in any way, then yes, you'd have just done art, as you put it.

I am firmly against gatekeeping art and music. Not to panty with too wide a brush here, but that has historically been bursting with elitism. Look at avant-garde art and music. Pollock tossing paint on canvas. Cage sitting at a piano for four and a half minutes. Once art and music becomes easily accessible to the common people, reproductions of works readily available, elitism demands that there be some form of it that is above the reach of those plebians. Nobody can fling paint like Pollock. Every performance of 4:33 is different because of the ambient sounds, you may have a recording of it but that is a poor substitution for experiencing it live in concert. The plebians would not understand the music of laying your forearm down on the piano to create what would otherwise be discordant noise, having a composer changes it and people purchase tickets to hear it.

So yeah. If all that bull**** is art, then so is AI art. Even not being actual intelligence, even just taking existing inputs and altering them, screw it, it's all art. Open the gates.

[Aquillion]

No, because you just shared something. If you altered it in any way, then yes, you'd have just done art, as you put it.This is an interesting and complicated question and comes down to which alterations are transformative.

As I mentioned above, one of the interesting things about AI art is that a lot of the actual transformative work isn't done by the person using the final generator; it's done by the person who builds and trains it.

I think that it's much easier to see where the actual "human element" that makes it (new) art comes from if you examine it from that angle. To produce a trained model, a human being has to (on some level) select what goes into it, then make numerous decisions about how they're going to train their model on it. All of these are manifestly artistic decisions made by a human being - they're deciding what qualifies as art; they're deciding (in a subjective way) what they want and don't want their model to produce, and so on.

It's like producing a collage, but (unless you completely screw up the process, which is possible) it's a much bigger, more complex, multidimensional collage. I think that most people would agree that it is at least possible for that to be a form of art that creates something new and interesting (caveat, of course; obviously not all will be, but that's true for anything - Sturgeon's Law applies.)

If you imagine a hypothetical future where there are actual famous or respected artists who use existing AI art technology - not hypothetical actually-intelligent AIs, but basically the stuff we have now - I think it's more likely to be people who create (or at least tweak and modify) their own models, because creating a model is where a lot of the actual artistic decisions lie.

The connections that a model makes are the "new" part; and they're genuinely interesting in the sense that they have the ability to comment meaningfully on existing art, on our visual world, and so on. Someone who trains the model is determining the rules for how those connections are structured, whereas someone who uses the model is exploring the connections that those rules resulted in.

(In that respect the people who say that it's not AI are technically correct - the actual interesting parts still ultimately come from human beings, just expanded on by powerful tools - but it's sort of a moot point because we use the term AI for similar things all the time. Videogame AIs are far simpler than this, say. AI researchers make the distinction between single-task "weak" AI, which is what we have now, and hypothetical "strong" AI, which is actually human-intelligent and which doesn't exist yet.)

[Dragonus45]

I wonder if it isn't more accurate to think of the AI in AI generated art not as equivalent to the painter of a painting but as the brush, paints, etc. The AI image generators don't decide they want to make and image of a cat, for example, but they are prompted to generate it by a user, as far as I know. So generating an image with AI is more equivalent to choosing paint vs. pencil or some other medium of expression.

I agree with this wholeheartedly, AI as a tool like a brush or typewriter is exactly where I am at.



So the kid says "ChatGPT, tell me a fairytale".


Ohhh, this is one of the more interesting thought experiments I have seen about AI. Unfortunately I think it lacks to much context. Both in what the story it actually tells looks like and how much if at all the core of how the AI works has changed.


So far, I believe the "put request into AI tool and literally post the unaltered result" isn't really art, and it definitely isn't drawing. But photographs and digital formats took a while to become art too... and frankly, I don't have an issue with them being used in general, especially non-profit uses such as generating initial images for your newest character. (Especially if you don't immediately have the money to afford commissions.)

Define altered though? Not trying to be pedantic here. I use the tools a lot for making character portraits for campaigns and I often take whatever the one image I think works best is and send it back in a few dozen times with tweaks to the request to get something even close. At what point in the feedback loop of modifying the image through the AI tool itself qualify as altered enough to be "art" if it you think it can be called that at all without having to have me personally make some modification. Which I am not capable of fundamentally.



No, because you just shared something. If you altered it in any way, then yes, you'd have just done art, as you put it.

I am firmly against gatekeeping art and music. Not to paint with too wide a brush here, but that has historically been bursting with elitism. Look at avant-garde art and music. Pollock tossing paint on canvas. Cage sitting at a piano for four and a half minutes. Once art and music becomes easily accessible to the common people, reproductions of works readily available, elitism demands that there be some form of it that is above the reach of those plebians. Nobody can fling paint like Pollock. Every performance of 4:33 is different because of the ambient sounds, you may have a recording of it but that is a poor substitution for experiencing it live in concert. The plebians would not understand the music of laying your forearm down on the piano to create what would otherwise be discordant noise, having a composer changes it and people purchase tickets to hear it.

So yeah. If all that bull**** is art, then so is AI art. Even not being actual intelligence, even just taking existing inputs and altering them, screw it, it's all art. Open the gates.

This also sums up exactly how I feel about a lot of this. Even leaving aside the more elitist "subjective" art crowd tearing their hair out at the idea of the masses having equal access to these new creation tools there are a lot of people I think who are just upset at the idea that a skillset they have just has less value now. I knew someone who had aspirations of being a professional photographer one day and would take forever and ever working on photos in photoshop, and the end result usually was pretty stunning even if it took forever. I once heard them complaining very aggressively about how Instagram filters were bull**** because they were letting people do all the work they had to learn to do in photoshop with a lot of hard work and practice and now everyone could just have these nice pictures, even said they though some other person they knew was just slapping them on photos for baby pictures they would shoot or something like that and was way more succesfull. Sure it was probably only at around 75 or 80% as good as the finished product from a professional but for most people that was more good enough and the bitterness about it was strong.

[Ionathus]

Noted that we never got to see what Roy wanted to talk to Durkon about in the previous comics.

Obviously we'll get back to it at some point. There are two possibilities here:

1) Roy wanted to talk to Durkon about his mission with Redcloak. Either an idea or to verify that Durkon isn't going to sabotage them again.

2) Roy had another idea that he wanted to try. Possibly similar to Elan talking to Durkon in the desert as a "secret plan" (calling Julio).

Though if he wanted to contact someone - who could that be? I assume someone should inform Hinjo that Lien and O-Chul are safe at the very least.

I think Durkon still has the 1 Sending left, right? He suggested using it on Redcloak but when Roy nixed that plan, I think he just kept it in his back pocket...hmm....


Epic-level Wizard: It appears to be a common Holy Symbol of the clergy of the Dark One. Not one particularly fancy or anything. The kind an acolyte would get the day they receive their White Cloak.
Epic-level Paladin: So this is...
Epic-level Wizard: ... completely useless to anyone who isn't a Cleric of the Dark One, yes. And those who are probably already have their own.
Epic-level Rogue: You're telling me this is a masterly crafted replica of a random piece of junk gear?
Epic-level Wizard: Of a very specific piece of junk gear. The divination tells me that most of effort went into simulating the wear and tear.
Epic-level Rogue: Who the hell came up with this adventure!?

DM: I'M GLAD YOU ASKED *pulls out a massive 7-book volume of a new sourcebook* Alright everybody, now we're going to play the prequel campaign to see how we got here, I've entitled it "Order of the Stick"...

[bunsen_h]

There's a classic SF story, "A Work of Art" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Work_of_Art), by James Blish. In it, a couple of "mind sculptors" attempt to reproduce the mind of Richard Strauss as a kind of overlay on a test subject who has no musical talent whatsoever. The "Strauss" composes a new opera, but eventually realizes that it's hack work, entirely derivative of the original Strauss pieces that had been included in the overlay. The audience for the performance isn't sufficiently discerning to realize this, and they wildly applaud... for the "mind sculptors".

[Provengreil]

I think Durkon still has the 1 Sending left, right? He suggested using it on Redcloak but when Roy nixed that plan, I think he just kept it in his back pocket...hmm....



DM: I'M GLAD YOU ASKED *pulls out a massive 7-book volume of a new sourcebook* Alright everybody, now we're going to play the prequel campaign to see how we got here, I've entitled it "Order of the Stick"...

And thus the new webcomic, "DM of the Stick", began.

[Laurentio III]

DM: I'M GLAD YOU ASKED *pulls out a massive 7-book volume of a new sourcebook* Alright everybody, now we're going to play the prequel campaign to see how we got here, I've entitled it "Order of the Stick"...
Players: «Seems interesting. We do keep our characters' level and stuff, right?»
DM: «Nope. It's a prequel, so you'll play at a lower level with standard equipment.»
Players: «Boooring! Plus, we would already know to much, so it would fall in metagaming.»
DM: «Uhm... what if you are self-aware about being in a roleplaying game, so you can do metagaming without being cheating?»
Players: «Sounds better.»
DM: «And, you play with one less finger.»
Players: «What.»

[hroþila]

Meh, I think all this talk about what is and isn't art is an unnecessary distraction. The issue should not be whether or not AI art is actual art, or whether it looks crappy or good, or whether the texts it writes can be interesting. There's plenty of aesthetically appealing AI art out there, and presumably it will get better in this regard in the furure. The real issue is how AI art is created, which is by stealing other people's art.

[Precure]

Players: «Seems interesting. We do keep our characters' level and stuff, right?»
DM: «Nope. It's a prequel, so you'll play at a lower level with standard equipment.»
Players: «Boooring! Plus, we would already know to much, so it would fall in metagaming.»
DM: «Uhm... what if you are self-aware about being in a roleplaying game, so you can do metagaming without being cheating?»
Players: «Sounds better.»
DM: «And, you play with one less finger.»
Players: «What.»

Are they four fingered?


As I mentioned above, one of the interesting things about AI art is that a As I mentioned above, one of the interesting things about AI art is that a lot of the actual transformative work isn't done by the person using the final generator; it's done by the person who builds and trains it.

Or by the people who created the stolen art in the first place.

[Aquillion]

Define altered though? Not trying to be pedantic here. I use the tools a lot for making character portraits for campaigns and I often take whatever the one image I think works best is and send it back in a few dozen times with tweaks to the request to get something even close. At what point in the feedback loop of modifying the image through the AI tool itself qualify as altered enough to be "art" if it you think it can be called that at all without having to have me personally make some modification. Which I am not capable of fundamentally.It also starts to get more complex when you talk about inpainting and other methods that give more direct control over the output and how it's structured.

Again, I think the comparison to a collage is a fairly good one, albeit a much more complex and intricate collage that combines things in really weird and abstract ways.

I also think that, as far as the "is it original?" issue some people raised above goes - collage, the closest comparison, is a complex issue that depends on how you are using it, so to some extent AI art is as well; but all but the most poorly-designed and poorly-trained AI art generators are going to be more transformative than a collage, by their very nature, based on both the artistic decisions made when the model is trained and the ones made when it is used. And any specific output ought to contain less that is clearly identifiable as anything in the source. "Distinctness from its training set" is one of the most important goals when creating this sort of neural-network based AI and has been for decades, after all; that much they have down fairly well.

The innumerable images used to form the model's weights are present on some conceptual level but not on the literal and direct level they are in an actual collage.

[Dragonus45]

Meh, I think all this talk about what is and isn't art is an unnecessary distraction. The issue should not be whether or not AI art is actual art, or whether it looks crappy or good, or whether the texts it writes can be interesting. There's plenty of aesthetically appealing AI art out there, and presumably it will get better in this regard in the furure. The real issue is how AI art is created, which is by stealing other people's art.

It's no more theft than if I look at someone else's art and remember for inspiration.

[Peelee]

Define altered though?

Altered is altered. Im defining art, not intellectual property rights or ownership. Print the Mona Lisa on a grain of rice? Ya done made art. Let the courts decide the legalities.

[Dragonus45]

Altered is altered. Im defining art, not intellectual property rights or ownership. Print the Mona Lisa on a grain of rice? Ya done made art. Let the courts decide the legalities.

I agree with you, but I at least thought the post I was responding to was talking about art in the context that AI art is only art if the someone then modifies it in some way and I was curious if making alterations also though the same AI tool would still count.

[hroþila]

It's no more theft than if I look at someone else's art and remember for inspiration.
It's really not comparable because AI doesn't work as a human brain. AIs reuse the art they've been fed rather than recreate it on their own.

[Fish]

So yeah. If all that bull**** is art, then so is AI art. Even not being actual intelligence, even just taking existing inputs and altering them, screw it, it's all art. Open the gates.
You might also mention Marcel Duchamp, who submitted a common urinal as a sculpture and called it "Fountain" (1917). Of course, he was asking people to do exactly what we are doing now, which is to ask the question "what is art?"

To me, the key element of art is representational intent. In my view, art is created intentionally: to depict a subject, to evoke an emotion, to communicate a message, to raise awareness of an issue, to capture a moment, etc.

We don't consider a bird or a sunset art, not in and of themselves. We probably also wouldn't consider a deer trail or a bird's nest to be art; even though they were created by an intelligence, the trail and the nest don't represent something. They are what they are: a place to stay and a way to get somewhere. Likewise, your own leg bone isn't art. You made it, but you didn't really mean to, and it doesn't really stand for anything (thank you, I'll be here all week).

It's harder to categorize the roll of some dice, or a graph of a parabola you did for your calculus homework. You intended to roll the dice but had no control over the result; and the parabola wasn't meant to be anything other than what it is. To me, those are algorithms, not art. You set in motion some mechanistic thing, and the result is what it is. The results are not yours. Just like a Google search, the software takes a bunch of known data, chops it up, and feeds back a result in response to your prompt. Is a Google search art?

I would view the AI, in and of itself, as an algorithm. It has no representational intent of its own. The training stage feeds in art created elsewhere (by humans), which is tagged (by humans) with a gold standard describing what each image consists of. It later spits out a result according to the algorithm it was coded with (by humans). Feed it bad art and the AI spits out more of the same. Give it nonsensical labels and it spits out nonsense. It is a function f(x), where humans wrote the function and left x up to the user. Its results are only as artistic, or art-like, as the humans who decided what information goes into its brain, and the humans who created the art to begin with.

Look at it this way: if I spray some paint onto a canvas, that might be considered "art." If I then interpose a metal mesh in between the spray and the canvas, it changes how the paint is distributed. Is the metal mesh now the artist, and not me?

Therefore, I would say AI art is definitely art — but the AI is not the artist.

[Dragonus45]

It's really not comparable because AI doesn't work as a human brain. AIs reuse the art they've been fed rather than recreate it on their own.

Arguably so does every artist alive who has ever seen anyone else's art. Which outside of a few true outsider artists to ever live is all of them.



To me, the key element of art is representational intent. In my view, art is created intentionally: to depict a subject, to evoke an emotion, to communicate a message, to raise awareness of an issue, to capture a moment, etc.


Much like the Giant's famous quote about the value of fantasy I find this idea too restrictive. I think things have value just for existing in their own right independent of if they have any deeper meaning intentional or otherwise.

[Fish]

Much like the Giant's famous quote about the value of fantasy I find this idea too restrictive. I think things have value just for existing in their own right independent of if they have any deeper meaning intentional or otherwise.
Art doesn't have to have a deep meaning. Like I said, it could just depict a subject. It can just be "here's a picture of a kitty cat." This is why a picture of a cat is art, and a cat is just a cat.

[Dragonus45]

Art doesn't have to have a deep meaning. Like I said, it could just depict a subject. It can just be "here's a picture of a kitty cat." This is why a picture of a cat is art, and a cat is just a cat.

I don't know, if a beautiful sunset by the beach is beautiful why wouldn't it be art? Just because no one happened to snap a picture of it? What about a spider web? Some of those can get elaborately beautiful despite there being no real intent or thought beyond basic instincts and drawing in prey.

[Jasdoif]

I just looked up "beautiful art" on google. Clicked the first option that came up:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQGW5MnFU5pmb3Wj61w7HVEb3z7UnTEL AdQr5pfnBDGA683LcH96U8LR-bSp9z2zjyjJVU&usqp=CAU

Did I just do art? I wanted to have "beautiful art" to post here. Do I have some claim to being an artist involved in creating this piece?You have decided this image fits your vision of refuting the idea that searching for an image constitutes creating art, assembled a narrative around it, transformed that narrative into characters in a text field, and presented it to the world in the form of the post I'm excerpting.

So yes: in taking the image out of isolation, and attaching it to an effort of your own creation, you've produced art that you have a valid claim of being an artist involved in creating.


In case that came across too blithely....


So, I mentioned edge cases a lot here, so it's time to make it clear that I'm definitely not saying AI can't be used while making art. I'm not saying AI generated imagery cannot be used in an art-piece. I'm saying "AI art" isn't a thing, and that we're currently comfortable calling plenty of things that aren't art art, and provide categorical defenses of AI "art" that don't stand to reason."Randomly-generated" overtook the far more accurate "procedurally-generated"; because "random" is easier to understand and that was more important when implementations spread outside specialized field. This situation is not any different....both because "AI" is fundamentally creating procedural rules based on other procedural rules analyzing input; and because "AI Art" is pithy, alliterative, and much shorter than "AI-generated construct modeled to approximate art".

Not that this makes it any less annoying, mind you, but knowing why aids in critical targeting.

[brian 333]

This is an interesting and complicated question and comes down to which alterations are transformative.

As I mentioned above, one of the interesting things about AI art is that a lot of the actual transformative work isn't done by the person using the final generator; it's done by the person who builds and trains it.

I think that it's much easier to see where the actual "human element" that makes it (new) art comes from if you examine it from that angle. To produce a trained model, a human being has to (on some level) select what goes into it, then make numerous decisions about how they're going to train their model on it. All of these are manifestly artistic decisions made by a human being - they're deciding what qualifies as art; they're deciding (in a subjective way) what they want and don't want their model to produce, and so on.

It's like producing a collage, but (unless you completely screw up the process, which is possible) it's a much bigger, more complex, multidimensional collage. I think that most people would agree that it is at least possible for that to be a form of art that creates something new and interesting (caveat, of course; obviously not all will be, but that's true for anything - Sturgeon's Law applies.)

If you imagine a hypothetical future where there are actual famous or respected artists who use existing AI art technology - not hypothetical actually-intelligent AIs, but basically the stuff we have now - I think it's more likely to be people who create (or at least tweak and modify) their own models, because creating a model is where a lot of the actual artistic decisions lie.

The connections that a model makes are the "new" part; and they're genuinely interesting in the sense that they have the ability to comment meaningfully on existing art, on our visual world, and so on. Someone who trains the model is determining the rules for how those connections are structured, whereas someone who uses the model is exploring the connections that those rules resulted in.

(In that respect the people who say that it's not AI are technically correct - the actual interesting parts still ultimately come from human beings, just expanded on by powerful tools - but it's sort of a moot point because we use the term AI for similar things all the time. Videogame AIs are far simpler than this, say. AI researchers make the distinction between single-task "weak" AI, which is what we have now, and hypothetical "strong" AI, which is actually human-intelligent and which doesn't exist yet.)

The gist of this is that the parents and teachers of a child who grows up to do art are the real artists.

In the context given the above description may be valid, but how long will it be, given the acceleration of computing power and complexity?

Final thought: art is that which is made by hand. Knapping flint is art. Designing a skyscraper is art. Taking care of a sick person is art. An artist, (or artisan,) uses accumulated knowledge and the skill of his body to perform his art.

So, is the 40001st clay pot, made exactly the way the potter's employer required, a work of art? What if it is the only one ever found by an archaeologist?

Final thought:
AI can generate 'art' once it learns to do so by intent rather than programming. If the intent is external, it isn't creating, it is fabricating.

[Peelee]

The gist of this is that the parents and teachers of a child who grows up to do art are the real artists.

Homelander told me i was the real hero once.

[Tzardok]

I don't know, if a beautiful sunset by the beach is beautiful why wouldn't it be art? Just because no one happened to snap a picture of it? What about a spider web? Some of those can get elaborately beautiful despite there being no real intent or thought beyond basic instincts and drawing in prey.

I think by equating beauty with art you are making the term art at once too wide (if everything beautiful is art, why use the term art in the first place?) and too narrow (things can be art that aren't beautiful. Horror movies for example).

My personal definition of art is (obviously) informed by my native language: the German words "Kunst" (art) and "Können" (skill, expertise) have a common origin. IMO, for something to count as art it must be done skillfully. If you took some rando from the street and he could do something just as well, this something isn't art. Anyone can sit for a few minutes in front of a piano without playing or splatter some paint on a canvas. That's not art. True art requires effort, training, dedication and maybe talent. Note that this is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. A thing can be done with expertise without being art, but without expertise its not art.

Now, what does that mean for AI? Heck if I know. I tend to no, at the current development state. An AI can be a work of art, but I don't think AI as it is currently can be described as having skill.

[Aquillion]

The gist of this is that the parents and teachers of a child who grows up to do art are the real artists.

In the context given the above description may be valid, but how long will it be, given the acceleration of computing power and complexity?

Final thought: art is that which is made by hand. Knapping flint is art. Designing a skyscraper is art. Taking care of a sick person is art. An artist, (or artisan,) uses accumulated knowledge and the skill of his body to perform his art.

So, is the 40001st clay pot, made exactly the way the potter's employer required, a work of art? What if it is the only one ever found by an archaeologist?

Final thought:
AI can generate 'art' once it learns to do so by intent rather than programming. If the intent is external, it isn't creating, it is fabricating.Well, my point is that the person who trains a model is doing it "by hand". Their overarching artistic decisions in terms of both selecting the training set and how the training process uses it are vital to defining the weights (and implied connections) that form the completed model, which are the new / added "artistic" aspect of a model that go beyond what's just present in its training set.

Those decisions have to ultimately be done "by hand" today (to the extent that anything that is done using computers is by hand.) You can't just pass them to another algorithm endlessly - ultimately the algorithm is written, and the source material that goes into it selected, by a human being. It reflects their preferences, choices, prejudices and beliefs about what does and doesn't constitute art - especially since these models are the result of massive amounts of time these people spent revising them until they got output that they, subjectively, decided was "good."

This is important to understand for AI in general, not just for AI as it relates to art - ultimately, it still reflects the decisions made by a human, just on a larger and more complicated scale.

Now, how long will this be valid for? It's a reasonable question but at least when I was taught how AI worked - which was admittedly some years ago - there was a general consensus that neural-network approaches like those used here aren't actually likely to reach "strong" AI on their own. That is to say, just pouring more computing power and complexity into it might make it faster and better at the specific task it's trained for, but it's not going to become sapient from that alone. These AIs are (subjectively) cool and can be used for some neat (and some less-neat) things, but there's still an unknowable gap between this and actual strong AI. Maybe someone will have a breakthrough and bridge that gap tomorrow; maybe it'll never happen in our lifetimes. But it's not inevitably going to happen - there's still important pieces missing, ones more complex than can be bridged by simple, inevitable advances in computing power.

As things are now, though, the "intent" for an AI comes from two places - the person who built or trained the model, and the person using the model. Certainly some people do one or the both thoughtlessly or carelessly (Sturgeon's Law applies, again; most of what's produced with these tools will probably suck, because most of what people produce via any method sucks.)

But I don't think it's fair to completely dismiss those contributions out of hand, or to say (as some people do) that they axiomatically add nothing over the contents of the training set. Whether an individual model and application of that model adds enough to be considered transformative and new and to have value as a work of art on its own is a subjective individual value judgment (and sometimes a legal question).

Like I said, it's like a collage. Some of them are going to be mishmashes that don't really do anything with their source material, adding nothing; and some of them will transform them into something completely new and different, gaining unique meaning from the intent of the people who built, trained, and used the model.

[Dragonus45]

I think by equating beauty with art you are making the term art at once too wide (if everything beautiful is art, why use the term art in the first place?) and too narrow (things can be art that aren't beautiful. Horror movies for example).

My personal definition of art is (obviously) informed by my native language: the German words "Kunst" (art) and "Können" (skill, expertise) have a common origin. IMO, for something to count as art it must be done skillfully. If you took some rando from the street and he could do something just as well, this something isn't art. Anyone can sit for a few minutes in front of a piano without playing or splatter some paint on a canvas. That's not art. True art requires effort, training, dedication and maybe talent. Note that this is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. A thing can be done with expertise without being art, but without expertise its not art.

Now, what does that mean for AI? Heck if I know. I tend to no, at the current development state. An AI can be a work of art, but I don't think AI as it is currently can be described as having skill.

So went with those because they were generic not because they were specifically beautiful. I strongly disagree with the idea that if it accessible for anyone to it isn't art. The kind of democratization that AI brings to break that barrier down is that I am most excited about when I talk about the technology.

[Tzardok]

So went with those because they were generic not because they were specifically beautiful. I strongly disagree with the idea that if it accessible for anyone to it isn't art. The kind of democratization that AI brings to break that barrier down is that I am most excited about when I talk about the technology.

I'm not talking about accessibility. Anyone can appreciate art. But if anything can be called art, if art isn't special, the whole term loses its meaning.

[Jasdoif]

My personal definition of art is (obviously) informed by my native language: the German words "Kunst" (art) and "Können" (skill, expertise) have a common origin."Art" and "artifice" have a similar relationship.

[Dragonus45]

I'm not talking about accessibility. Anyone can appreciate art. But if anything can be called art, if art isn't special, the whole term loses its meaning.

Hmmm, I think I disagree with the basic idea of that. I just don't think someone has to be special to be art.

[brian 333]

Well, my point is that the person who trains a model is doing it "by hand". Their overarching artistic decisions in terms of both selecting the training set and how the training process uses it are vital to defining the weights (and implied connections) that form the completed model, which are the new / added "artistic" aspect of a model that go beyond what's just present in its training set.

Those decisions have to ultimately be done "by hand" today (to the extent that anything that is done using computers is by hand.) You can't just pass them to another algorithm endlessly - ultimately the algorithm is written, and the source material that goes into it selected, by a human being. It reflects their preferences, choices, prejudices and beliefs about what does and doesn't constitute art - especially since these models are the result of massive amounts of time these people spent revising them until they got output that they, subjectively, decided was "good."

This is important to understand for AI in general, not just for AI as it relates to art - ultimately, it still reflects the decisions made by a human, just on a larger and more complicated scale.

Now, how long will this be valid for? It's a reasonable question but at least when I was taught how AI worked - which was admittedly some years ago - there was a general consensus that neural-network approaches like those used here aren't actually likely to reach "strong" AI on their own. That is to say, just pouring more computing power and complexity into it might make it faster and better at the specific task it's trained for, but it's not going to become sapient from that alone. These AIs are (subjectively) cool and can be used for some neat (and some less-neat) things, but there's still an unknowable gap between this and actual strong AI. Maybe someone will have a breakthrough and bridge that gap tomorrow; maybe it'll never happen in our lifetimes. But it's not inevitably going to happen - there's still important pieces missing, ones more complex than can be bridged by simple, inevitable advances in computing power.

As things are now, though, the "intent" for an AI comes from two places - the person who built or trained the model, and the person using the model. Certainly some people do one or the both thoughtlessly or carelessly (Sturgeon's Law applies, again; most of what's produced with these tools will probably suck, because most of what people produce via any method sucks.)

But I don't think it's fair to completely dismiss those contributions out of hand, or to say (as some people do) that they axiomatically add nothing over the contents of the training set. Whether an individual model and application of that model adds enough to be considered transformative and new and to have value as a work of art on its own is a subjective individual value judgment (and sometimes a legal question).

Like I said, it's like a collage. Some of them are going to be mishmashes that don't really do anything with their source material, adding nothing; and some of them will transform them into something completely new and different, gaining unique meaning from the intent of the people who built, trained, and used the model.

The artist is the programmer, the art is the AI itself. The products made by that AI are like the products the Phillips screw making machine produces. Raw materials go in, product and waste come out.

Any artistry performed by current AI is more like sausage making. The person selects and mixes the ingredients, the sausage machine grinds it up and fills the casing, and the person cooks, cures, or otherwise preserves the sausage for later consumption.

When a machine can choose to create absent any order to do so and can choose the materials and tools, and dictate for itself what the output will be, then it can create art.

[Tzardok]

Hmmm, I think I disagree with the basic idea of that. I just don't think someone has to be special to be art.

You propably mean "to make" art. And I'd reverse it. It's not "special people can make art", it's "if you can make art, you are special". Because art is something wonderous and special, and so the act of creating it must be special too.

Edit: All of that doesn't mean I'm against AI "art". It can be pretty and interesting to look at. I just feel it disingenious to call it "art".

[brian 333]

Homelander told me i was the real hero once.

404 Error: Reference not found.


Hmmm, I think I disagree with the basic idea of that. I just don't think someone has to be special to be art.

So, the 40001st identical pot made to the specifications of the owner of the pottery is art? I would consider it an artifact, or a thing made by a craftsman, but art?

Am I creating art when I get on the dance floor and mix up moves from the many dances I've learned? (Warning, my girlfriend would disagree with my calling it dancing!)

[Fyraltari]

My personal definition of art is (obviously) informed by my native language: the German words "Kunst" (art) and "Können" (skill, expertise) have a common origin."Art" and "artifice" have a similar relationship.

If you've wondered what the difference between "the fine arts" and "the arts" is, it's because "art" used to mean any craft whatsoever and the associated skills.

Hence The Art of War, it's not about the beauty of cleaving your fellow human beings in two, it's about the ways to do it most efficiently at large scales.

[Wintermoot]

Can you all just agree that "art" has no universal definition that everyone is willing to use, so using it as a term in communication is problematic.

Speaking only of my own personal definition:

when I was in college back in the 90s, digital art was new(ish) to the world. I was getting a degree in traditional art and taking classes in watercolor, oil and acrylic painting, figure drawing and the like. There was a wee lab set up with four or five computers where some people were working on digital art.

I remember this same debate about people painting with traditional paints and brushes, versus people doing digital work. I remember at the time watching the guys in the computer lab and thinking "well they are certainly putting in a lot of effort, just like I am"

Then I graduated and went out into the real world and eventually ended up with my own cintiq tablet and manga studio and gimp and doing my own digital art.

So I look at people talking about this new AI generated art and part of me thinks "these sound like the same arguments used against digital art back in the day"

But as someone who is versed in both traditional hands-on art, and digital art, I -do- think there is a difference between equating those, both of which require skill, training, technique, and practice to master the tools and craft with this new AI generated art which, largely, consists of asking the computer to make something and waiting to see if its cool or not when its made.

I don't think i'll ever get to the point that I see that AI-wrangler as the same level of "artist" as I do someone painting or crafting digital art by themselves.

Even when I am doing digital art and using shortcut tools like blur or rub or so on, it still requires effort to know how to use and and how not to use it.

I'm not just saying "I want a picture of the easter bunny, crucified, with his blood running down and coloring eggs gathered at his feet" and seeing what the computer comes up with. Then asking for it a slightly different way to "hone" the image.

and when someone who "is really good" at asking his AI to make pictures, ends up with a studio show, selling his work, I'll probably skip it.

[Peelee]

404 Error: Reference not found.
I highly recommend the Amazon Prime TV show (not the comic) The Boys. I tried searching youtube for a trailer or teaser for the last 20 minutes or so but couldn't find one that didn't contain graphic language, graphic violence, graphic nudity, graphic language, graphic violence, and graphic language.

But it's really good.

ETA: There is an in-universe commercial (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KxV9EUaIjAA) that's tame enough to link here.

ETA: And one with Homelander (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mncUK1dtmyg)!

[Dragonus45]

So, the 40001st identical pot made to the specifications of the owner of the pottery is art? I would consider it an artifact, or a thing made by a craftsman, but art?

Am I creating art when I get on the dance floor and mix up moves from the many dances I've learned? (Warning, my girlfriend would disagree with my calling it dancing!)

I've called the writing of technical manuals art before, so yes the pottery is art. Just like your terrible terrible dancing is art. Just like my terrible terrible dancing is art. Everyone's terrible terrible dancing is art.

[hroþila]

Arguably so does every artist alive who has ever seen anyone else's art.
No, it's fundamentally different. The AI is quite literally scanning copyrighted art and then replicating its pixels elsewhere in a statistically probable distribution. It can't do anything that hasn't already been done in some way somewhere in its dataset. A human brain/artist works in a fundamentally different way.

Arguably.

[brian 333]

I've called the writing of technical manuals art before, so yes the pottery is art. Just like your terrible terrible dancing is art. Just like my terrible terrible dancing is art. Everyone's terrible terrible dancing is art.

Technical manuals are art! The amount of imagination and dedication to craft required to produce absolute gibberish accompanied by uninformative, mislabeled, or simply inaccurate drawings of the equipment is staggering. 200 monkeys with typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare's sonnets, but they will never reproduce a well written tech manual.

[gbaji]

Even when I am doing digital art and using shortcut tools like blur or rub or so on, it still requires effort to know how to use and and how not to use it.

This. I have a friend who is an artist. And yeah, I suppose it depends on what kind of art we are talking about, but assuming some sort of visual art (painting, sculpture, etc), there is a lot of training about space, color, shapes, etc, that artists have to learn to be able to produce things that are both pleasing to the eye *and* convey whatever idea they were trying to get across.

Anyone with a camera can take a picture. And they might even occasionally take a really great picture. But it takes an artist photographer to know how to take pictures so that they are great pictures instead of just doing it accidentally. That goes double or more for drawings, paintings, etc.

That's not to say that AI might be able to do that. But at least right now? The most it can do is reproduce the subject of the work, and not really the artistry of the work. AI right now is like someone who can technically produce a shape, or image, or whatever, but doesn't have a clue *why* you would do that in the fist place.


Technical manuals are art! The amount of imagination and dedication to craft required to produce absolute gibberish accompanied by uninformative, mislabeled, or simply inaccurate drawings of the equipment is staggering. 200 monkeys with typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare's sonnets, but they will never reproduce a well written tech manual.

For that definition of "well written", yeah. It's one of those areas where you hear people make fun of technical manuals and think "they can't really be that bad". Oh yeah... The jokes you've heard? Not even close to the reality.

[Peelee]

This. I have a friend who is an artist. And yeah, I suppose it depends on what kind of art we are talking about, but assuming some sort of visual art (painting, sculpture, etc), there is a lot of training about space, color, shapes, etc, that artists have to learn to be able to produce things that are both pleasing to the eye *and* convey whatever idea they were trying to get across.

Anyone with a camera can take a picture. And they might even occasionally take a really great picture. But it takes an artist photographer to know how to take pictures so that they are great pictures instead of just doing it accidentally. That goes double or more for drawings, paintings, etc.

That's not to say that AI might be able to do that. But at least right now? The most it can do is reproduce the subject of the work, and not really the artistry of the work. AI right now is like someone who can technically produce a shape, or image, or whatever, but doesn't have a clue *why* you would do that in the fist place.



For that definition of "well written", yeah. It's one of those areas where you hear people make fun of technical manuals and think "they can't really be that bad". Oh yeah... The jokes you've heard? Not even close to the reality.
I can make art just as well as your artist friend. I can take pictures just as well as my friend with a terminal degree in photography who teaches photography at a university. I make art just as well as they do.

My art may be notably worse and nobody will want to buy it or even look at it, but its just as much art as theirs is. Their skill lets them make significantly better art. Their skill doesn't make my art "not art".

AI art is still art.

[Jasdoif]

If you've wondered what the difference between "the fine arts" and "the arts" is, it's because "art" used to mean any craft whatsoever and the associated skills.And "artifact" retains this meaning, an object resulting from application of a craft (a fact from an art, basically).



So, the 40001st identical pot made to the specifications of the owner of the pottery is art?I've called the writing of technical manuals art before, so yes the pottery is art.....Technical manuals are most certainly art; they're technical information arranged with the vision that the presentation will be useful for conveying to another human. What I think brian's trying to hint at is the generation of a purely functional object, whose design is devoid of any non-utilitarian meaning. I think uniform bricks would be a more suitable example, myself...you can readily arrange or modify them into art, but one uniform brick in isolation isn't art.


Since we seem to getting into the weeds of definitions here...."Art" (or if you prefer, "works of art") is tangible things used to convey things that can't be conveyed tangibly. An attempt to send subjective messages, which by the nature of the subjectivity doesn't exist for an individual outside that individuals' own conscious experience, by arranging objective things to imply them through the shared nature of humanity. (Am I sounding bombastic by trying to define an aspect of sharing consciousness that's so ubiquitous it rarely needs to be said?) An object without an intent is not art. An intent without an object is not art.

The word "art"'s transition from meaning any skill to focusing on this type of skill is quite fitting: It's the use of objective means to elicit something that doesn't exist objectively and is subject to the mental whims of the audience, however niche or widespread that is. Humanity's gotten quite good at measuring objective measurements more and more accurately; things these particular skills cannot take advantage of. Art can be banal and art can be bad, same as any result of any craft; but "what makes good rat" is a question that's never gotten a truly definitive answer, and as long as humanity exists and civilization advances it never will.

[nleseul]

I can't help but notice that this thread sure is starting to sound a lot like the Standard Dispute (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb/p/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE) over whether a falling tree in a vacant forest makes a sound or not.

Remember, words are merely tools (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb/p/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp) for making (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb/p/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg) inferences (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb/p/yFDKvfN6D87Tf5J9f) about future events or hidden properties based on visible properties. If you can't agree about whether algorithmically-generated images fit in the category of "art" or not, it may be because you're trying to use that category in order to make different inferences or predictions.

So it's worth asking, how would the hypothetical world in which these images qualify as "art" differ from the hypothetical world where they fail to qualify as "art"? What observable events do you predict would actually transpire differently, based on that particular category membership? If there aren't any, then maybe you're arguing over a phantom question that doesn't really matter one way or the other.

Also:


but "what makes good rat" is a question that's never gotten a truly definitive answer, and as long as humanity exists and civilization advances it never will.

Dwarfs do have a fairly definitive answer to that question, though: ketchup (https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Dwarfs#Cuisine).

[brian 333]

I can make art just as well as your artist friend. I can take pictures just as well as my friend with a terminal degree in photography who teaches photography at a university. I make art just as well as they do.

My art may be notably worse and nobody will want to buy it or even look at it, but its just as much art as theirs is. Their skill lets them make significantly better art. Their skill doesn't make my art "not art".

AI art is still art.

Except this: you intended to make something. AI would not produce anything absent prompts to do so and instructions on how to do it. In its current state AI can never have intent to create.

Does a waffle iron that produces Jackie Gleason's face in a waffle create art? Does a cow patty that splats in the shape of a 3d North America prove the cow is an artist? Does a bullet scar that looks like a human nipple make the guy who shot me an artist?

Cool things happen. Not all cool things are art. The intent to create something is, in my opinion, a necessary element.