Stumbled upon "Goblins"

[The Cats]

Just finished reading the entire story thus far. Gotta say, it's a new favorite. I thought it was just gonna be another silly joke-a-day kinda thing, but hot dang if it ain't epic!

[Admiral_Kelly]

Uhgg... Goblins...

Unfunny. DnD jokes are way overused. Theme is overused. The 'message' about discrimination makes me want to hurl. Too many goblins getting maimed for no reason.

Art is good; I'll give the author that.

Everything else... really disappoints me for such a webcomic that is oh-so-praised.

[The Cats]

You pointed out like a million flaws yet didn't even touch on the one thing that makes this comic awesome: The story. I mean jeez, there's like three going on at once and each is better than the other! (I don't now how that works, it just does.)

[Admiral_Kelly]

Actually; the story was one of the factors that put me off at the close of the first 'story arc'. The plotlines were way too branched out and unrelated to eachother. Additionally; the comic is so entrenched in a DnD campaign that it is hard to take any story it portrays seriously. And I could not find any of the characters likable.

[Trazoi]

I find Goblins to be fairly entertaining. I also like how the quality has improved from the early pages by large degrees; it's inspiring to anyone who wishes to start a webcomic as a method for self-improvement.

I find the story and characters to be good, and I care about the main cast. My main gripe is that it takes so long to update and move the story along.

[Jayngfet]

Don't we have a thread on this?

[Gundato]

We actually have two or three threads already.

[Gez]

The comic has potential. However, I don't like it much. First, I don't like the look of his goblins. Then I find the "let's take a D&D setting and inverse the alignment niches of the characters, so that stereotypically evil people (goblins, orcs, ogres, etc.) are good while stereotypically good people (humans, elves, dwarves, paladins) are evil" approach kinda meh. If it's a rant at the manichean alignment system from D&D, there were shorter, simpler, more convincing ways to do it than by going all bizarro world. And finally there's the stuff that just doesn't make sense.

[BRC]

I don't actually mind the "Goblins" story premise, sure it's unoriginal, but it's more of a general concept than a specific story that is being unoriginal, if we restricted ourselves to completally original concepts there wouldn't have been any fantasy after Tolkien or any sci-fi after Asimov.

[Kurald Galain]

Uhgg... Goblins...

Unfunny. DnD jokes are way overused. Theme is overused. The 'message' about discrimination makes me want to hurl. Too many goblins getting maimed for no reason.

Art is good; I'll give the author that.

Everything else... really disappoints me for such a webcomic that is oh-so-praised.

I agree with all of that, except the bit about the art.

Good story? Come on, people! The characters are one-dimensional cliches, the plot is essentially a series of dei ex machina, the subplots are completely unrelated, and the thing as a whole moves slower than the crossbreed between a one-legged turtle turtle and a backwards-crawling snail.

Tempts Fate is fun, I'll give him that. The rest of the comic is just meh with a capital H.

[EvilElitest]

Am i the only fan of the comic other than the OP? I find the comic one of the thigns taht D&D really needs, in depth story line, an intelligently approached premise, complex characters ideas, and well done fight scenes
form
EE

[Winterwind]

No, I like it too.
I like the tiny details he puts into the world, the scenery (don't tell me that landscape with the waterfalls and the strange animals in the air wasn't beautiful), I like the characters and how they are presented (yes, they may be stereotypes - but they are executed sufficiently well, in my humble opinion, to demonstrate why these stereotypes became popular in the first place, and therefore are a good thing), and I find the story interesting and, as it seems so far, well thought-out.

[Sneak]

I used to read it. It was actually fairly good.

The problem is, it took forever to update. This might have been okay, but when it takes at least 10 comics to get through one gory battle (without any dialogue or humor, might I add), a one update a week pace just doesn't cut it.

[Tom_Violence]

I think I got about as far as the yellow one getting the stupidly massive axe before I got a bit tired of it. It was fun for a while, but I found that with it updating so slowly I couldn't actually remember what was going on without having to re-read the last half a dozen or so strips.

[Burley]

I'll admit that it does take a while to update, but that is my only gripe.

And, it's a little ridiculous for people to say that the jokes are lame and all that, because...well, have you read OotS? It's great now, but looking back at some of the first strips, I groan. Same cheesy jokes and puns.
And, while I'm comparing my two favorite gaming strips, has anybody read OotS: SoD? Cause...that's basically the whole Alignment swap thing, too. At least, that's how I took it.
Goblins doesn't change alignments. The tribe of goblins that has Dies right now is considered evil, because of their world domination thing. The tribe that the main protagonists are from, on the other hand, are only out in their warband because tradition dictates that it must be so. They don't attack anything. They're just chillin' and tryin' to survive. Sure, it's a look at a different perspective, but it's completely true that group of people (or monsters) can ruin it for the rest.
(In my own D&D campaign, I had a troupe of Goblin Scouts, which were actually like girl scouts, try to sell the players Goblin Scout Cookies. Sure, the cookies were made of various animal bits, but that was no reason for them to kill them all and loot their Cookie Sales money.)

[stm177]

I keep up with Goblins, but it's not the best webcomic out there. It's not even the best RPG comic out there. I was hoping that there'd be more than a role reversal between the humans and the goblins.

I like more complex motivations rather than just a plain good-evil, sane-insane dichotomy.

Since it sounds like I'm bashing the comic, I'll add that I do like most of the art, and that the cursed paladin named Kore intrigues me.

[The Cats]

Yeah, I want a swivel shield like he's got.

[BRC]

The slowness of the updates and the jumping around of the story is the big problem. The artwork isn't awe-inspiring enough for a single battle to be entertaining, and while the plots are good, They take several pages to move at all. So The standard pattern is somthing like this

Week 1: Plot Point introduced in subplot A
Week 2: no comic, delays
Week 3: fight scene starts, Complains kills somthing
Week 4: Fight scene continues, Chief kills somthing
Week 5: Fight scene continues, THAC0 kills somthing
Week 7: Fight scene continues, Big Ears kills somthing
Week 8: Fight scene continues, Complains kills somthing else, a minor development occurs
Week 9: No comic, delays
Week 10: Continuation of story in Plot B (which left off just before a plot point was reached)
Week 11: no comic, delays
Week 12: Plot B expositions or somthing
Week 13: More plot B exposition
Week 14: Exposition finishes, plot point almost introduced
Week 15: No comic, delays
Weeks 16-20: Back to plot A, repeat cycle in weeks 3-8. Wrap up plot point introduced in week one (which at this point isn't half as intresting as when it was introduced).


Now this is proably a little harsh, but I stand by it.

[Steven the Lich]

I find the comic entertaining. Cheesy jokes and puns... Hello? Almost everyone uses it, even OotS, and I actually find the perspective of it rather more unique, as we see goblins defying the rules to take classes. Sure, the whole switch thing has been done before, but we actually see not everyone is against the goblins (the cleric, though he is going to be killed by that over-zealous paladin, as we are told by that fortune teller). It also has a good way of keeping suspense, switching between storylines. When theres something good, the author changes the channel at a suspenseful moment. And as for the slow time to update... It is hand drawn first and then made on the screen for action, I believe. One cannot just poof it up daily at that quality. Besides, as I can tell, there have been plenty of webcomics that are going slow now. OotS seems to have slowed down considerably too, though it is picking up again. And talk about Erfwood. :smallsigh:

[Trazoi]

And as for the slow time to update... It is hand drawn first and then made on the screen for action, I believe. One cannot just poof it up daily at that quality. Besides, as I can tell, there have been plenty of webcomics that are going slow now. OotS seems to have slowed down considerably too, though it is picking up again. And talk about Erfwood. :smallsigh:
Don't get us wrong, I'm sure all of us know there's reasons for the slow update. When it comes to viewing webcomics as free online entertainment we know that it takes time to draw, especially with real life interfering for the majority of webcomics that aren't the creator's full time job.

Nevertheless, it's still the biggest drawback to Goblins as far as I'm concerned. I did my first big archive trawl several months ago and loved the comic when I could read them all en masse, but since that time not much has happened at all. It doesn't help when a new page comes every week or two and only furthers the plot by about ten seconds. The problem is that this is a webcomic not a print comic, and your die-hard viewers will be reading it page by page, so it's a bit of a downer when the new page doesn't add much more to the story.

I personally wouldn't mind less detail or comics in black and white if it speeds up the comic (and I'm talking in general here, not specifically about Goblins). I'm in training myself to start a webcomic some time later this year, but the one thing I'm really uncertain about is the level of detail to put into my art. I can make semi-reasonable looking figures if I invest a massive amount of time into it, but if I were to do that I could only do a once-a-week page comic. Personally I'd prefer something a bit more frequent, so I'm trying to figure out where I can speed up and which corners can be acceptably cut.

[Gundato]

I don't think anyone would mind the delays if the author compensated for them.

I love CVRPG, which has seven updates a week. That works, because the art is easy for the artist to handle, and the plot can thus be very fast paced. A single page may not be all that great, but read as a whole the arcs are amazing. And, outside of occasionally having to check to see if two horny nuns were the same character, the cast is small enough to never really forget what is going on in one particular area.

Post-Nuke used to be good about the other end of the spectrum. It updated very infrequently, but it worked because the plot was structured around that. It left the reader on the edge of his or her seat. Lately Post-Nuke has failed at this and has had three or four "crap pages" in a row (with a month or so in between).

Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic is an example of a frequently updating comic that isn't quite built right. I still love it, but I know I am not the only one who has trouble keeping track of everyone. A fast updating comic gets a lot of plot across in a short amount of time, which is great. But when you have such a massive collection of characters, it is hard to remember who is who sometimes (case in point, I have already forgotten whether or not they parted on good terms with the female pirate. I also thought her and the Kobold were on the same ship :p).

Goblins could update once a year for all I care, if they do it right. But when battles take ten or twelve pages (with most individual pages being boring, or rivaling DragonBall Z as far as crappy monologues go), it really hurts the comic. Why do you think Rich has been doing so many multi-page updates lately? He can't keep up his old update schedule, but he doesn't want to kill the plot. So he makes sure that each update can be enjoyed (or at least keep the reader interested) while the reader waits for the next one.
It is a bit old to bring up, but imagine if number 200 (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0200.html) had been only a single page per update, spread out over a month or two. Sure some bits of it would work great (page 3 to 4, maybe 2 to 3), but the rest would just seem awkward. That is what Goblins is doing, except that (because of the artist's style), it is generally one or two panels per update (but still a 42 panel (wow) battle). Alright, come to think of it, 200 could work pretty well. So imagine the one page per update over a couple weeks with number 298 (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0298.html). It is harder with OOTS because Rich is actually really good at pacing throughout the entire scene, but I hope I got the point across.

Personally, I loved reading the first arc or so of Goblins all at once. It was great. But after they left the village the plot itself went downhill (at least as far as I am concerned), and now that I get to experience it with updates, I just don't give a crap about the plot itself. I can only watch a Goblin Paladin in Super Armor give really cheesy dialogue while crying for so long (for crying out loud, I have played White Wolf games with less angsty people. And keep in mind that I once got banned from a game because I broke into a hospital maternity ward and ate babies while everyone else was talking about how they hate losing their humanity as vamps :p).

[EvilElitest]

I think you hit the nail on teh head, i generally love the comic, but the up date make it almost not worth it.
from
EE

[Gundato]

Oh, and just so people don't think I am being too harsh: Pacing is a problem with paper comics too.

Atomic Robo has a lot of potential, but (after buying the first issue) I am going to wait for a trade paperback. The comic is great, but it is obvious that Clevinger planned to make it an arc. The individual issue just doesn't have any substance.

Marvel is making a similar mistake with their recent run of Captain Marvel. The plot is gripping, but the first two or three issues were really slow, which didn't mesh well with the monthly comic. Not enough happened in any given issue, which leads to disinterest. They fixed that with the latest issue (I am eagerly waiting for my lunch break tomorrow to grab the final issue), but that doesn't change the fact that the pacing was awkward at first.

[averagejoe]

As a comic I love Goblins, it is among my favorite webcomics. However, pacing does tend to be an issue, even when trawling through the archives. Even more than the update schedule, my biggest criticism of the comic has to do with his pacing of each individual arc, often switching back and forth when in the middle of something. There's nothing bad about that in and of itself, but it lends the comic a feeling of simultenaity that perhaps shouldn't be there; that is, it feels too much like these things are happening at the same time.

However, I would also argue that a bit of DBZ-ness isn't necessarily a bad thing, except in light of the slow update schedule. Even now such things clearly aren't the only schtik, and he's a strong enough artist that such things can work. Especially since the bits that contain mostly dialogue tend to be intelligent and well done, which is what impressed me most about the comic in the beginning. I guess Thunt's other main problem is that he doesn't juggle purposes well; that is, in each bit he tends to do one thing well, but to the detriment of other things, which is why some of the shifts in pacing can seem so jarring.

Actually, now that I think about it, I seem to remember Thunt saying something along those lines. I could just be imagining things, though.