OOTS #852 - The Discussion Thread

[Math_Mage]

Yes, he does say he's poking fun at the system where he can, but he also says that entertaining story trumps mechanics, which is what I held in mind when reading the strip. Perhaps the confusion is that I equate entertaining story to narrative?

In any case, that's what I was referring to; if his stance has changed since then, well, that's news to me. Sorry for the confusion.

No, the error you make here is one that many, MANY people have made: equating rules GAGS with the rules themselves.

OotS has long since moved away from a gag-a-day strip to a story-focused strip; one result of this is that when 4e came out, and when 5e started being developed, Rich didn't bother bringing the comic forward because all the time spent introducing the new rules (and poking fun at them) would undermine the narrative flow. But the story remains consistent with the 3.5 ruleset, with the few exceptions being noted by the author in forum posts (Tsukiko has too few barred schools, for example).

As such, the rules will continue to exert influence on the plot, both implicitly (as when Roy used Thog's Dungeoncrasher ACF against him in the final scene AND tried to run out the clock on his rage) and explicitly (as with Know(Architecture & Engineering)). One of the factors that makes the Roy vs. Thog fight and the V vs. Z fight interesting is that each represents the triumph of clever fighting over build optimization, which is a D&D perspective through and through. And one reason I respect the Giant so much is that he's able to make that perspective visible to non-D&D players through dialogue, without boring and clunky explanations.