Concerns About the Progressions of the Goblin Plot (@Rich)

[Jason]

Speaking as somebody who has done quite a bit of writing, both for D&D and for prose fiction, "show, don't tell" has limits. Sometimes you do need to provide exposition.

Of course. The Lord of the Rings did it all the time, with major events like Saruman's capture of Gandalf or the Ent's assault on Isenguard being told after the fact from one character to another rather than being "shown directly" to the reader. The film rightly showed these events directly, because film is a visual medium and it worked better in that medium to show it.

I suspect that a web comic similarly needs to be more careful about telling rather than showing, like a film.

Narratively speaking, there needs to be a certain level of buy-in from the reader: if a character states a non-outlandish opinion, and nobody in-story dismisses it or questions it, the reader is meant to give that statement the benefit of the doubt.

Agreed, but if a significant portion of your readers are not willing to make that buy-in then that's a sign that more "showing" may be needed.