T w e n t y S i d e d
Shamus Says:
A recap comic. Everyone – fans and Shawn alike – faulted me for doing too many of these. They don’t advance the story, they just rephrase it.
They’re probably right, but I remain unrepentant.
Shawn Says:
On the one hand, this comic is largely unnecessary. On the other hand, there are a few amusing bits. I’m also once again reminded that I wish I had done the fantasy segments in a sketchier style. I think it would have worked well. Ah well.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
I think it’s a testament to the authors’ commitment to the premise that I don’t immediately find Steve the most unlikeable character in the group :)
That recap is perfect. There’s just something so very…Marcus about the way it conveys all the basic information in such a stupid, unhelpful way.
It’s very true to my experiences with RP groups, too.
The recap helped me. I haven’t gone back and read the rest of this strip and don’t know if I plan on doing so. And it was a funny little recap.
Side Note: I usually find stories about what the party was doing before I joined to be boring. I know its sounds selfish and honestly partly it is, like I care more if my character is involved. But its also more interesting if I was there to get the full context of what happened as it happened. If I was there rolling dice, experiencing the tension.
Now that’s a good clip episode! You can taste the salt emanating from the GM whose entire plot nobody cares about!
Just because it’s not necessary doesn’t mean it’s not funny.
I think it’s not _just_ recap; there’s humor in seeing how badly the players have garbled their understanding (or, at least to some extent, Casey has garbled their understanding) of the plot.
I lean towards the players in this comic. The plot established by Casey is extremely simple, and the players screwing around so much is the cause for their own confusion. DMotR is more aligned with the DM making things way too complicated and/or forgetting crucial information.
I think recaps are important in a webcomic. When the reader spends only a couple of minutes per week with the comic, and storylines can stretch over months, a recap is good way to remind the reader of the main events. Especially because the highlights of a comic like this are the jokes, not the plot points
From the other perspective, that of the binge reader, a recap is just one extra strip, and doesn’t distract much from the flow of the story.
The only downside with that, especially for a strip that updates irregularly is that it can be frustrating to have that single update in a month or week be a recap of things the audience already knows.