T w e n t y S i d e d

Nobody wants to play a campaign with Emperor Fred or High Chancellor Gary, and so the usual approach is to give everyone high fantasy names like King Geon’ai, Sir Lua’an-Eradin, or Lady Alaain Mera-Dovrel. You know, strange and fantasy-ish. Of course, this means the names will all be unpronouncable, difficult to spell, and easily confused. For fun, have your players describe the plot of your campaign after it’s over. I promise it will sound something like this:

The dragon guy with that black sword was oppressing the people that lived on those hills. Then that one king with the really long beard got that one chick with the crazy hair, and she went to that one lake. Then she got corrupted by that curse thing that made her attack that group of guys we found dead. You know, the ones that had that +1 sword and the bag of holding? Once we broke her curse she told us about the dragon guy and gave us that thing. And the map. Then we found the dragon dude and kicked his ass.

It’s like living in a word without proper nouns. I’ve always wanted to make a campaign like this:

The Dark Lord Walter, wielder of the Black Sword of choppery, was opressing the peoples of Pittsburgh. Then King George Washington enlisted the help of the Warrior Princess Rapunzel. Sadly, in the Land of Yellowstone she fell under a spell and slew the Steelers, Knights of Pittsburgh. At last the heroes freed the princess, traveled through the kingdom of Barstow, and confronted Walter in the land of Spokane.

Sure, it sounds stupid, but you have to admit: your players will be able to remember, pronounce, and even spell all of the important people and places.

-Shamus,  Wednesday Jan 10, 2007

Man, that’s funny to read knowing how much things have changed in the past sixteen-ish years since he wrote it. There’s a real split between the folks who use high-fantasy names and the folks who have a shopkeeper named Terrance in the town of Coolsville. I’ll just say, he was right in my book. It’s more fun to play and a lot easier to get invested in Terrance and his basement slime infestation than to try to remember an encyclopedia worth of names just to keep track of the plot. (For me, at least. I know there’s some folks who daydream about that hypothetical spreadsheet.)

Honestly there’s something to be said about the power that allowing people to get a bit silly can have when it comes to letting players get really genuinely invested in the world around them, instead of trying to strong-arm them into playing exactly the way you want to. If you haven’t heard people joke about it before, there’s a real phenomenon of serious high-fantasy campaigns being known for going off the rails into chaos. While games where someone has a character named Penny the Wise, a wizard who dresses like a clown,  is more likely to end up with a high stakes chase across the country to stop the war that could end the world. The more control you have over your character and choices the easier it is to throw yourself into it, whether you really mean to or not.

Now D&D stuff aside, you may have noticed this version of the comic isn’t the 1-1 update we normally do. Our dad mentioned more than once that he really didn’t like how the formatting ended up here (I vaguely remember being used as a test subject for his attempts to make it more readable). The arrows were a bit of a band-aid for the problem he always meant to go back and fix. So I was recruited to mess with it so it didn’t need any arrows. Mostly it was just a matter of adjusting the pacing of the panels a little bit. He really didn’t technically do too much wrong.

English speakers tend to read left to right, so generally our eyes like to follow the same line. Like you’re doing now, left until you hit the end of the line and then down and left again. With the exception of, if, perhaps, they maybe put something colorful or interesting in the center to catch your eye. The same principal applies to other stuff too. You’ll notice a lot of billboard ads will favor putting larger blocks of text over on the left-hand side. And when they don’t do that sometimes it can feel just a little bit off, like you’re reading it wrong. The exception being when your eyes are being drawn along a path. Like trail of speech bubbles.

What he did was he put speech bubbles from the next panel directly in the path the eye likes to follow. Which meant people would instinctively read it first, and then the bubbles would guide them down the wrong path.  Fixing it just meant a few panels needed shifted around so the eye wasn’t getting caught on a visual red herring.

Peter T Parker He/him