T w e n t y S i d e d
In the comments of the previous strip, I said, “In hindsight, the ideal thing would have been to cast Aragorn as a dumb, distracted stoner. He spends about half of the movie blinking very, very slowly. I can come up with a shot of him looking baked or mouth-open stoopid in just about any scene. I should make a “I am so high” montage out of all these shots.“
The amount of screen time he spends in a vacant stare or a prolonged blink is sort of alarming. I’ve come to think of him as Stareagorn.
Once again only the end section is linked this time to skip the link mingling complexities.
There’s a fine line between ‘well forshadowed revelation’ and ‘big annoying neon sign on the wall that the DM won’t let you acnowledge yet’. This guy seems to be about ten miles over the neon sign side and still running.
I do have to sympathize with him a little bit though. It’s hard to predict what a player will pick up on. And it’s pretty awkward when they figure something out early and you gotta reformate your whole dang plot around it. Its almost enough to tempt you to the railroad tracks, if only to save on the writing time.
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Programming Vexations
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
I just came from Darth’s and Droids and they we advising precisely on this!
(posting angry!) yikes, I edited my own mistakes, but not the ones introduced by the spell checker. I meant “they were advising on this”.
“The king’s advisor, his most trusted aid, Grima Wormtongue steps forward to…”
Party, as one: “he’s evil, isn’t he?”
One the other hand, the pizza just arrived and no one is paying attention, completely miss the clues, and the DM has to have an NPC explain it to them. Preferably NOT Wizard Jesus who they’re sick of running the board every session.
Other thoughts: Baked Aragorn’s player shows up in Chainmail Bikini as a guest character, and it’s around this point of DM of Rings that the three remaining players seem to start actually filling out the details of their characters. I guess Gimli’s player showed off his experience and knowledge earlier, but I can’t remember if it was ever established as canon that Gimli was played by Chuck. I’m sure it’s address in Shamus’ notes, I just don’t remember off the top of my head.
In the books, ‘Wormtongue’ was a name his enemies in court *gave* him because they knew what kind of person he was, and it’s not really his name.
In D&D, ‘Wormtongue’ is a name designed by someone with very little faith in their player’s note-taking abilities.
Given how the players generally aren’t all that interested in staying IC or keeping IC and OoC knowledge separate, the first five panels are funny to me because they seem to imply that while Aragorn’s player was having an aside with the DM that was mutually inaudible between the two groups (perhaps in another room?), the DM was simultaneously proceeding forward with the movie as basically a cutscene for the other two characters. I don’t see this as a plot-hole or anything, it just strikes me as amusingly absurdist, like perhaps the DM recorded this part and just had it playing while dealing with Aragorn’s player. (I suppose an alternative, reasonable, explanation is that they both returned to the others, had the cutscene, and Aragorn’s player is suddenly being uncharacteristically IC by asking about what happened while Aragorn was gone but he was present, but that’s less amusing.)