{"id":45867,"date":"2019-03-22T06:00:09","date_gmt":"2019-03-22T10:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=45867"},"modified":"2019-03-22T01:06:05","modified_gmt":"2019-03-22T05:06:05","slug":"45867","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=45867","title":{"rendered":"#9 Pwnage Personified"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--more--><image src=\"images\/cb9.jpg\" max-width=\"100%\" style=\"margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;display:block\"\/><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"images\/cb_josh.jpg\" class=\"bubblehead\"\/><\/p>\n<div class=\"bubble speech\">At a tabletop game, it doesn\u2019t matter if you win or lose. What matters is that you win and look awesome doing it.<\/p>\n<p>Remember that the GM is not your adversary. Neither are the monsters or your fellow players. They are all but minions of your true foe: The rulebooks.<\/p><\/div>\n<p><br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<p><strong>Shamus Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Here is the payoff  for setting the game within a fictional RPG system.  We can set up stuff like this.  You can pull off the same joke using rules from standard D&#038;D, but then readers will think you\u2019re lampooning the system instead of the people who deliberately work to break the system. In DMotR, I poked fun at attacks of opportunity and the grapple rules.  It led to amusing discussions, but it also led to epic debates over the meaning, purpose, and usefulness of the D&#038;D 3.5 rules.   Here I wanted to make sure we were talking about the fact that pretty much all systems will suffer from this sort of thing.<\/p>\n<p>The problem isn\u2019t that the rulebooks aren\u2019t \u201chardened\u201d against exploits.  The problem is that you have someone at the table actively working to exploit the system.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Man, now this was a fun comic to make.  Between that sweet, sweet drawing of xXKillStealr69Xx and coming up with all of the jokes for panel 1, this was a ton of fun to do.  Also, I love how Josh just butts in with his character in the middle of Marcus choking Chuck.    Probably the first time when we were working on the comic that I just had a blast making it.   (Actually, that\u2019s not true, the Gnome Paladin from \u201cNo Love For Shorties\u201d sent me in to a giggling fit for days.  I just love that little guy.)<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a lot less to talk about when things go well than when you have a big botched joke and controversy to look back at, but that\u2019s ok with me.<\/p>\n<p>See you guys on Friday!<\/p>\n<div class=\"dmnotes\">EDIT 2019: For the record, a lot of the jokes in panel 1 were Shawn&#8217;s work. I mean, that&#8217;s true of a lot of this series. It was very much a collaboration and most strips featured some extra joke or detail I hadn&#8217;t written. But this one <em>especially<\/em> benefited from his additions. He doubled the number of jokes in that first panel, and improved on most of the jokes I gave him.<\/p>\n<p>It really helps that Shawn has a much greater knowledge of different tabletop systems. He was much better at mimicking the conventions and styles of the books.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45867"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46350,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45867\/revisions\/46350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}