{"id":46676,"date":"2019-04-19T06:00:44","date_gmt":"2019-04-19T10:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=46676"},"modified":"2019-04-19T03:59:55","modified_gmt":"2019-04-19T07:59:55","slug":"17-setting-the-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=46676","title":{"rendered":"#17 Setting the Stage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!--more--><image src=\"images\/cb17.jpg\" max-width=\"100%\" style=\"margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;display:block\"\/><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"images\/cb_shamus.jpg\" class=\"bubblehead\"\/><\/p>\n<div class=\"bubble speech\">Players expect the game world to make sense. They want verisimilitude. They want carefully planned characters with believable motivations. They want arduous attention to detail.<\/p>\n<p>Unless you\u2019re talking about loot, in which case they think nothing of getting a $1,000 Longsword in exchange for rescuing a $5 pig.<\/p><\/div>\n<p><br clear=\"all\"><\/p>\n<p><strong>Shamus Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Part of this joke was that the sign was supposed to be illuminated by a nearby torch or lantern. It was just one more nonsense trope to make the scene even more absurd. Who lights and refills this lantern and why?<\/p>\n<p>I didn\u2019t make it clear in my notes, and Shawn changed the lamplight to moonlight in the process of drawing the strip. This is the only change Shawn ever made that wasn\u2019t an improvement. Since this was part of the punchline, it sort of took a bit of the \u201cheh\u201d factor out of the joke.<\/p>\n<p>Then again, if it had been at all funny Shawn probably would have recognized it as such and included it in the joke, so\u2026<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shawn Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I actually still find this one pretty funny.  Not so much for the punchline, but for the dialogue leading up to it.  But then, I\u2019m a big fan of comics that just have characters acting naturally and the humor results from that, not neccesarily because you set up jokes and have a punchline at the end.  (Get Fuzzy is easily my favorite example of what I\u2019m thinking of.)<\/p>\n<p>Also, people generally reacted very favorably to the silhouettes, which amused me as they\u2019re so much easier to draw.  I think after Clockworks ends in like 5 years, I\u2019m going to do the Complete Shadowpuppet Adventures of Silhouette City.<\/p>\n<div class=\"dmnotes\">EDIT 2019: No, I wasn&#8217;t getting paid by the word. Why do you ask?<\/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-46676","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\/46676","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=46676"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46678,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46676\/revisions\/46678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}