November 26, 2015: Multicolored Forgath

[thinkslogically]

Apologies, my point re. the law you pasted was that the sexual interiors doesn't have to be vaginal for it to be considered 1st degree rape (which is what you said on your first post). Small point, but it would arguably extend to all of bowsts potential options...

Anyway, I've already made my main points I think. Whoever placed the curses is obviously a Bad Person (because it's a curse, doig!), but I don't particularly think the sex every day curse is mechanically in keeping with a d&d setting. It fits some of the other themes of the comic for sure though, so we'll see what happens I guess. I'm just a bit "meh" about the whole plot line right now...

[mustache_man]

Ok then, this situation is like someone leaving a cake full of poison sitting on a table next to a cup of tea full of antidote inside of a locked room. You break into the room and eat the cake that was sitting next to a cup of tea and see that there's a letter under the cake telling you that the cake had poison in it and the antidote is in the cup of tea sitting next to it. Nobody is forcing you to drink the tea. You must pick the cup of tea up and drink it for the antidote yourself. It doesn't matter if you want the tea, you already consented to eating the cake and now you need to drink the tea for an antidote because you couldn't leave the cake alone.

Drinking the tea is the price you have to pay for eating the cake that you purposefully gobbled down. But nobody is actually forcing you to drink the tea. You have to pick it up with your own hands and put it to your own lips and drink. There's nobody else in the room. This situation is no different from any other where an adventurer trips a trap and has to pay the consequences. Sex doesn't get to be off-limits in a world where people have all kinds of body horrors and messed up situations happen to them for less.

Sure. Except it's not at all the same.
1. After you're poisoned and have the antidote, you usually don't have to keep hunting for the antidote everyday until you die or someone comes along and tells you its ok to stop.
2. Even if you did have to keep gulping down that shitty antidote that doesn't seem to work properly, it's reasonably safe to say you will never find yourself in a position where you have to rape someone in order to drink the antidote.

As for not being off-limits, maybe you have a point there. Doesn't mean everybody has to like it. If this were a tabletop game, that would be the point I'd get up and never play with that DM again. Ever. It's that distasteful for a game that should be played for fun.

[Synch]

'non-consensual sexual activity'.

Saw this recently, using tea as an analogy for consent.

"Unconscious people don't want tea."

Saw this as a response to that video. Its a bit stupid, but I thought it was funny. Love the guy's accent! I think its Manchurian.

[jbrecken]

I wonder if Idle's daily resurrection makes her lose her virginity every day, and possibly works as a morning after pill. Is her libido a side-effect of the rabbitization?

[BuildsLegos]

You must mean the exact opposite, right? I'm tempted to report you out of sheer confusion-rage.

[Krulle]

What? I find jbrecken's comment pretty clear....
The spell resurrecting her might restore her hymen, as well as remove any possible fertilised eggs. (She looses her virginity daily due to Bowst's daily curse.)
And the adrenaline of dying might indeed cause "rabbitization", increased libido.

[Guus]

If that's where this is headed I'm definitely out. I'm not reading this comic for sexcuses.
Hunt won't take it there I hope and assume.

[Sessine]

Er... sex-ed 101, guys. Virginity and an unbroken hymen are not even slightly the same thing! The hymen is a bit of skin that can break many different ways -- and even be restored, magically or by plastic surgery, though in the real world this only ever seems to be done in order to lie to people who haven't taken sex-ed 101.

Anyway. A person can only have sex for the first time once. Done is done. Male or female, you don't ever go back to being a virgin. Let's not be silly.

Judging by her attitude, Idle has been a happily enthusiastic non-virgin for a good while.

[Krulle]

Well, I just reformulated the comment to make the jump of thoughts more visible and understandable.
I know that the hymen and virginity are unrelated. You can go back to "bleeding like the first time" (which for most girls nowadays is not true anymore), but never back to "like a virgin".
And it would be a pseudo-scientific explanation that has nothing to do in this comic, and I definitely hope Thunt won't go this way.

And I agree with Sessine's analysis, that Idle very likely had more partners than just Bowst, and that the player playing her is not without experience.

[BuildsLegos]

What? I find jbrecken's comment pretty clear. The spell resurrecting her might restore her hymen...(She looses her virginity daily due to Bowst's daily curse.)

Let's pretent for a moment that you're not confusing ideas as Sessine pointed out.

I wonder if Idle's daily resurrection makes her lose her virginity

Do you see the problem now?

[Simon]

It seems to me that it was just a simple mistake, confusing virginity and having an intact hymen. I doubt it's something that necessitates reporting people.

Anyway, I thought I'd just mention that there is a "Controversy!" forum on here, if anyone needs it. Not that I'm trying to tell you what to do or anything, it just seems that whenever the subject of a particular comic sparks an intense discussion, especially one that may stray off topic, I've seen it get suggested that further discussion should be moved there.

So, about the comic. It's certainly an interesting curse, I don't think I've heard of anything like that before. I like the juxtaposition (I'm not sure that's even the right word for this context) of what the curses mean for the characters and for players (if any). As some people have already mentioned, the curses are terrible for the characters. They must be causing some sort of emotional or psychological damage to the characters. We don't know enough about Bowst to know what he really thinks, but it can't be any good being essentially forced to have sex. I wonder what he feels like, whether he thinks Idle is unhappy about the arrangement. She seems to be ok with it, but she sort of has to do it unless she wants Bowst to die. Similarly, Idle having to be killed once per day must be traumatic for both of them. For Idle, it must be painful and probably scary, even though it's someone (I assume) she trusts who is doing it. For Bowst, I couldn't imagine what he thinks, having to kill a friend in order to save their life.

But for the players I could imagine these being 'fun' curses. They get the benefit, without having to actually experience the negatives themselves. Especially the 'have to die once per day' curse. It is essentially a 'free' life. Players naturally try to use or abuse game mechanics for their own benefit, and this opens up a lot of possibilities. You could jump off of a very tall building and 'survive', saving time getting down. You could test food/drink for poison once per day. You could do a lot of things that would be very traumatic for the actual character to experience.

It kind of ties in good with the overall idea of the comic, like where players are coming in and killing 'monsters' like goblins, without actually thinking about what they're doing and how it would affect them.

[Aegis J Hyena]

It just occurred to me that Junior killed a couple members of the other adventuring party (the PCs gone from drow to new characters) --- are Idle and Bowst their replacements?

[thinkslogically]

Yeah, I was wondering the same aegis. Only there were 3 players playing the original drow group and I thought there were 3 in the samurai party too who all died... I could be wrong though, I can't really remember

[spiderwrangler]

I think we switched groups on a B-horror movie shot with implied death?

*Edit: Here

I personally hope not... they were the worst.

Though if they are, they are much improved at staying in character... maybe they are also cursed not to speak out of character, or with metaknowledge... and they can't even tell Forgath about those curses, because they would trigger the curse just by mentioning it.

[thinkslogically]

Thanks for the link! Yes, there were three pcs in that murdered party too. If idle and bowst are those same players, they've definitely got a lot less murder-hobo-ey than their last appearances

[Synch]

Just pointing out that because of this damn curse, we are now discussing ejaculation, hymens, virginity, consensual sex, rape and sexual assault. I mean, we're all adults and can be mature about it all, but is this really the path Thunt wanted to take this? I'm certainly no prude, but I read a webcomic for a bit of entertainment and escapism. This scenario, and this ensuing discussion are not that. So in that respect I think that Thunt has failed, unless of course he is trying to educate us all on tricky life issues like consensual sex through the medium of a webcomic.

[SpellsBedly]

Ok then, this situation is like someone leaving a cake full of poison sitting on a table next to a cup of tea full of antidote inside of a locked room. You break into the room and eat the cake that was sitting next to a cup of tea and see that there's a letter under the cake telling you that the cake had poison in it and the antidote is in the cup of tea sitting next to it. Nobody is forcing you to drink the tea. You must pick the cup of tea up and drink it for the antidote yourself. It doesn't matter if you want the tea, you already consented to eating the cake and now you need to drink the tea for an antidote because you couldn't leave the cake alone.

Drinking the tea is the price you have to pay for eating the cake that you purposefully gobbled down. But nobody is actually forcing you to drink the tea. You have to pick it up with your own hands and put it to your own lips and drink. There's nobody else in the room. This situation is no different from any other where an adventurer trips a trap and has to pay the consequences. Sex doesn't get to be off-limits in a world where people have all kinds of body horrors and messed up situations happen to them for less.

Are you saying it's okay to have sex with someone at gunpoint? Because, you know, they could always choose death instead of sex, so you're not forcing them to do anything. Also, they already consented to being in your neighborhood, and having a gun aimed at you is something that happens there sometimes. The nonconsensual sex is just the price you pay for going out on the street.

Sure, it's not exactly the same, but the difference is mostly that the curses in the curse walk or your cake aren't aimed at a specific person. With a gun you can see who you threaten, leaving a cursed item is more like a landmine, it targets the next person to come along. In case of a dungeon crawl, that's an unwanted visitor. Odds are it's still not someone who deserves being raped every day for the rest of their lives though. What is this, the extreme castle doctrine? If someone enters your dungeon you are obligated by law to film either the next SAW sequel or a bad porn flick? And yes, the person who made those traps probably wasn't nice, and maybe they were downright sadistic. But "it's what my character would do" is never an excuse, or not a very good one at least. This curse is, in my opinion, treated by the comic as a whole as too much as a joke for how serious it's implications can be.

I could be wrong, maybe it's not comedy. Maybe that first page just came off a little weird, maybe the story restores itself further on. But for now my standpoint is that personally, I could have done without this item in this comic with this presentation.

[BlueAmaranth]

Yeah, I'm not buying the poisoned cake analogy either. The real-world equivalent of what the caster did would be booby-trapping your property. At least under American law, that's illegal for a reason. The analogy is framed like the caster isn't responsible for the consequences the cake-eater brought on himself, but in fact the caster is responsible for setting up the entire cake and tea situation. My opinion is that what the caster did is morally equivalent to committing rape.

[BuildsLegos]

It's the Saw excuse all over again; filmakers actually had the audacity to claim Jigsaw isn't actually a killer because his victims get themselves killed...even when it's often impossible for everyone to escape some traps.

[BlueAmaranth]

Yeah, Saw is a good comparison. If you set up a situation where someone has to cut their leg off or die, you're not magically cleared of the moral burden of costing that person their leg just because they ended up cutting it off themselves. The person is obviously under duress, just like Bowst is under duress. It's not reasonable to say "oh they didn't REALLY have to do it because they could have just died instead." That's not a real choice.

[R¤ògre]

Plot Twist:

While trying to escape, rocks fall separating Bowst and Forgath from Idle. Not being able to remove all the rocks on the way, Forgath and Bowst have to make it up otherwise he dies.

[Sessine]

Yeah, I was wondering the same aegis. Only there were 3 players playing the original drow group and I thought there were 3 in the samurai party too who all died... I could be wrong though, I can't really remember

There are three in this party, too. There's this gracious fellow.

Two males and a female. You guys may be on to something. Perhaps Herbert set down a condition if they wanted to play any more. He made them sit in and watch a couple of sessions of his main game. And they went, "Okay, okay, we get it now! We can do this. Let us try again. We'll really try this time -- promise!"

So Herbert said, All right, but your new characters are going to have some big disadvantagea. Roleplay those well or I'll kill you off again.

It fits rather well, actually. The player who's been doing the female characters in that trio started off knowing the least about roleplaying but is by far the quickest learner. So now that player is Idle, who seems to be the most interesting and complex character of the three so far.

One of the other players seems to have decided to do a MinMax knockoff.

The third one, the one who always played the short guy, said, "Oooh, ooh, I wanna be a Klik!" Herbert rolled his eyes... then he got an idea. "Well, Kliks don't talk. I'll let you be a Klik merged with a cursed magic sword."

I imagine Herbert continuing, "As for you two, yup, you connected up with Ward here when you went through this, ummm, Cursewalk dungeon, so you're just loaded with curses. You've each got a daily curse -- there's something you've got to do each day, or die. I'll just roll on this table here--"

Bowst's player, interrupting, thinking he's being sooooo clever: "Have sex! Let's say Bowst has to have sex every day. You wouldn't let him DIE, would you, Idle?" (waggles eyebrows at Idle's player)

Idle's player, being a bit smarter, considers. "Mm. Don't even think of roleplaying that on camera in the game, but all right. It's just to keep you alive. If he gets to choose, then so do I, right? How's this: Idle has to die every day, or she dies for real."

Herbert's known for letting players get away with potentially gamebreaking initial character choices -- look at MinMax's ridiculous stats. So he agrees.

===

If this really is more or less what's going on at the gaming table, if these new characters are the same three players... then the apparently-gratuitous infodump about Junior's origin is Herbert handing Idle's player a fact sheet. "This is what killed you last time. Tell Forgath, so he knows it too. You haven't seen the last of that thing. Oh, and Ward? This is your character's worst nightmare. Good luck."

[FailsWildly]

Well, let's not forget if we're going by the female character being the same person every time then her player character was portrayed as being incredibly dumb and immature.

"Wanna see my boobies?" Ring a bell? Even Minmax, MINMAX for goodness sake said she seemed like a boy pretending to be a girl. If anyone jumped on the sex curse idea, it'd be her. And let's not forget the fact she hadn't realized her HP was in the negative nor that she had bought armor. She's not the bright one of the group.

As for shorty being the Klik, yeah I can see that. He hated that stupid round thing for killing him twice, so why not become one? Maybe he thought they were ridiculously powerful.

As far as the last one goes, I mean, Minmax was the only one of their group who capable of doing some serious damage so I can see him totally ripping off his character.

Also, completely unrelated but I think Forgath's PC being a girl is what influenced him saying the whole, "Sounds like more of a curse for you." thing. Projecting her own feelings on the matter and what not. Definitely not right, she shouldn't assume because Bowst is male he automatically enjoys it and because Idle is female she doesn't. It's pretty crappy to label Bowst and brush off his feelings in the matter simply because he's a dude. But I don't think there was any real malice or harm intended in the comment, just a spur of the moment knee-jerk reaction.

[thinkslogically]

I thought the were 2 female drow at the beginning (1 with a teenage male player)? On mobile though so it's a pain to check, but yeah I thought one was a short female, one was the drizt clone and I've was the "boobies" female. Happy to be corrected though, I really can't remember

Thanks for reminding me about the curses klik too - that at least explains where some of the info came from re. Kliks! If this part is deliberate poor storytelling because it's those 3 guys again then I'll be a little happier.

[Guus]

The short drow was a man right? I thought it was supposed to be a man at least.

And I wouldn't consider messing up HP and magic armor stupid, as the drow characters were obviously their first. D&D is a difficult game, you don't learn it in one session, mistakes are bound to happen.
Heck, I'm one of the most knowledgeable of my group, with the exception of our DM who had been playing for 8 years straight now and cooks up weird chars and monsters as a way to pass the time, and I still make plenty of mistakes while playing D&D. "Wait, that check is supposed to be a standard action? That makes it so much less useful, I just assumed..." Etc.