December 3rd, 2015: Wheel... Of... Species...!

[Aegis J Hyena]

http://www.goblinscomic.org/12032015-2/

The alternate thread title I came up with was "Only funny to Donald Trump"

I thought Idle was a goblin too. And the idea of that Wheel is a good one. Of course, imagine if things like "slime", "undead", "golem" (ok, not species but you kind of get the idea) turned up on the Wheel...

[BuildsLegos]

First: that person who was swearing on his life that Idle was a goblin is going to feel stupid.

Second: I was JUST about to predict that Forgath was going to have to admit to Minmax that he lost the Racist Axe.

[RocketScientist]

Would've been funny if she just kept getting elf.

[spiderwrangler]

First: that person who was swearing on his life that Idle was a goblin is going to feel stupid.

Well, she is... partly. I wasn't prepared to be booped until tomorrow.

[sunphoenix]

So.. I guess it is a specious turn of the wheel?

[FailsWildly]

Would've been funny if she just kept getting elf.

Her elf features would just become more and more defined until she looked creepy I guess.

At least we know what she is now. I'm a little confused at why she looks so offended to have been asked as to what she is. I mean, common, really it was a legitimate questions. I wonder why Bowst didn't spin it. .. Maybe he did and maybe he's not human at all and just kept landing on human. O_O

And yeah, hey its the racist axe. Cool.

[SpeaksManyLanguages]

Of course she was an elf, jeeeeeeez!

I mean, common, really it was a legitimate questions.

The question was worded quite sharply. Imagine coming up to an asian-looking person and asking, "what are you, chinese? vietnamese? you look japanish".

A question of interest: can Idle get the "racist bonus" from the axe against goblins and rabbits?

[FailsWildly]

That's not really a fair comparison. Idle clearly is a Mashup of things and it's a fair question to ask what she is or used to be originally before all the curses. An Asian person who may or may not be Korean, Japanese, Chinese or something else is a little different. You can deduce, "That person is probably of Asian descent, though I can't pinpoint which." but as far as Idle goes, she doesn't look like any standard race and is known to have gone through a cursewalk. So really, it's a fair question. She should have expected it a lot sooner to be honest.

I didn't even know her extra ears were rabbit ears at first, I thought it was some odd hair style. The first thing I would've asked after getting formalities out of the way would have been about her rabbit ears and how those came about.

Forgan certainly could've worded it nicer, but honestly I'd have laughed at the way he phrased it. Like, "Hah, yeah, I'm kind of an odd mix of things, right?" because I mean, she's gotta know she looks really weird with the rabbit ears alone.

[askstoomuch]

another info dump, come on I want something to happen already

[BuildsLegos]

Fails, read her first pages again; the origin of her ears ARE explained early.

Askstoomuch, do you really think so little of the Kinslayer?

[blargfoot]

So ... somebody's got a hair fetish ... Idle has goblin features and hair ... I can see where this is going.

Go on and let your freak flag fly, Names!

[SpeaksManyLanguages]

She also has some rabbit facial features (upper lip, nose shape, etc.)

[Sessine]

I'm a little confused at why she looks so offended to have been asked as to what she is.

If Idle really is the new character for the player who started with Drowbabe and then Yodette, he's still learning how to roleplay. Better than before, but still has lapses. We should expect to see betraying moments of clumsiness. He wasn't roleplaying Idle being offended just then, he was taken off guard by Forgath's question.

After Forgath's player expanded the question, he got the idea. "Oh, right. I'm being handed a prompt here to let me reveal more of my backstory, so Forgath is allowed to act on the knowledge! Just like we've been doing this whole conversation! except I forgot to mention the wheel. Oops." (Proceeds to repair the omission.)

As for why Forgath didn't ask earlier, when the characters first met? Well, Forgarh'a player is better at this. She did wait to ask the leading questions until their two characters were alone and Bowst couldn't disrupt it with "None of your business!"

When you look for the clues to what's happening around the gaming table, they're there. All of this since Forgath survived his fall is an "insert newly-rolled replacement characters into the game" sequence, complete with DM-required infodumps of stuff some of the characters already know, to bring others (in this case, Forgath) up to speed. It's not very involving for readers, but it's good to get some of these points cleared up, and when you look at it from the meta point of view and imagine the players saying these things, it's amusing enough. It feels like it's just about finished now, though. The pace should pick up soon.

It hasn't helped that, what with one major thing after another, Thunt's Real Life has made the posting of pages pretty glacial recently. It will read much better for people who come along to read it later. Moreover, G:AR is almost done, Thunt's had his operation and can now draw pain-free, and the page-posting rate is likely to pick up. I am looking forward to what's coming next!

[Wolfie]

So ... somebody's got a hair fetish ... Idle has goblin features and hair ... I can see where this is going.

Go on and let your freak flag fly, Names!

This made me snicker.

+1

[LarsenSan]

I don't think she's offendend. Looks more like puzzled to me.

[RocketScientist]

I wonder if Kore is a product of the Cursewalk. If the dungeon designer doesn't mind forcing a person to have sex or die every day, then turning a paladin into a murderbot doesn't seem like much of a stretch.

[Guus]

That'd make Kore a lot less of a fleshed out character than I hope he will be though

[SpellsBedly]

It could be. Maybe he spun both angel and demon or something.

But it's not very satisfying to me. It doesn't explain how he gets to keep being a paladin after committing evil acts.

Also, yes, Idle will totally get +7 against rabbits with that axe. I fully expect the axe to be used by or on her or by or on another person who spun the wheel.

[spiderwrangler]

Okay, lets make a game of this... by setting "HUMAN" as 1 and continuing clockwise, we get the species on the wheel assigned to d20 results.


1- HUMAN
2- HILL GIANT
3- ANGEL
4- CAT
5- DWARF
6- TROLL
7- RABBIT
8- TITAN
9- SPIDER
10- DOG
11- MOUSE
12- ORC
13- DEMON
14- FAIRY
15- DRAGON
16- KOBOLD
17- ELF
18- GNOME
19- GOBLIN
20- VAMPIRE


Roll twice and post your new hybrid form below.


_: 1D20 = [3] = 3
1D20 = [8] = 8

I'd be a human with features of an angelic titan... possibly pretty good. I'd imagine that would mean I'd be massive with a tiny set of wings and a bit of glow about me.


I wonder if Idle was always a goblin/rabbit, or if Thunt made up the wheel and rolled for her...

[Moroser]

another info dump, come on I want something to happen already

+1. Too much exposition in the recent updates.

Also, yes, Idle will totally get +7 against rabbits with that axe. I fully expect the axe to be used by or on her or by or on another person who spun the wheel.

Yeah, Thunt wouldn't incert such a detail just for fun. But I do hope Idle won't have to fight our goblins.

[nikohl]

_: 1D20 = [14] = 14
1D20 = [2] = 2

Hell yes, Fairy Hill Giant. *stompy flap flap*

[Lady Dawn]

Gnome and ....vampire!
Damn...I'm a midget vampire with a big nose...
Don't laugh at my nose or I'll bite you!!

Oooh let's roll for my guinea pigs too.
My female guinea pig B'Elanna gets.....spider....and elf
The male, Shakiro, gets......demon and...fairy.
Oh great, now I have a drider with a guinea pig upper body on spider legs who casts spells and a horned and winged guinea pig who flaps all around the room either setting stuff on fire or making them sparkly.

[thesilence]

Would've been funny if she just kept getting elf.

Her elf features would just become more and more defined until she looked creepy I guess.

A brilliant answer to this interesting question. We may well include the Wheel of Species in our next D&D game, simply for the sake of enabling such outcomes. (Now this poster is attempting to imagine a human who benefits from the same effect; we suspect the result would be either or both of "primordially terrifying" and "mesmerizingly erotic".)

I'm a little confused at why she looks so offended to have been asked as to what she is.

Speaking as someone who considers the question entirely inoffensive, and might once have been tempted to blurt it out in casual conversation when looking at a person of indeterminate ethnicity, profession, or any other category...bitter experience has taught this poster that almost everyone takes it in the worst possible way. It seems almost impossible to ask someone such a thing as "hey, are you Chinese", without them immediately assuming that your intention is to stereotype them as a racist caricature the moment you have established the accurate label for them. I mean, if you weren't planning to jump to conclusions about the person and pigeonhole them as some insulting cartoon, why would you even care what category they fall into? Such seems to be the prevailing logic in the modern cultural climate, at least in the USA (and nations heavily influenced by its values and prejudices, which is rapidly approaching "all of them" in the Internet age).

[Sessine]

another info dump, come on I want something to happen already

+1. Too much exposition in the recent updates.

For webcomic readers, patience is more than a virtue. It's a necessity!

This has been a character-insertion scene in a D&D game. There's a certain amount of background information we have to be given for the coming story to make sense. The new characters know it. Forgath has to learn it. There aren't many options available...

1. Character monologue? Boring. Thunt made fun of that already the first time these players entered the game.

2. Show don't tell? Please, no! At the rate of one page a week, this much info would take months or years to show in a flashback, and meanwhile all the main plot lines and all the characters we already care about would be left in limbo. It's necessary to get this in, but it's Background, not Story.

3. Work each detail into the story as it comes up? Yikes. Readers would be complaining that Thunt had started pulling new facts out of a hat every time his characters got themselves into a fix. There'd be justifiable mutters of 'deus ex machina'. It would slow down the action every time he had to do it. And until all the moments came up there'd be a lot of needless mystery in our minds about the new characters, interfering with our understanding of them, and generating many misinterpretations.

4. Infodump conversation. Best choice, here. Especially when you consider the meta level of the story. Have one of the new characters, who knows it, explain it quickly in a one-on-one conversation with the old character who doesn't, and at the same time have the new character banter with the old one and show us more about her nature. Yes, she is doing it a bit clumsily... why would she, in-character, go into all that detail about what went wrong with Junior just then, when she doesn't even know Junior exists? It can only be because the DM required the player to get this info into the game right now. At the meta level, the clumsiness works because if the player is who I suspect he is, he shouldn't be too adroit about it.


TL;DR - Yes, this has been info-dump-y -- for Reasons. It's over. Things are going to start moving now.

[RocketScientist]

Oh, hell.

_: 1D20 = [10] = 10
1D20 = [4] = 4

I'm a DogCat? Seriously?

I'm allergic to dogs.

At least I'm not buttbutt. (<-Catdog reference.)