Comic - Fracturing Fairy Tales

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In preparation for NaNoWriMo I've been reading a lot of fairy tales. The original Grimm ones from a book gifted to me when I was one year old. I couldn't help but wonder how many D&D players would solve similar problems faced by those in a fairy tale:Evil queen wants you to take a princess out to the woods and kill her? I know one queen who's going through the looking glass, if you know what I mean. An entire kingdom fast asleep due to a magic spell? Time for some looting. No door into the tower save some long flowing hair? That's why there's stoneshape or rope and pitons. The example of cracking a fae over the head with a spinning wheel to hunt for his ID and learn his hidden true name is one option, but it might come after cold iron related torture. Or divination spells. But those might be a back-up because you don't want to burn a valuable fireball just so you can scry. 

We're an odd, misanthropic bunch.

Comic - It's a Trick

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Magic Missile always hits its target. That's what makes it magic missile opposed to the lesser known variants mundane missile and pretty good missile.

When I played a wizard, I always liked to imagine my missile would take the most round about route to the target. It'd whip between legs, dodge through a brawl, and home in on the bad guy like the arrow in Gamers.

The show presented above might be a little boring. You know it's never going to miss. When you watch a knife thrower you're also pretty sure they're not going to miss but there's always that secret dark hope that this time, this once, there might be an accident. That's where the thrill comes from.

Of course... that presumes the wizard isn't aiming for the assistant.

Comic - Light Reading

***An understated part of levelling-up in most editions of D&D is training. There have been a few optional rules that suggest a character needs to practice their skills and be taught new tricks from a master or trainer. But, for the most part, those rules are unused. Instead, the Player Characters just venture into a dank and foreboding dungeon for a few weeks and emerge with five times the talent, gaining mastery of new abilities from the aether. Even if the optional training rules are used, what kind of training would there be? What would a master barbarian teach his angry pupils? What lessons would there be at Berserker Academy? "Class, today we're learning how to roar. NO TALKING! I WILL SMASH! To begin, everyone needs to take a deep breath."

Comic - BFS

***A symptom of the influence anime games and cartoons has had on D&D can really be seen in the art of the game, specifically weapons and armour. Stylistic weaponry and armour have become much more common and realistic medieval gear has become dismissed or downplayed. Some of this is to better enable each of the races to have a distinct visual style, but other times it's just seen as "cool". All I can ever think of is "man, that sword would be heavy to lift and impossible to wield" or "that armour would just direct blows to vital spots on the torso." It's one thing to depict fantastic weapons and armour that would be slightly impractical, it's another to present armour and weapons that are detrimental to the wielder. 

Comic - Let the dice fall...

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Every gamer who has ever played D&D has likely had some encounter with the weird hybrid monsters of the game, typically blamed as the result of wizard experiments. What the heck kind of experiment results in a wolf-duck? I suppose "wizard experiments" is a more likely justification than the other option: a mama owl and papa bear who love each other very much, and likely get really drunk.