Tagged as: inspiring, leadership, responsible, secret door
704 – White Smoke Mountain • 72
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Heroes of Lesser Earth Webcomic
…A Dungeons and Dragons Webcomic. Comic: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Blog: Tuesday, Thursday
{ 44 comments… read them below or add one }
Is Bunker striking an inspiring pose in panel four, or suffering from lower back pain? You decide.
Definitely lower back pain.
If I was swinging the kinda bulge he has, Id have lower back pain too.
….
I just depressed myself.
Don’t feel bad, buddy, this is fiction. Very fictional fiction.
Fictionally fictional fiction.
Oh my fucking lola apocalypse!
Oh my fucking lola catastrophe!
Oh my fucking lola doomsday!
Oh my fucking lola eternity!
Oh my fucking lola judgment day!
Oh my fucking lola apocalypse!
Oh my fucking lola asshole!
Oh my fucking lola badness!
Oh my fucking lola bitch
Oh my fucking lola catastrophe!
Oh my fucking lola chaos!
Oh my fucking lola disaster!
Oh my fucking lola doomsday!
Oh my fucking lola eternity!
Oh my fucking lola evil!
Oh my fucking lola judgment day!
Oh my fucking lola motherfucker!
Oh my fucking lola porn and pornography!
Oh my fucking lola sex and sexiness!
Oh my fucking lola tradegy!
I suffer from lower back problems. Thank you CavemanCavan for telling me the source fo the problem.
I’m calling WTF on this DM apparently going back and forth between near-total cluelessness and giving worthwhile advice on leading a party. Is he quoting from a DM guide, is the moon full and he’s a were non-idiot, is the person running as DM changing between strips, or is it something else entirely?
My first reaction on today’s strip precisely: “Wait, isn’t Violet an NPC played by the DM? Does this mean he knows about the hacking? Did he plan this with Bunker all along? But… if Freya hadn’t told Bunker that something was fishy about the module and she suspected Martin had tampered with it, Bunker would never have asked Martin to hack the GM’s laptop to alter it again with the password obtained from Freya… but would the DM be so stupid to allow Martin access to his laptop? What’s going on?”
Or is the DM indeed playing Violet, but doesn’t know Martin hacked the module, and he’s merely happy that Bunker is all of sudden showing initiative and leadership?
Edited to add:
I call bullshit on the idea that a leader’s responsibility is to make sure his followers are happy.
Also, is it just me, or is the right hand edge of the comic strip cut off? I went back to check the past couple strips, and the panels are cut off there, too. Panels getting too large to be displayed properly? Sidebar cutting them off? Or is it my browser messing up?
I also agree with Anon, it seems really out of place with the recent “lets fool the stupid DM” strip, and Kevin’s own words about stupidity.
But Christina, the DM-Violet and Bunker are talking about the other “plan”, the one where Bunker starts acting more leader-like and taking the group in hand.
Well, for a person leading a bunch of roleplayers, their happiness might be a key issue. Since the idea is having recreating fun. For a person leading a reallive operation, like a company, happiness of your subordinates is probably not in the top ten.
If you think your browser doesn’t show the full strip (I had the same issue with some of the strips before – not with this one though), rightclick on the strip and choose “open link in new tab” or “display graphic” this should show you the strip as the underlying JPEG and you will be able to see how big it should have been.
“Well, for a person leading a bunch of roleplayers, their happiness might be a key issue. Since the idea is having recreating fun. ”
OK, maybe I should’ve voiced it differently. I think the responsiblity for a gamer group having fun shouldn’t solely lie with the GM, with the players just sitting back and expecting to be serviced. After all, the GM wants to have fun too.
I don’t mind telling you that the DM does NOT know about the hackery. As for the rest of what got said, well, we’ll just have to wait and see how that plays out.
Sounds like you’re having a browser issue, Christina. Dagon’s workaround should certainly take care of it though.
I don’t know who Violet is but she can’t be the DM. She gives good advice and seems to have a good head on her shoulders. She’s probably the best thing to happen to the party in a looong time. I just hope that she isn’t going to betray them because if she does…they’ll be so boned it isn’t funny.
Well shit… now I have to jump in with the stupid comment, thanks a lot for not stepping up to the plate everybody else:
“Huh huh, she’s gonna bone them, like, a lot, like, an orgy!”
How vulgar of you, sir! I demand that you apologize at once for your uncouth remark!
Violet is so much more intelligent than the DM (e.g., in WSM #71) that either she isn’t an NPC or the DM only plays dumb.
Christina: I’m not seeing anything cut off. Maybe you need to widen your browser?
I’d say that in a game, it is the leader’s responsibility to keep the players happy. Not necessarily the PCs, but the players. Why else would they follow him? A military officer will need to sacrifice his troops’ morale sometimes to achieve military objectives, but if a party leader does that, he’s taking the game way too seriously.
There’s nothing too serious about sacrificing the players(and their morale) to achieve the objective, soldier! Now give me 20, and throw yourself onto the trap so the rest of us can go(the rogue already bought it last time)!
maybe bunker is thinking rather highly of himself at the end there…
Could be.
I often always fall into the leader role in our games.
Although Ive had to roleplay it in different ways, really what it comes down to is that my job was to know what the others were able to do, then suggest they do it in ways that would benefit us most as a group.
Kind of like a pokemon trainer, I guess.
Sadly, the downside is that I also tend to then have the more social responsibilities. Including even when Id rather just shut up and let others play an equal share.
When that happens, as the leader, you should delegate the social responsibility too.
So, do you keep the other players in a pokeball whenever its not time for gaming or feeding?
My take on this is something like what Martin does with the differrent incarnations of Fleece: The DM and Martin both have partial control over the character, but in places like this it Bunker having a talk to his imaginary friend, similar to how some films have a devil and an angel on their shoulders.
The character still only knows what they know, but their conscience and ‘evilness’ (Can’t think of the opposite of conscience is…), are vocalising what is going through their minds in order to make a decision.
Also: talking about back pain, take a look at what the lady troll is sporting – or does regeneration heal that?
“Can’t think of the opposite of conscience is…”
Logic? Pragmatism? Wisdom? Sense? Fun? No, wait, how did that last one get in here…
Hmm, I don’t think those are opposites, you can be a sensible, logical, wise fun person but still not have a conscience. Psychopaths (Not necesarily the killing kind, more the ones that don’t have any real appreciation of what others think) can be all of those things to achieve whatever goals they are going after.
According to thesaurus.com, the autonym to conscience is immorality.
To key a new word
How about “misconscience”? Also it’s interessting, that conscience has the word “science” in it. Fun fact: There is a relation of the representing words “Gewissen” and “Wissenschaft” in the german language too.
“Misconscience” implies negative attributes, whereas it should be positive.
*throws a five cent coin*
My two cents, plus inflation, to say that the word you wanted was coin instead of key.
Sorry, not a native speaker
Obviously I sometimes get some details wrong, it viscous 
I guess it wasn’t obvious, but Bunker and Violet just crawled through an extended and very short secret tunnel.
I did realise that they were going through a tunnel, but with people saying that Bunker with his lower back pain being caused by what he was sporting up front, I was saying that Violet has a couple of other reasons why she might be having back pain (ie large breasts, for the slow of thinking).
In other news, I wrote a comment earlier that looks like it got swallowed up.
Basically replying to orald in a fairly longwhinded way saying that you can have “Logic, Pragmatism, Wisdom, Sense, Fun” and still have a conscience.
Also, I looked up what the opposite of conscience is on thesaurus.com, and it said amorality. Not sure if I agree with that though.
Hey well, it’s just a comic right?
HOLE in an extensive and very short hole, in a dungeon-hole? Needs five layers more hole recursion and maybe one or two more contradictions but this is a good start.
Has anyone else noticed a surprising lack of fodder monsters? I think the DM is infactuated with puzzles.
Don’t forget that the DM didn’t make up this adventure.
This is a classic “Puzzle dungeon” – there really aren’t all that many monsters in there.
I wonder if, after this, the DM will decide to run them through the Giant and Drow campaign modules?
I’m guessing the monsters will pop up when the gang searches for them…
…Or right after the party finds suitable weapons specifically enchanted against the monsters racial type.
Like a sword of Ogre Decapitation.
No, no. You only find suitable weapons specifically enchanted against the monster’s racial type *after* you defeat the monster. That’s how all these classic modules worked.
You always wonder why a supposedly intelligent monster keeps things like that around.
“Honey! Don’t let the kids play with that +10 vorpal blade of Red Dragon Slaying, it’s dangerous!”
may hap the monster is protecting it? lest the item falls in the wrong hands and wreaks havoc on his/her own likehood
Sort of like keeping a bullet with your name inscribed on it?
But what if you’re a sailor, do you keep a full 16″ shell around?
But who play Violet, in fact ? It’s a little creepy when you think of it, no ?