The Order of the Stick

"Send in your skeletons

Sing as their bones go marching in again

[...]

The page is out of print

We are not permanent"

 

Foo Fighters - Pretender 

_____________________________________________________________________

Vaarsuvius: "I deliberately chose to cast the weaker form of Dispel Magic earlier so as to reduce the likelihood of it accidentally unraveling our own spells, which likely had a higher - "

Belkar: "Just say it was magic. Nobody cares about that stuff anymore."

 

(T)OOTS #1247

(mind the small spoiler)

 

As The Order of the Stick launches drifts into its last chapter, I've been wondering at its oscillating relevance to online subcultures during its relatively long lifespan as a chief representative of RPG-inspired comics (D&D 3.5e in this case) and the recent strip quoted above seems to have nailed the shifting baseline. T-OOTS started in the early 2000s, tracking the Infinity Engine series' and Neverwinter Nights' peak popularity, which allowed it to capture not only its implicit audience of tabletop gamers but many like myself with no access to tabletop groups but whose interest was piqued as to the more complex mechanics offered outside computerized hack'n'slash automation. But judging by the complete lack of conversation around roleplaying in online games, the two markets have either diverged again... or one has ceased influencing the other.

Unlike similar comics like Nodwick which drew humor from players' contrariness, tOOTS focused on the inherent absurdity of living and dying by fantasy role-playing gimmicks, at first with regards to specific game mechanics, then widening its scope to RPG campaign storytelling conventions. Meanwhile in pop culture at large, the fantasy / superhero craze legitimized by the Lord of the Rings movies ran its course from initial hype to diversification to watering down by lowest-common-denominator and now regressing to 1970s camp. If the first X-Men flick came out today, they really would be wearing yellow spandex. The supply of gamers who liked computer adaptations and would eat up commentary on original recipe dungeoneering might be running out.

More generally, the referential humor on which T?OOTS initially relied is going out of fashion. From the late '90s to about 2010 the unprecedented personal expression facilitated by the internet built up a tidal wave of "I've heard of that, who says I haven't" material as every little clique and fanatic fringe carved out its turf. Read some early Sluggy Freelance strips for a taste of just how reliant on in-jokes and catchphrases the success stories of the time were, or purportedly scifi strips like Melonpool and Zortic. Unabashedly derivative as it was, (t)oots at first depended on a trend now more or less collapsing under its own redundancy and the various entertainment industries' unfathomable output. Universal references (e.g. Seinfeld, Mario Kart, The Da Vinci Code) are far more easily lost in the shuffle now and World of Warcraft has gone from the game everyone's playing to the game everyone can tell you when and why they quit. Even if a fad peaks high its lifespan is far shorter now and jokes about last year's Star Wars movie will rapidly fall flat. Dungeons and Dragons itself looks more and more frustratingly antiquated, with attempts at modernization in 4e/5e having done more harm than good as far as I can see as an outsider.

On neither of those levels would T-OOTS be entirely doomed, since it rapidly grew beyond strict D&D rule jokes and stopped indulging in other pop culture references around the time of the Dune sandworm jokes. But its audience's mentality may have changed more thoroughly. The devil's in the details and as Belkar so aptly pointed out, nobody cares about that stuff anymore. It presented complex plots and chains of causality hundreds of strips in the making, but nobody wants to figure anything out anymore or kick ourselves for a twist we should've seen coming.

 

Contrast the way hints are given for two random computer games I've talked about in the past month. Whereas The Secret World's fan sites (circa 2012) attempted to emphasize investigation by only gradually unveiling puzzle hints, encouraging you to keep linking as many clues as you can after as little help as possible, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' (2021) feed you screenshots of the exact tile layout or password sequence, the faster to light up your achievement icon without the onus of independent thought, thereby also motivating developers less and less to fine-tune their creations' logical presentation. Even in terms of combat, instead of addressing the over-randomization of D20 rolls, Wrath leaves it in place and instead feeds you obvious "I win" buttons in the form of mythic feats with infinite effects so you can cheat your way past the numbers altogether and pretend you've mastered the system. Anecdotal examples such as these only fall into place as gradual retreat and capitulation to our loss of fundamental skillsets once you watch an otherwise rather intelligent grad student in the sciences struggle to divide 2 by 0.5 with a calculator.

Obnoxious as it could be most certainly was, the L33T subculture pervading game discussions when Rich Burlew started cracking wise about spot checks and baleful polymorphs still accepted the presuppositions that challenges are to be met, skills applied and clever solutions applauded. As Full Frontal Nerdity confirms, Belkar the lackluster ranger is not the only one to have noted the gradual shift away from rules-based gaming to self-gratifying flights of fancy, though I think Aaron Williams is kidding himself by assuming it's because everyone is now comfortable with D20 number crunching. An entire generation has grown up with pervasive cash shops in every electronic game, convinced that cheating by bribing the developers is more important than actually playing. Why sweat the arithmetic when you can just buy a win and bask instead in the parade the NPCs throw for "your" victory? You can't tell me that mentality hasn't transferred from desktop to tabletop as well.

While I myself prefer to focus on analyzing games' world-building, I can do so because others have playtested and nitpicked the practical side of gameplay. Unfortunately the pugnacity inherent in finding flaws where flaws exist back in 2003 has died off as we've traded adolescent boy bombast and abbrasiveness for the mawkish propriety of middle-aged soccer moms.*

So where does that leave Toots? How much of the old special nerdy interest group has it managed to retain?

Will its final volume reaffirm the characters' existence in a modern rules-governed wargame world or regress to preoperational make-believe and prescientific heroics? Will anyone still blurt out "wait a minute, I had a 22!" or figure out how to use INT in the arena of STR/CON or count the number of spell slots before a caster fight, caster fight (caster fight!) or will we simply be treated to characters squinting and grunting as they lob nondescript kamehamehas at each other?

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________

 

*The fact that even as outlandish a phrase as "mawkish propriety" already shows up on Google only compounds the problem of creativity, but that's a topic for another day.