Interview Questions For Rich

[The Giant]

"Might MitD's base creature be copyrighted by a company other than Wizards of the Coast?"

Creatures can't be copyrighted. They can be trademarked, in certain circumstances, though most monsters that appear in works of copyrighted fiction are not.

Based on the response to a previous question, I wonder what the Giant would say the most important theme of the comic is.

The main theme of the comic is, "I'm glad I have a job where I can work in my pajamas."

So I think there are the explicit references to power: see Vaarsuvius's quest for ultimate arcane power, Xykon's speeches on power, the debate by combat about how Roy'a intelligence was a form of power, etc.

I do think on a metafictional level there appears to be something foucaldian happening, especially evidenced in the most recent book, where you seem to be examining the power of narrative structure. I don't have a great argument prepared, but I think this would be a decent start for an academic paper analyzing Order of the Stick.

Well, I would say that those sort of examinations of power are more a function of the D&D game itself than anything that especially interests me. I address them by way of critiquing the game, and especially the people who play it. D&D, as an abstraction of reality, tends to simplify the messy analog world with discrete blocks of numbers that can be compared and contrasted. A character's life choices can then be sorted as "optimal" or "suboptimal" easily, and those who favor optimization techniques are quick to denigrate any choice that is suboptimal. And then they'll go a step further and tell me that I am writing the story wrong because the characters in it do not follow the current trendy optimization technique, or I dare to show a fighter as being the equal of a wizard.

Of course, the real world doesn't work like that. Who's more powerful, a fighter or a wizard? Who's more powerful, an art therapist or a tree surgeon? It's a nonsense question, because "power" in the sense that D&D players use the word does not really exist in our world. Therefore, it's a fairly meaningless thing to worry too much about. In the real world, power takes many forms, but none of them "trump" all the others the way that people think that wizards trump all other classes. Power is whatever helps you get what you want, and not everything that represents power to one person necessarily has any use to anyone else. Who's more powerful, a fully armed marine or a fast food worker? What if I told you that all the marine wants is to sleep next to her husband who's 7000 miles away, something the fast food worker does every single night? Now who's more powerful? Who optimized their life to get what was really important to them? Who's more powerful, an investment banker or a guy who gets to work in his pajamas? There are no clear cut answers, and everyone's choices are their own to make—and not for others to judge as being "suboptimal."

And to bring it back to D&D, optimizers usually make the flawed assumption that what everybody wants is for their character to be able to steamroll the monsters as quickly and efficiently as possible, when in fact what some people want might be to tell the story of a deeply flawed hero who bumbles their way through every encounter, while what other people might want is to not spend more than ten minutes making their character so they can spend more time sleeping next to their husband. Power is about priorities, and there are no objectively superior priorities in life or D&D.

So I guess what I'm getting at is that power doesn't interest me at all per se, but the ongoing and habitual mischaracterization by a subset of my readers about what constitutes power does. I suppose it's the D&D version of, "Money can't buy happiness."

At the same time, it seems you view power is only power if people have earned it. Not only did V not earn it, but neither did Bozzok by all accounts..

No, that's just something that matters to Xykon. Not everything a character says is intended to be the author's point of view.