Why are 10 million dwarf souls even important?

[Tom Lehmann]

Do you know how I picked 10 million? I googled the medieval population of Scandinavia and made it about the same.

Thank you for making the effort and taking the time to do this. I appreciate it. Since D&D's generic setting is pseudo-medieval western european plus magic (and OOTS's setting is an extension of this), taking the time to ground it -- even a little bit -- helps your story, imo.

if that bothers you on some math-level of your brain, just pretend that the words "ten million" are a typo and it should say whatever number you would feel would be big enough to make Hel's stated plan "make sense" to you, personally.

Yes, a reader can do this, but each time a reader has to consciously do this, suspension of disbelief becomes harder. By making the effort on your end, fewer readers have to do this. Of course, since humans see things differently, no number will work for everyone, but as long as it works for some readers, I don't think your effort was in vain.

you should assume that the characters are more familiar with the relevant details than you are—and if they say, "Hey, this number is the right number!" than you, as a reader, should accept that as being true within this story unless the story gives you some clue otherwise (like a character saying, "Ten million? That doesn't sound right").

True, though we as readers don't know whether in the next few strips -- which you know about but we don't -- a character will question something stated in the current strip. You generally "play fair" and show us when a character is making a false assumption (as in 865 where Roy says the party has time to carry out their plan when, in fact, they don't), but do occasionally mislead us (as in 371-374, where both Xykon and MITD state their intention to imprison Miko when Xykon's real plan -- revealed in 376 -- is to let her escape in order to scry on her to detect the Azure City's gate location).

I do not understand comments that boil down to, "I don't think the plot works the way the text says it works."

Some of this has to do with suspension of disbelief when a story is serialized over time. Not only does serialization affect the reader's experience of a story's pacing, it also gives readers more time to go "Wait a moment, how does that work exactly?" as they mull over a story's twists and turns while waiting for the next installment. It's where the Hulk film critic idea that a film's (or story's) "hand-waving" only needs to be good enough to get viewers through the "moment", for the length of the movie, runs into difficulties. A serial lasts a long time, with lots of time between the "moments" when a reader first reads each strip.

Another aspect is that fantasy, as part of "speculative fiction", tends to attract many readers who are curious and who *enjoy* poking at and wondering about a story's assumptions. Sometimes, this "poking at" is just playful exploration and speculation and sometimes it is done in a very critical way. I appreciate that for the creator it can be hard to distinguish between the two, especially as many fans don't make much effort to couch their speculations in non-critical ways.