DM of the Rings CXXXIX:
Oh Boy Oh Boy Oh Boy!
By
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Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
Spoiler Warning:
SOMA
A game that dares to ask what it means to be alive, what it means to be human, and why should you bother trying to answer the first two questions?
Game at the Bottom
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
DM: “You know, Legolas…if you push past the orcs just to get to the troll, each one gets a free attack…”
What? No one is here already?
Red Dice, ftw!!
Long-time reader, first time poster. I love this comic Shamus! As soon as I get my teleporter fixed, I’m sending you a cookie.
that was awsome. i actually don’t remember the troll in the movies….i guess i need to go rewatch them.
great comic shamus.
They’re so excited. It’s kind of cute. And yet I’m sure they fought a troll in Moria…
No really, you are guys are scared..
Yeah, yeah, can we kill it now?
Gotta love how well they pay attention to the dramatic situation, looking forward to (hopefully) one of them getting smacked around a bit ;)
I find it amusing the DM is still hoping for some decent roleplay out of these guys.
I recall reading that at one point, Peter Jackson & co were going to have Sauron appear in person outside the Black Gate and fight Aragorn. Then they came to their senses (thank goodness!) but still used some of the footage of Aragorn fighting a large opponent and simply replaced Sauron with an Olog-hai (troll). I would have been steaming mad if they had gone with the original idea.
Man, I know where this is going and I feel so bad for the players. hah.
Dude, I love it… it’s the definition for Legolas’ attitude… Niiiiiice!
Issachar: yeah, they were going to have Sauron in his original body come fight Aragorn, but right before the release of the movie they quickly covered the image with a troll. Thank God.
Love the comic, Shamus!
Saving them for the dragons, ahahahahaha! Incredible! The DM’s suggestion was the icing on the cake, though…
A shame no one brought torches to burn the troll once they kill it.
They dont need fire. They’ve got special red dice!
Not…the red dice! Anything but that!
Steve.
If they got so excited over a troll, just wait until the eagles arrive.
What? How is Legolass supposed to know who’s side the eagles are on? :)
Trolls! I thought those things only existed on message boards!
-The Gneech
I’m confused. I thought the text that the troll growled in was only for Balrogs.
Well, see, THIS troll is 1/3 balrog on his mother’s side.
Makes him immune to fire, too.
1/3?
I’m not going into details.
Whoa! I’ve had pretty much the same reaction to pretty much the same situation (horrific, unbeatable armored hulk – can our heroes possibly prevail?).
Of course, it’s perfectly in-character for a paladin to be ludicrously enthusiastic about facing a death knight and legions of undead, when the rest of the party is filled with horror. It was just role-playing. That’s my explanation. Really.
Flame the troll. ups sorry.
love legolas’s face in panel 5.
1. Great work done here Shamus. I just love this comic and last month I spend a lot of my time reading it and laughing.
2. I love the way you turned all those ridiculous scenes from the films in D&D actions.
3. The Witch-King has his flaming sword, Frodo has Sting, but in Book its clearly stated that the swords of other Hobbits (Daggers of Westernesse), Gandalf (Glamdring) and of course Anduril (..the sword of Elendil filled Orcs and Men with fear, for it shone with the light of the sun and of the moon, and it was named Narsil) also glowed in light.
The stats of Anduril (check DMotR: CII); Keen, Haste, at least +5 Enchantment…that Olog-Hai had no chance…but in the film…horrific.
Greetings from Slovenia
I remember the first time I fought a troll in D&D, only familiar with those of LotR. I think the average party level was 4. I nearly crapped myself, until someone explained the difference.
Eh, Aragorn is only around lvl5, so it all works out.
1/3 Balrog. hee hee.
I suppose a certain infinite series of inverted powers of two could add to 1/3, but that’s so nerdy. One might even say that that would be Unrelenting Nerdery. But who talks like that? Honestly.
Btw, Shamus, I noticed on your store that you have a shirt that the picture says “I’m an NPC” but the info about it is titled “Vader Quote for the Win”.
Sadly most of the time you only need to know your gm, the time he or she invested in the campaign and you know how every fight will end !
For example I almost always use beatable enemies who have the tendencies to not finish a disabled PC ;)
Those guys remind me of one of my WoD players.
Awesome strip as always.
9 Downtym Says:
“Man, I know where this is going and I feel so bad for the players. hah.”
/agree. For the first time the PC’s don’t actually hate the campaign. It’s going to be sad (for them, hilarious for us) when the DM pulls the rug out from under their fun.
Heh, 1/3rd breed. I had a discussion with some friends about how this could be possible (we were playing munchkin+expansions, and a third breed card came up). The closest we came was something like 3/8. Then again, it waas off the top of our heads, we didn’t go too much indepth on this.
I loved that troll in the movie. I particularly liked its reaction when the Ring was destroyed — it looks up from trying to crush Aragorn, seems to say, “uh-oh”, and runs for the hills.
Well, according to the ancient texts, Gilgamesh was 1/3 god, so there _is_ precedent… ;)
*sigh* Aragon versus Sauron….
Somethings Peter Jackson got so very right, and some things he got so *very* wrong.
Of course the troll can be 1/3 balrog, his father was 1/3 balrog and his mother was 1/3 balrog.
1/3 balrog = half-fiend half-dragon troll. The DM realized too late that you need a base race to put those templates on.
The sad… sad thing about this comic is, it would be about an infinite times more funny if after laughing at each one… I don’t remember some time that a similar situation had come up in my game experiences…
Wonderful world as usual.
Didn’t Pippin end up killing the troll?
Of COURSE you can have 1/3 ancestries! You provincial humans and your purely physical copulation!
Human copulating with troll you can picture, but you can’t image some sort of spectral being possessing a balrog and getting on with the lurve-sweet-lurve?
7 Wraithshadow Says:
I find it amusing the DM is still hoping for some decent roleplay out of these guys.
But they are totally role playing. Just not the characters the DM wants them to play. :)
Gah! WTB edit. :(
Imagine a empty line between the italics and my own comment…
11 EmeraldTiara Says:
Issachar: yeah, they were going to have Sauron in his original body come fight Aragorn, but right before the release of the movie they quickly covered the image with a troll. Thank God.
So, how would have that tied with the spotlight throwing eye? I tought Jackson’s interperation was the eye was Sauron himself. He had two bodies? :o
ps. Only the 2nd thread I’m posting in, and already I’m spamming… :p
A Trøll once bit my sister …
The troll is directly from the book; Pippin kills it. (Though I don’t recall if the books states that the troll goes after Aragorn.)
I seriously doubt that PJ ever considered having Sauron fight Aragorn. My guess is that’s a ‘net myth concocted by disgruntled “every movie has to be just like the book” types.
Hahahaha! In the last panel you can see a bit of Saurons’ crown poking above the head of the troll… or is that a tower? ;)
Telas said:
[i]A Trøll once bit my sister …[/i]
You are fired.
Now, we have to find new commentators. And fire them.
(for lack of an Edit function)
“I seriously doubt that PJ ever considered having Sauron fight Aragorn. My guess is that's a “˜net myth concocted by disgruntled “every movie has to be just like the book” types.”
No, Pete actually choreographed (sp?) the fight between Sauron and Aragorn… Shamus mentions it in this very webcomic I believe. You can witness it on the RotK dvd Special Edition Disc 2.
The Aragorn vs. Sauron fight is discussed here:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1016
I wanna see all of em dead
Oooh, special red dice. =D
“The troll is directly from the book; Pippin kills it. (Though I don't recall if the books states that the troll goes after Aragorn.)”
The troll chieftain that Pippin kills is part of a wave of trolls, attacking at the beginning of the assault during a wave of arrows. It doesn’t go after Aragorn, but instead goes for Pippin’s friend Beregond (another minor character left out of the movie, probably for the best) when Pippin kills it, gets crushed by it, and passes out after hearing the Eagles coming.
The story about having Aragorn fight Sauron is true, but it’s indeed possible that this bit was a source of inspiration for having him fight a troll instead, when they recognized Sauron as not being an option.
We assume that the campaign will end as the book did… but Gollum is dead. Maybe the DM will let Sauron get the ring and blast them to oblivion. :)
Also (doesn’t this place have an edit button?) the thing sticking out from the troll is just a tower in the background. If I recall correctly, they were going to show Sauron in his old beautiful form (Annatar, Lord of Gifts, a form he lost in the Akallabeth, another reason I’m glad they didn’t go through with it). So he wouldn’t be wearing that ugly crown he had in the beginning of the first movie, in any case.
Telas Says:
A Trøll once bit my sister …
Trøll bites can be quite nasti.
Steve.
In the book the troll which Pippin kills is going for Beregond, soldier of Gondor. Beregond was one of the cooler minor characters who was sadly left out of the movie–he and his son hung out with Pippin, and Beregond helped save Faramir from being burned by Denethor. Beregond and his son were also perhaps the only regular (as in not a lord or of special birth, etc.) humans we got to know.
FIRST POST!
Great comic.
I thought the tower sticking out behind the trolls head was part of the black gate that has similar towers on it.
Pete actually choreographed (sp?) the fight between Sauron and Aragorn… Shamus mentions it in this very webcomic I believe. You can witness it on the RotK dvd Special Edition Disc 2.
I think the important thing to remember here is that the scene didn’t get filmed with Sauron then changed to a troll, as has been suggested here. It was storyboarded to see if the idea would fly, at which point it was decided to drop it. Not one frame of the “Sauron fight” was rendered.
Jackson didn’t “ruin” anything. He had a look at the idea and…*rejected* it. This is what the creative process is about.
The books couldn’t simply be translated into a movie format. Books can never go straight to film and remain compelling to a wider audience. The movies had to appeal to more people than had read the books to ensure that the next one in the chain actually made it to the screen. The fact is that not enough people have read these books to make a definitive movie financially possible solely from their support.
For an example of what happens if you try and “film the book”, take a gander at the latest Harry Potter thing which is incomprehensible if you didn’t read the books – like me – and thoroughly disappointing – according to my wife and daughter – if you did because of all the stuff that had to be left out to make it all fit into a financially viable package. All because 7 books = 7 films in the minds of the studio.
C’mon guys. Be critical of the LOTR movies if you want, but for goshsakes be critical of what got made, not what got thrown in the crapper.
If it wasn’t for the DVD versions adding in all sorts of background stuff you’d never have known about this anyway.
Steve.
I understand the necessity of making alterations of a book to fit the screen (Though for the record, I didn’t find Harry Potter 5 to be incomprehensible, though they did sometimes just assume that we knew certain characters, though I did find the plot kinda…sucked, I suspect that’s a problem with the source material.), but P.J. made a number of decisions that were…questionable. (Like, say, the entire Paths of the Dead sequence.)
That said, they did more than storyboard the “Sauron” fight. They went so far as to “film” it – by which I mean, having Aragorn fight empty air. They never added any CG to that sequence though, and adapted it to become the Troll fight. I have no issues with that, really. Though I wish the films overall had been better.
It was storyboarded to see if the idea would fly, at which point it was decided to drop it. Not one frame of the “Sauron fight” was rendered.
Jackson didn't “ruin” anything. He had a look at the idea and…*rejected* it. This is what the creative process is about.
The bluescreen footage with Aragorn was filmed. They just cgi’d the troll instead of Sauron. Also, all the footage where the Eye stares at them and the whole party squints in the glare was originally meant to be the pretty form of Sauron (as Calaron says above) dazzling them with his glowy white prettiness.
(yes, I’m enough of a geek to have listened to all the director’s commentary)
Hilarious excellent comic Shamus^^
You are making more right? RIGHT!? If not i curse you to find the most crappy players for… well nah just hoping for mire ;D
more*
I love the shot of Legolas. :D
Don’t send Shamus cookies.. buy his shirts… or mugs.