If you merely don’t like her as much as most other commenters seem to like her: Nope, while I don’t dislike her, I don’t like her more than the other characters.
If you really dislike her: Maybe, but probably not.
I don’t know I’d say I “really dislike” her, I /am/ trying to give her the benefit of the doubt.
But at this point she’s been around for /a while/ now and I feel like all she’s really done is funny hats and sex-related stuff. Some of her in-game characters are cool and have interesting arcs, but Amy herself.. eehhh.
It is fortunate Dove is merely a character from a webcomic, for if I knew him, and I were friends with Dallas, I would be going to my garage and retrieving my baseball bat. After I ensuring fair Noble is in the right head space.
I have unfortunately had to deal with disruptive players like Dove at various times during my tenure as a judge at organized play events. It is never fun when a player is ruining everyone else’s fun, whether it’s by roaming from table to table and interrupting other games, or making the GM’s job a living nightmare.
You are lucky. I’ve never had to deal with more than one or two, though one was ‘politely’ removed for talking down to our GM at the time, and one was told, calmly and politely, to leave before our group used him as a rehearsal stage for riverdancing in golf cleats.
Not that common. I was lucky to only have to deal with one disruptive player at a table I was running. Fortunately the event organizers backed me up, especially since I offered the disgruntled player a chance to have them review the combat that resulted in his PC getting killed. (It didn’t help his PC that the player was bored with an adventure that focused on looking for clues and interviewing NPCs, and decided to split off from the group while in the business of a suspect. The suspect’s guards attacked the lone PC, who was no match for them without the party to back him up. Oops.) To add insult to injury, the disgruntled player blamed me for deliberately killing his PC, and proceeded to badmouth me online.
Another player, in a different group, was disruptive in different ways. She was a new player, and very enthusiastic. But she had no sense of boundaries, and that caused friction, ultimately leading to her expulsion from our group.
I had the displeasure of participating in an event where one of the DMs was this kind of player. It was one of those events where if you survived to the end you won a prize. After he TPKed the table he was running, he came over to ours and harassed our DM for running the module “wrong”, and basically called us all cheaters for about 30 minutes until the lead coordinator for the event came back from his lunch and made him stand down.
ya’ll got luckier than I did: had this 400+ lb blob of shame call my wife a cunt for objecting to his (very Evil) character doing something particularly messed up…being a rogue/paladin gestalt, she protested with Knives of Smiting.
the ambulance had to instead pick up a UNCONCIOUS 400+ lb blob of shame.
It’s a reference to the TV show “Will and Grace”. Their friends Jack (played by Sean Hayes) and Karen (played by Megan Mullally) were renowned for boozing it up and having all kinds of escapades, usually ending when one pair of friends or another found them passed out in awkward positions…
So Dove either got to Dallas, OR Dallas actually did something she feels morally uncomfortable with. Not sure which one, but it’ll be interesting to find out!
It’s probably just the brick to the face that broke the camel’s back, since it seems she received considerable grief with her coming out as a lass and he utilized that as ammunition.
Hmm, seems that Miss Noble opted to exit stage left…and possibly pick up another disgruntled player on her way to plot revenge…the plot can’t get any thicker!
Except 1) Dove DESPISES Dallas, and 2) Dove is misogynistic as is possible.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love for the one scheming with Dove to be some female in a powersuit that’s trying to buy up the store or something, but Dove would never work with a female. He literally gave up on winning Dungeon Run IN ANY CAPACITY simply so that he would not even have a chance of a shared victory with Dallas.
Yup. I can happily suspend my disbelief to accept that Sam is in intermittent contact with a pervy version of the Dungeon Master from the (excellent) old D&D cartoons, I can accept that Brett is not only Santa’s son but is now running the family business so to speak, but Dove working with a woman, especially one he hates as much as Dallas? That would a stretch too far 😉
The comic has at least been consistent within its own world. Anything it has shown to be true at one point does not become untrue later without damn good reason. So as Dove has been shown to hate working together with females (or even being in the presence of them?) I am DOUBTFUL that he will be working with one. I still hope it’ll happen, but I doubt it. 😛
I’m not so sure about that. We’ve only really seen him interact with Dallas, and he seemed just as critical of her age as of her gender. He’s a horrible elitist who looks down on his peers, there’s a fair chance that with someone clearly above him in the social order he’d become a master boot-licker.
Agreed! Dove really hit too hard in -very- tender areas. When you are young and trying to deal with the issues of figuring out who you are…people ripping on you and saying the things you’ve been working you ass off to produce tends to hit -really- hard. And people who are in creative pursuits or in fields that aren’t common for people like them (whether it be because of family, religious, ethnicity, religion or gender), they tend to be more vulnerable to people tearing them down
Dove got disqualified for being a jerkass. If anything the prize would go to Jeanie in third, who had the highest roll out of those who failed vs. dragon’s breath.
But I think Sam would rather find Dallas, make sure she’s OK, and give her the trophy regardless.
Going by the rules, I think Carlos wins, actually, since his was the only character to walk into the room before getting blasted, therefore corpse closest to the heart.
Though yes, Sam is likely to immediately jump to making sure Dallas is okay.
Did he? He was told to get out of the store, but I never heard anything about him being disqualified (especially seeing his character was dead). Not that it exactly matters as Dove also left (after being told to leave).
Sam told Dove “If you ever speak to me or another player like that again […] you will never return and I will file conduct reports with the union and every tournament organizer on the forums. […] you’ll be lucky to get in on a pick-up pog tourney”
So we haven’t heard Sam /explicitly/ say “YOU LOSE, GOOD DAY SIR!”, but I feel like that’s just because he became terse in his anger.
I think in the coming pages we’ll see Sam going to war with Dove and crew as he tries to enact the rest of the above threat, and if we’re lucky it’ll totally blow up into some kind of DM civil war and we’ll get to see some high council involvement. :3
Wait, now I’m worried that Dove broke Dallas, and that she now sees Sam’s involvement in bringing her identity to the world as the cause of her suffering.
Between winning under dubious pretences (Dove’s questionable dice), and the complete shredding of what was left of her pride afterwards, it’s no wonder she left. I hope this episode doesn’t push her too far in any negative direction 🙁
Damn, now every time I read dialogue from Trevor & Jeanie I’m going to here Jack & Karen’s voices (Sean Hayes & Megan Mullally) which will make me giggle like a little school girl.
Are we letting Dallas off the hook here too easily? Didn’t she publish some type of “tell-all” book on Gamers? We don’t know exactly what her background is but it would seem like she got into gaming only to write her book, maybe pretending to be what she wasn’t, and it wasn’t until later, that she found she actually enjoyed it. May be some people WOULD hold a grudge (at least for a while) towards someone they felt was being fake to them. This is not to condone Dove’s behavior, but apparently, Ms. Noble may not have come to terms with her past either.
>shrug<
Just because one person is a dick, doesn't mean the other person is ONLY a victim.
The only background we have on Dallas, thus far, is that using the pseudonym “Dallas” (her real name being Darlene), she published work for five years prior to agreeing to do a book signing (and thus revealing she is a young woman) for Dead Iron.
The relevant comic arcs (I won’t provide hyperlinks in case it triggers moderation) are:
– April 22, 2011 through May 4 (the most relevant one)
– September 9, 2011 through September 14 (the first few strips of Dallas’ signing session at Dragon’s Den, the later ones being narratively focused on Sam, Grey, and Mel)
I’m not aware of there being any new word on Dallas’ work as a designer since then, and certainly not any “tell all” book. Perhaps you can post a link from the archives?
No, I was referring to “Dead Iron” as well, and at least according to the 9/2/14 strip, “men at the local game store [felt she had] infiltrated the gaming industry to bring it down from the inside.” The idea being that she was pretending to be a gamer, and at least certain people felt betrayed. Maybe Dallas is feeling guilt over this as well.
That was the article writer putting down what they heard other male games think. these gamers that were “interviewed” may have felt like their territory was encroached upon and are also old-school, only-ever-played-with-other-guys gamers.
I don’t think that article was insinuating that Dallas wanted to take down gaming. Her only book so far was a gaming world and system called Dead Iron.
I wholly believe that Dallas is indeed a gamer, in fact, she’s part of the DM Union as she, like Sam, can see and hold a conversation with Larry.
Dead Iron was explicitly identified as “Dallas Noble’s new game” in the April 22, 2011 strip I referred to. Nothing more, nothing less.
I would say that if “men at the local game store” felt betrayed, or felt that she had “infiltrated the gaming industry to bring it down from the inside” – that is, if some subset of gamers can’t imagine that a teenaged woman would want to design and publish games except as an attempt to “bring [the gaming industry] down from the inside” – it reflects very poorly on them and not at all on Dallas.
This is an awesome series. Ran across it last night while searching for info about 5th edition bards. Read a few panels and ended up wasting most of my work day reading the entire series from the beginning. Even went and added to the kickstarter. A little overboard on the dick jokes occasionally, but overall an excellent series that I’ll be following.
OK, so your Kickstarter was already funded and I’m just pushing you to a stretch goal. I just wanted to let you know, I think you draw an amazing comic and I eventually kicked into something. Best wishes!
This is the stuff I was talking about in the case of one Dove, ruining people’s lives. This guy deserves to burn and Brian often burns them when their caught.
I’ve been re-reading D20, and I’ve now finished this are for like the third time. There is one thing that has been nagging at me, and hopefully someone can help me out. Why is Dallas saying that her life is ruined? I may be over looking something so stupidly obvious, but I can’t seem to wrap my head around her saying that. Or the way it now seems like she’s teaming up with a mortal enemy to “get revenge” on Sam for…. reasons??
IDK, like I said, I may be overlooking the simple answer.
There’s been no suggestion that she’s the one who’s teamed up with Phil. She clearly thinks her life is ruined because coming out as a woman tanked her latest game; that would provide an obvious reason to think that it’s not just a fluke bad run, and leave her with severe doubt that she could salvage her career.
That is to say, she thinks that being a woman had something to do with it; the idea really doesn’t hold water, but she’s upset about it and obviously not thinking clearly. (She’s evidently an emotional teenage girl as well as being a gamer)
Why I say it doesn’t hold water is quite simple; even in an enthusiast pastime like gaming, the vast majority of consumers don’t know a thing about the author of what they’re buying, let alone give a crap about her being a girl. Controversy in her hometown isn’t going to make a dent in nationwide sales.
/>
Hover-Text: Amy’s Participation Headband is reward enough… for all of us, really.
I vote that there should be an etsy shop devoted to buying Amy’s hats, because her hats are the best.
I don’t think they’re really that extravagant. Could probably make one with little effort.
i agree. what hats have we *not* seen yet? 🙂
Am I the only one Amy has still yet to win over? >_>
If you merely don’t like her as much as most other commenters seem to like her: Nope, while I don’t dislike her, I don’t like her more than the other characters.
If you really dislike her: Maybe, but probably not.
Not at all.
I don’t know I’d say I “really dislike” her, I /am/ trying to give her the benefit of the doubt.
But at this point she’s been around for /a while/ now and I feel like all she’s really done is funny hats and sex-related stuff. Some of her in-game characters are cool and have interesting arcs, but Amy herself.. eehhh.
TLDR: CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT OR GTFO, AMY
Patience, Monkey. Patience.
More Amy development is coming and it will be (I hope) good.
Good to hear!
I know this kind of thing is tough because you have a lot of characters all elbowing each other out of the way for screentime.
I’m just a grumbler. 🙂
It is fortunate Dove is merely a character from a webcomic, for if I knew him, and I were friends with Dallas, I would be going to my garage and retrieving my baseball bat. After I ensuring fair Noble is in the right head space.
I have unfortunately had to deal with disruptive players like Dove at various times during my tenure as a judge at organized play events. It is never fun when a player is ruining everyone else’s fun, whether it’s by roaming from table to table and interrupting other games, or making the GM’s job a living nightmare.
I’ve never met these kind of player. How common are they? :S (I wonder if I’m lucky or if it’s normal I’ve never met any)
You are lucky. I’ve never had to deal with more than one or two, though one was ‘politely’ removed for talking down to our GM at the time, and one was told, calmly and politely, to leave before our group used him as a rehearsal stage for riverdancing in golf cleats.
Not that common. I was lucky to only have to deal with one disruptive player at a table I was running. Fortunately the event organizers backed me up, especially since I offered the disgruntled player a chance to have them review the combat that resulted in his PC getting killed. (It didn’t help his PC that the player was bored with an adventure that focused on looking for clues and interviewing NPCs, and decided to split off from the group while in the business of a suspect. The suspect’s guards attacked the lone PC, who was no match for them without the party to back him up. Oops.) To add insult to injury, the disgruntled player blamed me for deliberately killing his PC, and proceeded to badmouth me online.
Another player, in a different group, was disruptive in different ways. She was a new player, and very enthusiastic. But she had no sense of boundaries, and that caused friction, ultimately leading to her expulsion from our group.
I had the displeasure of participating in an event where one of the DMs was this kind of player. It was one of those events where if you survived to the end you won a prize. After he TPKed the table he was running, he came over to ours and harassed our DM for running the module “wrong”, and basically called us all cheaters for about 30 minutes until the lead coordinator for the event came back from his lunch and made him stand down.
ya’ll got luckier than I did: had this 400+ lb blob of shame call my wife a cunt for objecting to his (very Evil) character doing something particularly messed up…being a rogue/paladin gestalt, she protested with Knives of Smiting.
the ambulance had to instead pick up a UNCONCIOUS 400+ lb blob of shame.
I don’t get the Jack and Karen reference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_McFarland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Walker_(Will_%26_Grace)
Sam’s two drunk friends 😛
It’s a reference to the TV show “Will and Grace”. Their friends Jack (played by Sean Hayes) and Karen (played by Megan Mullally) were renowned for boozing it up and having all kinds of escapades, usually ending when one pair of friends or another found them passed out in awkward positions…
Jack and Karen are two of the characters from Will & Grace.
the secondary characters from Will and Grace.
Be thankful of your ignorance 😉
I am. Thanks for the enlightenment(?) all. LOL
So Dove either got to Dallas, OR Dallas actually did something she feels morally uncomfortable with. Not sure which one, but it’ll be interesting to find out!
It’s probably just the brick to the face that broke the camel’s back, since it seems she received considerable grief with her coming out as a lass and he utilized that as ammunition.
we’ve already seen how sexist gaming is, when those other guys ended up getting shot in the face. it’s fuckin disgusting, really.
Hmm, seems that Miss Noble opted to exit stage left…and possibly pick up another disgruntled player on her way to plot revenge…the plot can’t get any thicker!
Except 1) Dove DESPISES Dallas, and 2) Dove is misogynistic as is possible.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love for the one scheming with Dove to be some female in a powersuit that’s trying to buy up the store or something, but Dove would never work with a female. He literally gave up on winning Dungeon Run IN ANY CAPACITY simply so that he would not even have a chance of a shared victory with Dallas.
Yup. I can happily suspend my disbelief to accept that Sam is in intermittent contact with a pervy version of the Dungeon Master from the (excellent) old D&D cartoons, I can accept that Brett is not only Santa’s son but is now running the family business so to speak, but Dove working with a woman, especially one he hates as much as Dallas? That would a stretch too far 😉
The comic has at least been consistent within its own world. Anything it has shown to be true at one point does not become untrue later without damn good reason. So as Dove has been shown to hate working together with females (or even being in the presence of them?) I am DOUBTFUL that he will be working with one. I still hope it’ll happen, but I doubt it. 😛
I’m not so sure about that. We’ve only really seen him interact with Dallas, and he seemed just as critical of her age as of her gender. He’s a horrible elitist who looks down on his peers, there’s a fair chance that with someone clearly above him in the social order he’d become a master boot-licker.
Awww, poor Dallas =( I just want to huggle her and try to make her feel better!
Agreed! Dove really hit too hard in -very- tender areas. When you are young and trying to deal with the issues of figuring out who you are…people ripping on you and saying the things you’ve been working you ass off to produce tends to hit -really- hard. And people who are in creative pursuits or in fields that aren’t common for people like them (whether it be because of family, religious, ethnicity, religion or gender), they tend to be more vulnerable to people tearing them down
I dare say that Dallas could sporadically have what is called impostor syndrome.
Especially given she’s still an adolescent, working in a creative field, labouring against a lot of entrenched sexism.
Amy is the absolute best.
Anyway, I think Dallas just realized that Dove will pull some old-boy network bullshit and is upset about it.
So. Seeing that the winner left, does that mean the second-place winner becomes the winner by default?
Or in other words, did Dallas just give the prize to Dove by walking off?
Dove got disqualified for being a jerkass. If anything the prize would go to Jeanie in third, who had the highest roll out of those who failed vs. dragon’s breath.
But I think Sam would rather find Dallas, make sure she’s OK, and give her the trophy regardless.
Because Sam is a decent guy like that
Going by the rules, I think Carlos wins, actually, since his was the only character to walk into the room before getting blasted, therefore corpse closest to the heart.
Though yes, Sam is likely to immediately jump to making sure Dallas is okay.
Ah, you’re right. The stated goal was to get to the heart, not just to survive as long as possible.
SHINY ROCK MINE
Did he? He was told to get out of the store, but I never heard anything about him being disqualified (especially seeing his character was dead). Not that it exactly matters as Dove also left (after being told to leave).
Sam told Dove “If you ever speak to me or another player like that again […] you will never return and I will file conduct reports with the union and every tournament organizer on the forums. […] you’ll be lucky to get in on a pick-up pog tourney”
So we haven’t heard Sam /explicitly/ say “YOU LOSE, GOOD DAY SIR!”, but I feel like that’s just because he became terse in his anger.
I think in the coming pages we’ll see Sam going to war with Dove and crew as he tries to enact the rest of the above threat, and if we’re lucky it’ll totally blow up into some kind of DM civil war and we’ll get to see some high council involvement. :3
hopefully sam files that damn report anyway. I would.
I’m… kinda hoping I know where this is going… and kinda horrified at the same time…
I… sorta hope this gets dark…
Wait, now I’m worried that Dove broke Dallas, and that she now sees Sam’s involvement in bringing her identity to the world as the cause of her suffering.
Ha! Loved the character reference. Was actually watching Will & Grace yesterday. Amy’s hats are fantastic. I’m confident Sam/group will help Dallas.
Between winning under dubious pretences (Dove’s questionable dice), and the complete shredding of what was left of her pride afterwards, it’s no wonder she left. I hope this episode doesn’t push her too far in any negative direction 🙁
Damn, now every time I read dialogue from Trevor & Jeanie I’m going to here Jack & Karen’s voices (Sean Hayes & Megan Mullally) which will make me giggle like a little school girl.
Which makes me ask if you did have voice actors to play a character in D20Monkey Universe who would play who if you had your first pick of choice?
All I know is, Sam would have to be voiced by none other than Billy West, aka Philip J Fry.
I can so hear that
Are we letting Dallas off the hook here too easily? Didn’t she publish some type of “tell-all” book on Gamers? We don’t know exactly what her background is but it would seem like she got into gaming only to write her book, maybe pretending to be what she wasn’t, and it wasn’t until later, that she found she actually enjoyed it. May be some people WOULD hold a grudge (at least for a while) towards someone they felt was being fake to them. This is not to condone Dove’s behavior, but apparently, Ms. Noble may not have come to terms with her past either.
>shrug<
Just because one person is a dick, doesn't mean the other person is ONLY a victim.
Forget it, Jake…this is Chinatown.
The only background we have on Dallas, thus far, is that using the pseudonym “Dallas” (her real name being Darlene), she published work for five years prior to agreeing to do a book signing (and thus revealing she is a young woman) for Dead Iron.
The relevant comic arcs (I won’t provide hyperlinks in case it triggers moderation) are:
– April 22, 2011 through May 4 (the most relevant one)
– September 9, 2011 through September 14 (the first few strips of Dallas’ signing session at Dragon’s Den, the later ones being narratively focused on Sam, Grey, and Mel)
I’m not aware of there being any new word on Dallas’ work as a designer since then, and certainly not any “tell all” book. Perhaps you can post a link from the archives?
No, I was referring to “Dead Iron” as well, and at least according to the 9/2/14 strip, “men at the local game store [felt she had] infiltrated the gaming industry to bring it down from the inside.” The idea being that she was pretending to be a gamer, and at least certain people felt betrayed. Maybe Dallas is feeling guilt over this as well.
That was the article writer putting down what they heard other male games think. these gamers that were “interviewed” may have felt like their territory was encroached upon and are also old-school, only-ever-played-with-other-guys gamers.
I don’t think that article was insinuating that Dallas wanted to take down gaming. Her only book so far was a gaming world and system called Dead Iron.
I wholly believe that Dallas is indeed a gamer, in fact, she’s part of the DM Union as she, like Sam, can see and hold a conversation with Larry.
by the sounds of it Dove was apart of the blasklash that hit Dead Iron as Dallas shed what gender she really was.
Dead Iron was explicitly identified as “Dallas Noble’s new game” in the April 22, 2011 strip I referred to. Nothing more, nothing less.
I would say that if “men at the local game store” felt betrayed, or felt that she had “infiltrated the gaming industry to bring it down from the inside” – that is, if some subset of gamers can’t imagine that a teenaged woman would want to design and publish games except as an attempt to “bring [the gaming industry] down from the inside” – it reflects very poorly on them and not at all on Dallas.
Just wanted to let everyone know Karthun has launched on Kickstarter so if you want to back it head on over! 🙂
Officially backed for the Limited $60 pledge!
it is indeed!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sandandsteam/karthun-lands-of-conflict
Soon as I have some spare money, I will back.
Officially an adventurer! (Backer)
And FUNDED! 🙂 😀
Backed and ready 🙂
Didn’t see it yesterday since I read the comic on Sunday, but now backed too, shame on me for missing the collectors level though.
This is an awesome series. Ran across it last night while searching for info about 5th edition bards. Read a few panels and ended up wasting most of my work day reading the entire series from the beginning. Even went and added to the kickstarter. A little overboard on the dick jokes occasionally, but overall an excellent series that I’ll be following.
Karthun Kickstarter!?!?! I’m in!!!
I lack monies. Will my firstborn do?
OK, so your Kickstarter was already funded and I’m just pushing you to a stretch goal. I just wanted to let you know, I think you draw an amazing comic and I eventually kicked into something. Best wishes!
This is the stuff I was talking about in the case of one Dove, ruining people’s lives. This guy deserves to burn and Brian often burns them when their caught.
I’ve been re-reading D20, and I’ve now finished this are for like the third time. There is one thing that has been nagging at me, and hopefully someone can help me out. Why is Dallas saying that her life is ruined? I may be over looking something so stupidly obvious, but I can’t seem to wrap my head around her saying that. Or the way it now seems like she’s teaming up with a mortal enemy to “get revenge” on Sam for…. reasons??
IDK, like I said, I may be overlooking the simple answer.
There’s been no suggestion that she’s the one who’s teamed up with Phil. She clearly thinks her life is ruined because coming out as a woman tanked her latest game; that would provide an obvious reason to think that it’s not just a fluke bad run, and leave her with severe doubt that she could salvage her career.
That is to say, she thinks that being a woman had something to do with it; the idea really doesn’t hold water, but she’s upset about it and obviously not thinking clearly. (She’s evidently an emotional teenage girl as well as being a gamer)
Why I say it doesn’t hold water is quite simple; even in an enthusiast pastime like gaming, the vast majority of consumers don’t know a thing about the author of what they’re buying, let alone give a crap about her being a girl. Controversy in her hometown isn’t going to make a dent in nationwide sales.