The OotS Thread II

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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Lord Zentei »

Simon_Jester wrote:I never really noticed the mods as a problem, and while the idiots were annoying, I could deal with them.

Personally, I'm just as happy in an environment where I know there's a limit on how much the loudmouths can strut and beat their chests and flame without getting in trouble. Dishonest trolls aren't really more troublesome for me than insult-spewing trolls, and they're considerably easier to ignore while keeping a level temper.
Well, bully for you. That doesn't change the fact that that dishonest trolls are just as much poison to useful discussion as are loudmouthed trolls. And never mind that moderating one type of troll does not preclude moderating the other type too, yes? More so since according to the rules over there, passive aggressive attacks and flame-baiting are supposed to be a no-no.

Of course, when I pointed this out to the moderators (I did a few times), the response I got was "this is a discussion board, not a debate board", and that "Rich wants a board which is 'safe for kids'". While I guess it makes sense to clamp down on flames in such a case*, the lack of clampdown on dishonesty does not follow from that, and that undermines the utility of the board.


* Though the word filter is hilariously silly regardless.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Simon_Jester »

Lord Zentei wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:I never really noticed the mods as a problem, and while the idiots were annoying, I could deal with them.

Personally, I'm just as happy in an environment where I know there's a limit on how much the loudmouths can strut and beat their chests and flame without getting in trouble. Dishonest trolls aren't really more troublesome for me than insult-spewing trolls, and they're considerably easier to ignore while keeping a level temper.
Well, bully for you. That doesn't change the fact that that dishonest trolls are just as much poison to useful discussion as are loudmouthed trolls. And never mind that moderating one type of troll does not preclude moderating the other type too, yes? More so since according to the rules over there, passive aggressive attacks and flame-baiting are supposed to be a no-no.
Eh. Just stating a personal opinion. They seem worse to you than they do to me, such is life.

The only reason I asked is that at first, I honestly had no idea what you were unhappy with them about.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Rogue 9 »

Rogue 9 wrote:
Lord Zentei wrote:As for the moderators, it's not their heavy handedness that annoys me, but their silly priorities. Sophism, petulance and all around dishonesty is a-ok, but bad words are not; they'll turn a blind eye to passive aggressive bullshit and frankly to some disturbing stuff being posted if only it's "polite", but are all miss-manners net-nanny over trivial crap. I'm not really concerned about whether I can survive there, but only on whether I like the overall moderation culture. Of course, I haven't been there for a couple of years, so perhaps things have changed.
They have not.
I must revise my statement: I forgot that they changed the infraction policy so that now points expire more quickly than the multi-year Sword of Damocles they were before. The priorities and enforcement, however, have not changed.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Solauren »

I would also point out that the GITP (and the comic) are a business of sorts for Rich, so he probably has the staff give more leeway.

Can't scare off the client base
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by avatarxprime »

Lord Zentei wrote:
Crazedwraith wrote:So if Tarquin had fathered a child on that last wife. Would Famicide wiped him out as well? And thus Nale and Elan also?
I don't think so. Familicide was supposed to kill the family of the victim, and the families of said family members. The dragons were the family, the Draketooths were the family of family. Going for Elan and Nale would make it family of family of family, wouldn't it?
Close, but based on the description of Familicide the Draketooths should count under the first clause of the spell "Every living creature that directly shares your bloodline is dead" thanks to the Black Dragon ancestor. Penelope and any hypothetical child she had with Tarquin would die under the second clause of the spell "Every living creature that is directly related to any of those creatures is also dead" thanks to Penelope's child. Tarquin and by extension Nale and Elan would be safe since they share no blood with Penelope or her Draketooth child (the same cannot be said for the hypothetical Tarquin-Penelope child of course since it would be a half-sibiling to the Draketooth child).
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by CarsonPalmer »

avatarxprime wrote: Close, but based on the description of Familicide the Draketooths should count under the first clause of the spell "Every living creature that directly shares your bloodline is dead" thanks to the Black Dragon ancestor. Penelope and any hypothetical child she had with Tarquin would die under the second clause of the spell "Every living creature that is directly related to any of those creatures is also dead" thanks to Penelope's child. Tarquin and by extension Nale and Elan would be safe since they share no blood with Penelope or her Draketooth child (the same cannot be said for the hypothetical Tarquin-Penelope child of course since it would be a half-sibiling to the Draketooth child).
Or because it would be directly to Penelope, which is why her parents, grandparents, and siblings would also get hit (unless I'm misunderstanding how this had been said to work).
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by avatarxprime »

Penelope's parents and any other blood relatives (siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews, etc...) would all also die under the second clause of the spell. They are all directly related to Penelope's Draketooth child through Penelope so they all get dead. That's the horror that V realized, thanks to the Draketooths, V realized how widespread the spells effect was and just how many innocent lives died thanks to V's deal with the devil (and daemon and demon :D). Penelope's entire family died (along with tons of others) because she fell in love with a charming redhead and had a child. If Penelope never actually had a kid then she would have been safe from Familicide's effect, as would her family. Sadly, that was not the case.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Simon_Jester »

What confuses me, though, is where the effect stops. I still think that this matters on some level, because we know V didn't depopulate the entire continent, or even cause enough deaths for it to be commented on by anyone during the two weeks they were wandering around the place.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by avatarxprime »

Based on reading the spell description I was under the impression that the limitation to the spell is the jump between the first and second clauses. Familicide requires a living relative of the spell's target (a living relative of the ABD) to jump over to those related to the target's bloodline, but not actually of the target's bloodline. So if Orrin and the child had died before V cast Familicide, Penelope (and by extension her family) would have been safe.

However, Rich has been good enough to settle the matter by providing a quick rundown on Familicide that I just found while browsing the OotS wiki and decided I'd post here.
Rich Burlew aka The Giant wrote:I really thought that last comic would end this debate, but it seems like there's still a lot of confusion. So here goes:

Step 1: Kill everyone with the original target's blood. This is a simple yes/no effect: Is a creature (the secondary target) related by blood to the original target at all, in any way? If yes, kill it. If no, move on. Number of generations or percentage of blood or direction doesn't matter.

Step 2: Kill everyone who shares blood with any of the people killed in Step 1. Think of it as killing everyone descended from (or siblings to) any and all still-living ancestors of each secondary target. So if Penelope had a grandfather on one side and a great-grandmother on the other side who were still alive, every person who could trace their blood back to either of those people would be dead, because Penelope's daughter carries both of their bloods. If a person can only trace their blood through (say) Penelope's already-dead great-great-great-grandfather, then they're safe. Thus cousins and second-cousins and the like are all dead, but more distant genetic relations are not. It is possible for some cousins to survive if all older generations were already dead, yes, but Vaarsuvius wasn't really likely to take the time to make that distinction while sobbing on a dungeon hallway floor.

Now for some anticipated FAQs:

That's not exactly what Vaarsvuius said when the spell was cast, though.
First, Vaarsvuius is prone to poetic word choice and had no particular reason to include various exceptions or inclusions while in the middle of punishing the dragon. Second, as the author, I also had an interest in not necessarily giving away the twist that the Draketooths would be killed two years ahead of time (leading me to choose words that maybe implied one thing while allowing for another). In other words, don't try to parse the language too precisely.

Wouldn't that spell kill everyone of the original target's species?
In our world? Maybe. The OOTS world is not ours, though. It was created fully populated, even with black dragons. So there could be 100 original black dragons who (as V noted) breed slowly over the relatively-short span of time the current world has been in existence, leading to one-quarter of them being wiped out. If it had been cast on a human first, it may well have taken half or more of the population with it, depending on how many Original Humans there had been and how much interbreeding had occurred. Good thing that's not what happened, right?

But if it worked like that, it would have [insert obscure effect proven with math]!
Yeah, well, it didn't. Why? I don't know. But it didn't. I guess that makes me a crappy writer because I didn't think of whatever implication you just thought of, but there it is. I'm not a biologist or a mathematician. If it makes you feel better, just assume that all the laws of heredity and genetics work differently because It's Magic™.

I hope this will end the endless debates. It's really quite simple, and if you're getting to a point where it seems utterly complicated or recursive or whatever, you're probably thinking about it more than I did.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by CaptainChewbacca »

So the spell requires each step in the chain of relatedness to be alive in order to move on to the next individual. If it goes back to a great-grandfather, but that great-grandfather's siblings are dead, all of the descendants of those great-grand-uncles and aunts don't get killed.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Simon_Jester »

So, to take an example, suppose someone casts it on Bob. Bob's fourth cousin or whatever, Betty, happens to be married to me and we have a kid. Betty is killed, the kid is killed, I get killed.

But my grandparents are already dead, so my cousins (descended from those grandparents, but not otherwise related to me) are not killed?
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Re: The OotS Thread II

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Simon_Jester wrote:So, to take an example, suppose someone casts it on Bob. Bob's fourth cousin or whatever, Betty, happens to be married to me and we have a kid. Betty is killed, the kid is killed, I get killed.

But my grandparents are already dead, so my cousins (descended from those grandparents, but not otherwise related to me) are not killed?
Correct, assuming that Bob and Betty's common ancestor is still alive. The key is from step 2 of the Giant's explanation:
Think of it as killing everyone descended from (or siblings to) any and all still-living ancestors of each secondary target.
If the shared thrice-great grandparent is dead, the spell can't affect Betty. The reason why familicide killed so many people is because the dragon was (presumably) very long-lived and gave birth to long-lived decendents.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by CarsonPalmer »

Wow. Familicide is even more brutal than I thought it was. That's one hell of a body count.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Simon_Jester »

What if it skips a generation? Suppose Bob's mother is dead, but Bob's maternal grandparents are alive. Are they targeted?
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Re: The OotS Thread II

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844 is up. No real surprises.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by CaptainChewbacca »

Simon_Jester wrote:What if it skips a generation? Suppose Bob's mother is dead, but Bob's maternal grandparents are alive. Are they targeted?
No. A dead relative in the chain breaks it, I think.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Simon_Jester »

Hmmm.

Is there a cleric spell that lets you communicate with the soul of a dead person on another plane? There's Speak With Dead, but that doesn't actually let you send any information to the dead person. There's Contact Other Plane, but I think that only lets you interact with deities. Is there something in between, a "Hold Seance" spell?

Or Durkon could cast Undetectable Alignment on himself and see if that helps. Though it might not, if the clan is indeed that paranoid.

Also, you could burn through a lot of diamonds that way.

I wonder, can they contact a cleric of a different alignment who is nonetheless favorably disposed toward them?
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by avatarxprime »

CaptainChewbacca wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:What if it skips a generation? Suppose Bob's mother is dead, but Bob's maternal grandparents are alive. Are they targeted?
No. A dead relative in the chain breaks it, I think.
I think a dead relative only breaks the spell in terms of the jump between "all people related to spell's target" and "all people related to those people." In the case that Simon gave, since the maternal grandparents are still alive, they are still directly related to Bob and thus the spell will work it's way down from the maternal grandparents' line of heredity killing everyone that is still living and can trace ancestry back to said grandparents. I'd actually be better for the Bob if his grandparents were dead and his mom was still alive, the spell can't jump up any higher on the family tree than the oldest living relative. The closer that is to the target, the less damage that can happen since the spell is limited in how many branches of the family tree it can prune.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

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Contacting Roys Father could work. He can communicate with Roy and can communicate with others on the plane of dead. It probably won't happen though.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Solauren »

That would depend on which Pantheon the Draketooth's worshipped (if at all)

As I recall, Roy, his dad, and Durkon worship the Northern (Norse) Gods, while the contient the Draketooths were on appears to hold the pantheon similiar to the Babylonians in regard.

If that is the case, getting a message to them would involve alot of effort and time.

Speak with Dead would actually be better

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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Rogue 9 »

Solauren wrote:That would depend on which Pantheon the Draketooth's worshipped (if at all)

As I recall, Roy, his dad, and Durkon worship the Northern (Norse) Gods, while the contient the Draketooths were on appears to hold the pantheon similiar to the Babylonians in regard.

If that is the case, getting a message to them would involve alot of effort and time.

Speak with Dead would actually be better

"Why have you distrubed my rest?"

"Let me resurrect you, I'm not with the Sapphire Gaurd!"
Speak with dead doesn't contact the departed soul; it picks the brain of the corpse. This is why a damaged or substantially decayed corpse gives less complete answers. Using it doesn't communicate with the soul they're trying to raise.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by FaxModem1 »

Would that technically be necromancy though?
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Re: The OotS Thread II

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Technically speaking, yes. The necromancy school of magic, though, is not inherently evil.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Simon_Jester »

Solauren wrote:That would depend on which Pantheon the Draketooth's worshipped (if at all)

As I recall, Roy, his dad, and Durkon worship the Northern (Norse) Gods, while the contient the Draketooths were on appears to hold the pantheon similiar to the Babylonians in regard.

If that is the case, getting a message to them would involve alot of effort and time.
Also, Roy's father was apparently Lawful Good-aligned.

If they have to pick a ghost to talk to Girard's family, Shojo might be a good choice- but then there's no special ability to communicate, and they're back where they started, with the sole exception that Shojo has pretty good credentials when it comes to "fuck the Sapphire Guard." On account of him playing an elaborate con on them for decades, then getting bisected by their strongest paladin. Even Girard might be willing to hear Shojo out.

(I almost said "toughest paladin," but that is obviously O-Chul)
FaxModem1 wrote:Would that technically be necromancy though?
Actually, "necromancy" means speaking with the souls of the dead- that's what the Greeks called it. The idea that it can be used to summon the spirits of the dead for combat, or to animate dead bodies, came later as a sort of memetic creep in modern fantasy literature.
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Re: The OotS Thread II

Post by Solauren »

Actually, why bother with speak with dead or trying to get someone to talk to them.

Durkon can planeshift to the afterlife, and just go find them himself.
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