It cannot be easy to give up paradise, even to come back to those who need you. Plus, she might be wondering if she isn’t good enough, if a swim through lava and half a ton of dinomyte can kill her.
She will be fine, but I think she’s happy that Derek is looking out for her.
I’m violating a law of “don’t nitpick art details when it’s obvious what’s going on and the stuff you’re talking about isn’t important,” but if he’s up against the wall when she drops him, he should fall behind the bed. (And she’d probably have had to move from one side of the bed to the other, given the difference in viewpoint between 3 and 5.) But if she pulls him back to mid-air near the foot of the bed it works out, I think.
I…I think that was the joke they were going for. That which goes into a bedpan would best describe her current bedside manner (it stinks, to put it politely)
Based on Derek’s cryptic “get back what they lost” comment, I’m guessing Madeline losing her evil side had more adverse effects than initially evident.
Only way not to lose a level’s worth of xp, skills, attack bonuses, feats and other level related goo-ga’s is True Resurrection. Guessing the poor girl lost a lot from her rez related level loss.
True. This doesn’t invalidate the point made, however. Having strong interpersonal skills (the majority of what a CHA score represents) is also very effective for making people like / admire / love you.
Well, resurrection magic makes the distinction a kind of blurry one. Death is a serious but treatable medical condition…
…but yeah, Rusty’s shopping montage on the last page of the Circus chapter — http://rustyandco.com/comic/level-7-97/ — included a jeweler’s shop because diamonds are the material component for a Raise Dead spell.
The dialogue a few pages before that, when Roxy assured Rusty that “You know she’ll probably come back, right?” was alluding to the fact that the spell gives the deceased patient’s spirit a choice: remain in the afterlife, or return to the world. With Maddie’s sense of duty, she would gladly delay paradise to keep helping people…but Dorillys seems to be saying that the experience took a psychological toll.
In metagame terms, if we are going by the D&D 3.x rules (don’t know for other systems), about every resurrection spell has the unavoidable side-effect of draining the character of a level (well, putting him/her midway through the previous level). This means losing a few bonuses, a number of skill points, maybe even an attribute point.
Back in the game world, such a drain would manifest in the patient experiencing physical and mental losses. IOW, Madeline may be feeling a bit low, right now.
—————-
Uh, BTW, what’s the race/species of the green babe?
In older versions each ressurection was also chance based, with modifiers being taken from constitution. After multiple rez’s your constitution would take a point hit (or more) per rez.
I don’t remember about losing a level through death, but I only played a quasi 1.5 & a half version (friend took bits from multiple versions, put them together to make something that worked well enough to get the story’s he wanted to tell told [was really into finding non-combatitive solutions to problems/actual dialogue {parley with a dragon? Good luck!}])
In 1st and 2nd Ed D&D, a Raise Dead spell reduced your CON by one point. A Resurrection spell did not.
Resurrection Survival was a percentage chance (typically well over 50%; 18+ CON gave you a 99% chance of coming back). Failure generally didn’t happen much, at least in any game I played.
CON determined the number of times either spell could be used. If you had a 13 CON, you could be raised or resurrected a total of 13 times between the two.
The PH didn’t make this clear, but a character could choose not to return if either spell was used (briefly noted in the 1st ED DMG, a bit more spelled out in the 2nd Ed DMG). Only ever see a player make this choice twice in 28+ years of gaming. Happened a lot more often in 3rd ED due to the changes noted below.
Players don’t like losing CON (affects HP totals), so 3rd Ed switched to losing a level via experience point loss (actually, going to the halfway point of experience points between the minimum needed for your current level and the minimum needed for the level prior to the one within which you died). Since levels could be regained, this was deemed more fair – and if your GM used the rules straight up, it wasn’t so bad. Most of the games I played in have had GMs who felt advancement was too fast. So they cut experience awarded, and once your character died more than once, it became non-viable to adventure with the group it started. 3rd ED is *much* more deadly than 1st or 2nd Ed due to the generally higher attack values and generally lower PC armor class values.
System Shock was also a thing – they replaced it with a FORT ST in 3rd Ed. System Shock was used for things like being forced into (or out of) a shape change / polymorph or suffering massive damage in a single shot (50+ points in a single shot in 2nd Ed). Which leads to an amusing story from 2nd Ed.
While on a mission, the party (averaging 8th level) encountered a random group of 25+ kobolds. I roll a reaction check for morale and get a 3 – the kobolds, for some reason, attack the heavily armed and armored party. In a single round, the party manages to kill every kobold but one. I make another reaction check at the end of that round and the lone kobold rolls a 2 – okay, the kobold, against all reason, decides to stay and fight. He manages to go off early and attacks the heavily armored dwarven fighter with 61 HP. Natural 20. In the system we were using, if you hit with a natural 20, there was a chance of scoring a critical hit if you then rolled your character level or less on a d20, and if you had to roll a natural 20 to hit at all, you had to roll another 20 first. Since the kobold needed that 20 to hit, I rolled again. Nat 20. Okay, now I need to roll a natural one twice (once to confirm, again since a Kobold hals a 1/2 HD). Nat 1, Nat 1. So the kobold has successfully rolled a critical hit on the dwarven fighter. A critical hit does a percentage of current HP plus weapon damage ((2d10 x 5%) + weapon damage). The dwarf takes 95% of HP plus 2 points of damage – 60 HP. The dwarf survives! Except he took more than 50 points in one shot, so system shock. No problem, He’s got a 19 CON – 99% System Shock survival! He only has a single d10, so he rolls for the “tens” digit – and it’s a 0. No problem he can only fail if he rolls another 0. And so therefore…
We decided that the kobold shoved his spear up the dwarf’s largest exiting sphincter and the dwarf died of shame.
And to add insult to injury, his resurrection survival roll was a 99% – and that was what he rolled.
He asked me to add “kobolds” to his like of fears on his character sheet.
Uh huh… I might believe in this 1/800000 chance event a bit more, if I didn’t constantly see stories about “just when all was lost, I rolled a triple nat 20 and saved the day!” (which is itself a mere 1/8000 likely event on any 3 consecutive d20 rolls) on tabletop forums.
People online seem to have the most AMAZING luck… whereas I’ve seen one or two consecutive 20s where it mattered at all (crit confirmations), and only a single instance of truly terrible luck screwing someone (double nat 1s on a Con poison save, when anything else would have saved them from death). But we’re only talking 1/400 odds, there!
That is, that’s the most I’ve seen in about a decade of regular gaming. Much more common has been hearing something like “oh wow I rolled another 20 for this Use Rope check, besides the 20 I’d rolled for that Ride check I just made–can you imagine if those had lined up on something that actually mattered?!”
You’re forgetting the most important factor in determining the likelihood of rolling a lot of the same value:
Likelihood someone fairness tested their dice in a saline solution, so low the house offers no odds.
Casino dice are certified fair out of the factory. Gaming dice aren’t. Two outcomes from the same die are thus not independent probability distributions but dependent on a single random outcome at the Chessex factory.
Now add that early d20s and d10s were just unmarked icosahedrons not intended for use as dice and marked by the consumer and had to be marked by a dye that is not massless and I’m not particularly surprised that some people have stories of extreme “luck” using them.
In addition, the more rolls one makes, the more chances one has to get an unlikely sequence of dice rolls, thereby increasing the odds,
During the time that sequence happened, out group gamed around 20 hours a week (4 hours on Wednesday, 5 hours on Friday, and between 11-13 hours on Saturday – not counting the occasional Sunday). As a GM,one makes more rolls per hour. Let’s assume 15 d20 rolls per hour – that’s 300 rolls a week (as a player I roll less, as a GM I roll far more). Assuming 48 weeks of gaming, and now we’re up to 14,400 rolls a year. We gamed that way for around 15 years, so now we’re up to 2,160,000 rolls. So finding that exact sequence in that many rolls is still damned unlikely, but a lot less unlikely than you might think.
I’ve got like 4 stories like that in 28 years of gaming where the dice did seriously bizarre stuff. And since as a GM I roll all rolls on the table (no screen to hide my die rolls), the players don’t get to say I cheated on the dice rolling (they still call me a cheater mind you).
And I’ve personally never ever saved the day based on dice rolls. My rolling as a player is just crap. It’s the sheer volume of rolls made as a GM that increases the odds of the seriously weird stuff happening,
Good point. In 3e, the dead soul gets three pieces of information to help decide whether to return: The name of the character bringing them back, that character’s patron deity (if any), and the effects of the means of return (such as experience loss, waiting period, or changes in race).
Point of order, it wasn’t one little adventure. Maddie had been on adventures with Mimic et al before the one that required she renew her lease on life.
I would guess she’s coming up against the idea that sometimes, sheer goodness won’t carry you through everything.
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It cannot be easy to give up paradise, even to come back to those who need you. Plus, she might be wondering if she isn’t good enough, if a swim through lava and half a ton of dinomyte can kill her.
She will be fine, but I think she’s happy that Derek is looking out for her.
How does Mimic not land on the bed?
I guess if Dorilys pulls him back from the wall before panel 5.
Which makes sense, because between panels 4 and 5 she stands up straight.
She pulled him away from the bed and to the wall beside it on the last page. You can see it in the third panel.
I’m violating a law of “don’t nitpick art details when it’s obvious what’s going on and the stuff you’re talking about isn’t important,” but if he’s up against the wall when she drops him, he should fall behind the bed. (And she’d probably have had to move from one side of the bed to the other, given the difference in viewpoint between 3 and 5.) But if she pulls him back to mid-air near the foot of the bed it works out, I think.
He rolled a 1 on his Reflex save.
Logical?
That was one of those things that was hard to notice at 2am. It’s been fixed.
Hey!
You don’t get to reroll your spot check!
;p
She has a good bedpan manner.
I… I think that’s bedside you’re looking for. [:P] Bedpans are something else. [:P]
I…I think that was the joke they were going for. That which goes into a bedpan would best describe her current bedside manner (it stinks, to put it politely)
What did they do to Madeline? They brought her back. 😛
Based on Derek’s cryptic “get back what they lost” comment, I’m guessing Madeline losing her evil side had more adverse effects than initially evident.
Only way not to lose a level’s worth of xp, skills, attack bonuses, feats and other level related goo-ga’s is True Resurrection. Guessing the poor girl lost a lot from her rez related level loss.
Oh god, the mouseover text…. *dies*
What does it say!?! O.O I can read it, I’m on Android! [:(]
“Today’s strip brought to you by Dropbox.com”
… Darn, I can’t tell if that’s a joke or if you’re serious. [:P]
Hfar is serious
Okay, Derek is actually kinda cute. No wonder Madeline blushes whenever she thinks about him.
Cleric. CHA is one of the major stats. No wonder he’s a hunk.
*coughcharismaisnotjustlookscough*
He does know how to present himself with Charisma though!
True. This doesn’t invalidate the point made, however. Having strong interpersonal skills (the majority of what a CHA score represents) is also very effective for making people like / admire / love you.
Not that I know a lot about this IRL. 😀
Wait, Madeline DIED?! I thought she had just been hurt!
Well, resurrection magic makes the distinction a kind of blurry one. Death is a serious but treatable medical condition…
…but yeah, Rusty’s shopping montage on the last page of the Circus chapter — http://rustyandco.com/comic/level-7-97/ — included a jeweler’s shop because diamonds are the material component for a Raise Dead spell.
The dialogue a few pages before that, when Roxy assured Rusty that “You know she’ll probably come back, right?” was alluding to the fact that the spell gives the deceased patient’s spirit a choice: remain in the afterlife, or return to the world. With Maddie’s sense of duty, she would gladly delay paradise to keep helping people…but Dorillys seems to be saying that the experience took a psychological toll.
“the experience took a psychological toll.”
In metagame terms, if we are going by the D&D 3.x rules (don’t know for other systems), about every resurrection spell has the unavoidable side-effect of draining the character of a level (well, putting him/her midway through the previous level). This means losing a few bonuses, a number of skill points, maybe even an attribute point.
Back in the game world, such a drain would manifest in the patient experiencing physical and mental losses. IOW, Madeline may be feeling a bit low, right now.
—————-
Uh, BTW, what’s the race/species of the green babe?
Human.
I know this because she’s a cameo.
As for why she’s green — I told Mike R., and we’ll see if he uses it 0:)
So, she’s not the “psychological troll ” Maddie had…
Bad run-in with a rod of wonder?
In older versions each ressurection was also chance based, with modifiers being taken from constitution. After multiple rez’s your constitution would take a point hit (or more) per rez.
I don’t remember about losing a level through death, but I only played a quasi 1.5 & a half version (friend took bits from multiple versions, put them together to make something that worked well enough to get the story’s he wanted to tell told [was really into finding non-combatitive solutions to problems/actual dialogue {parley with a dragon? Good luck!}])
Whoa, triple brackets 😀
In 1st and 2nd Ed D&D, a Raise Dead spell reduced your CON by one point. A Resurrection spell did not.
Resurrection Survival was a percentage chance (typically well over 50%; 18+ CON gave you a 99% chance of coming back). Failure generally didn’t happen much, at least in any game I played.
CON determined the number of times either spell could be used. If you had a 13 CON, you could be raised or resurrected a total of 13 times between the two.
The PH didn’t make this clear, but a character could choose not to return if either spell was used (briefly noted in the 1st ED DMG, a bit more spelled out in the 2nd Ed DMG). Only ever see a player make this choice twice in 28+ years of gaming. Happened a lot more often in 3rd ED due to the changes noted below.
Players don’t like losing CON (affects HP totals), so 3rd Ed switched to losing a level via experience point loss (actually, going to the halfway point of experience points between the minimum needed for your current level and the minimum needed for the level prior to the one within which you died). Since levels could be regained, this was deemed more fair – and if your GM used the rules straight up, it wasn’t so bad. Most of the games I played in have had GMs who felt advancement was too fast. So they cut experience awarded, and once your character died more than once, it became non-viable to adventure with the group it started. 3rd ED is *much* more deadly than 1st or 2nd Ed due to the generally higher attack values and generally lower PC armor class values.
GMing – it’s a sickness, really….
System Shock was also a thing – they replaced it with a FORT ST in 3rd Ed. System Shock was used for things like being forced into (or out of) a shape change / polymorph or suffering massive damage in a single shot (50+ points in a single shot in 2nd Ed). Which leads to an amusing story from 2nd Ed.
While on a mission, the party (averaging 8th level) encountered a random group of 25+ kobolds. I roll a reaction check for morale and get a 3 – the kobolds, for some reason, attack the heavily armed and armored party. In a single round, the party manages to kill every kobold but one. I make another reaction check at the end of that round and the lone kobold rolls a 2 – okay, the kobold, against all reason, decides to stay and fight. He manages to go off early and attacks the heavily armored dwarven fighter with 61 HP. Natural 20. In the system we were using, if you hit with a natural 20, there was a chance of scoring a critical hit if you then rolled your character level or less on a d20, and if you had to roll a natural 20 to hit at all, you had to roll another 20 first. Since the kobold needed that 20 to hit, I rolled again. Nat 20. Okay, now I need to roll a natural one twice (once to confirm, again since a Kobold hals a 1/2 HD). Nat 1, Nat 1. So the kobold has successfully rolled a critical hit on the dwarven fighter. A critical hit does a percentage of current HP plus weapon damage ((2d10 x 5%) + weapon damage). The dwarf takes 95% of HP plus 2 points of damage – 60 HP. The dwarf survives! Except he took more than 50 points in one shot, so system shock. No problem, He’s got a 19 CON – 99% System Shock survival! He only has a single d10, so he rolls for the “tens” digit – and it’s a 0. No problem he can only fail if he rolls another 0. And so therefore…
We decided that the kobold shoved his spear up the dwarf’s largest exiting sphincter and the dwarf died of shame.
And to add insult to injury, his resurrection survival roll was a 99% – and that was what he rolled.
He asked me to add “kobolds” to his like of fears on his character sheet.
bah.. “list of fears”, not “like of fears”.
Uh huh… I might believe in this 1/800000 chance event a bit more, if I didn’t constantly see stories about “just when all was lost, I rolled a triple nat 20 and saved the day!” (which is itself a mere 1/8000 likely event on any 3 consecutive d20 rolls) on tabletop forums.
People online seem to have the most AMAZING luck… whereas I’ve seen one or two consecutive 20s where it mattered at all (crit confirmations), and only a single instance of truly terrible luck screwing someone (double nat 1s on a Con poison save, when anything else would have saved them from death). But we’re only talking 1/400 odds, there!
That is, that’s the most I’ve seen in about a decade of regular gaming. Much more common has been hearing something like “oh wow I rolled another 20 for this Use Rope check, besides the 20 I’d rolled for that Ride check I just made–can you imagine if those had lined up on something that actually mattered?!”
You’re forgetting the most important factor in determining the likelihood of rolling a lot of the same value:
Likelihood someone fairness tested their dice in a saline solution, so low the house offers no odds.
Casino dice are certified fair out of the factory. Gaming dice aren’t. Two outcomes from the same die are thus not independent probability distributions but dependent on a single random outcome at the Chessex factory.
Now add that early d20s and d10s were just unmarked icosahedrons not intended for use as dice and marked by the consumer and had to be marked by a dye that is not massless and I’m not particularly surprised that some people have stories of extreme “luck” using them.
What Atarlost said.
In addition, the more rolls one makes, the more chances one has to get an unlikely sequence of dice rolls, thereby increasing the odds,
During the time that sequence happened, out group gamed around 20 hours a week (4 hours on Wednesday, 5 hours on Friday, and between 11-13 hours on Saturday – not counting the occasional Sunday). As a GM,one makes more rolls per hour. Let’s assume 15 d20 rolls per hour – that’s 300 rolls a week (as a player I roll less, as a GM I roll far more). Assuming 48 weeks of gaming, and now we’re up to 14,400 rolls a year. We gamed that way for around 15 years, so now we’re up to 2,160,000 rolls. So finding that exact sequence in that many rolls is still damned unlikely, but a lot less unlikely than you might think.
I’ve got like 4 stories like that in 28 years of gaming where the dice did seriously bizarre stuff. And since as a GM I roll all rolls on the table (no screen to hide my die rolls), the players don’t get to say I cheated on the dice rolling (they still call me a cheater mind you).
And I’ve personally never ever saved the day based on dice rolls. My rolling as a player is just crap. It’s the sheer volume of rolls made as a GM that increases the odds of the seriously weird stuff happening,
*SPIT TAKES* WAIT! That’s Derek isn’t it? That’s sneaky! We saw Derek the Cleric before actually knowing who he is
And if Madeline’s sense of duty wasn’t enough, Mimic found the one cleric she’d definitely come back for.
Good point. In 3e, the dead soul gets three pieces of information to help decide whether to return: The name of the character bringing them back, that character’s patron deity (if any), and the effects of the means of return (such as experience loss, waiting period, or changes in race).
I’m pretty sure Maddie would have been extra upset to see that. Bad form.
Help me fill in the blank, I’m stumped and want to find the answer before the strip gives it away:
Madeline the Paladin
Derek the Cleric
Dorilys the ______
Medic?
Sorceress?
::sound of bells, whistles, and sirens going off while flashing lights in various colors go off::
Nailed it.
Ah, thank you. Dorilys is wearing the same armor as Madeline, so I assumed she was a class related to paladin.
She’s a cleric, actually.
GreatLimmick already answered the question, but I can’t help but wonder if their group also has Carmen the Shaman.
I wonder what that armband Derek is wearing does. He’s wearing it on the other arm than last time we saw him back when Maddie got raised.
Point of order, it wasn’t one little adventure. Maddie had been on adventures with Mimic et al before the one that required she renew her lease on life.
I would guess she’s coming up against the idea that sometimes, sheer goodness won’t carry you through everything.
Acknowledged.
I’m in love. <3
No, you’re drunk. [:P] Go home. [:P]
I can’t help but feel that you missed an opportunity by not naming that medic “Dolores”.