Level 9: #11
Chapter: Comic, Level 9 — Hotel Califormian
Rusty & Co.
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Ah, a Do Not Enter sign. The natural enemy of Lawful characters everywhere.
I’m now picturing a fight taking place on a lawn with a “keep off the grass” sign and the party paladin scrupulously staying on the path the whole time.
IGNORE THIS ORDER!
DO NOT FEED THE ELEPHANT!
Unexpected Terry Pratchett
But what if she’s fighting lawn gnomes?
Fighting lawn gnomes is no excuse for breaking the law!
There’s actually a Handbook of Heroes (another RPG webcomic) with precisely that.
This is going to result in Madeline getting hired here so she can enter, rather than her disobeying the sign, isn’t it?
Probably… and then she won’t be a guest, so she won’t be able to go back to the room Rusty and Y.T. are in.
Sure she can, she just needs to get hired as a maid.
Never mind, I forgot the line about the warded door
Or she could immediately quit just before returning to the guest room, and then go beg for her ob back if she needs to enter this room again. Remember, Lawful doesn’t just mean “obeying the rules”, it also means “exploiting the rules”. That happens more on the Evil side, but even the Good can lawyer their way around obstacles whenever it’s important enough.
Regardless of alignment, Madeline’s Intelligence score isn’t high enough to be a lawyer.
Much, much, better idea. Get declared as part of Rusty’s “staff.” Technically she’s a staff member, just not a hotel staff member. Gets around hiring practice problems. Still too tricksy for our resident pally though.
flaw exploitation. . . and they might not even have meant it
“See? THIS is why we should have asked Myrmarch Antoinette to show us the way!”
Obvious solution:
Get a part-time job as a life guard or folding laundry or something
then you’re now Staff and can freely enter
Slightly less obvious solution: Get temporarily polymorphed into a Quarterstaff and tossed into the room.
That kind of rules-lawyering is generally restricted to Lawful Evil characters.
Maddie would do it and not even realize it’s rules-lawyering. Of course, it would help if YT were here to think of it. . . . sigh Divide and conquer
Forget not realizing it is rules lawyering, she might legitimately think that that room is for storing quarterstaffs.
It says “staff”, singular. For her to make that misunderstanding, she would have to believe that the room is for storing a single staff – and it isn’t her.
I forgot that Maddie uses Detect Evil via her nose!
And I forgot that Detect Evil can also find artifacts infused with evil magic, not just evil people…
Adventure Line, ho!
Does this mean we’re skipping the pink champagne and the mirrored ceilings and going straight to the master’s chambers?
Well, the last thing I remember, she was running for the door…
And she found the passage back to the place she was before !
If the room is not stuffed with staves, I’m surprised.
That fourth panel is so THE FAMILY CIRCUS…
…which might make an interesting source to rift off of once the Eagles are finished with…
When I saw the lines, I laughed as that is so The Family Circus.
Am i only one who thinks Maddie is SUPER cute in last panel?
She just needs to find a staff and she’s golden.
A couple of wards, maybe not. But what about a couple of words?
Oooh, good catch! I wonder if that was deliberate?
The inevitable downfall of moral absolutism.
There’s just one thing, I realized. Being Lawful Good doesn’t mean “blindly follow every single rule ever no matter what”. There are times when good is more important than law.
Sure, that’s definitely true. And if the situation were more urgent, like a bunch of innocents being beaten to death on the other side of the door, Madeline would probably be willing to ignore the sign and rush in to help. But when she only has a suspicion of uncertain shady business, and there isn’t an every-second-counts type emergency, it makes more sense to at least try to do things lawfully, rather than go “cheerfully ignore any Law that is even the slightest bit inconvenient to what I think is Good”. One thing about being a paladin is that, while you might sometimes need to compromise on your principles to make the best of a bad situation, you should never be eager to do so.
Besides, Madeline is… well, not really bright, so she just isn’t very good at judging when the needs of Good are important enough to justify compromising on Law, so she errs on the side of caution.