And so, we come to an end of the Guardian mini arc. A million thanks to Roel Stalpers of Rules of Rule. Please be sure to check out his site and his comics!

Slap that mage!

Finally finagled the time to start catching up around here and, of course, I just had to check out the Loaded Dice guest arc as the first order of business. Great little run, there... AND quite the surprise twist of an ending...

Great stuff, Roel... thanks for keeping the web comics breathing.

Some thoughts:

I wanted to start the whole thing with a bit of a misdirection, as I mentioned before. Hinting that the whole thing is obviously meta.

I then went with a straight story, avoiding comedic elements as best I could, a bit of snark doesn't count, or shouldn't count. But every short story has a twist, and with the first twist being impossible to revisit, the whole "she's really his mother in the real world", I had to think up of something unexpected.

So when the last pages came rolling out I had two heroes on their knees, and just introduced a third. So I figured, why not reference the game element in a way that should be recognizable to the readers?

Originally it was Dalana who would break character together with Jhim, since they were both late to the battle, it would have translated in both being late to the game itself, and then Faustus breaking character by pointing out they just broke character and it should cost them XP.

But Olan pointed out that Dalana was the least likely to break character, so I had to make some adjustments. I wondered about having Faustus break character, but it wouldn't make sense, he got beaten to a bloody pulp. I wondered if I could have him walk away with the glory, boasting that it was him who did the job, but it didn't feel right and I felt it wouldn't have been as big a break from the character and its player, so the effect of a player commenting through his character would have been lost. So it turned out to be Jhim to break character, after all he was the one who did the heavy lifting to speak, and with an impossible feat that could easily be blamed on a motherloving excellent couple of throws.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Having Faustus and Dalana be all bitter about Jhim saving their sorry asses by being utterly awesome and then bragging about it feels like a natural conclusion to the story.

Haha, must say that I loved that ending

I am probably one of the pickiest members of the Inn and I approve of this ending....excellent!

I must agree the ending was wonderful.
I greatly enjoyed that you tied the scene to the ooc comments seen throughout LD.



Thank you for your hard work Roel.

Awesome little story- good to see some life in loaded dice, if only for a short story. =3

Noooooooooooooo....................

It can't be over, we need Rich to come and heal!!!!!!!!!

It ain't done until we get our PUN!

Perfect ending! And the ice effects were awesome too~ <3

Gotta LOVE Tim/Jhim, right? Absolutely amazing~ x33

Oh crap...does that mean I'm up soon? o.o

Yes, please? Just one more strip, Roel? Just so (I CAN'T believe I'm saying this. . .) Rich can fire off one of his puns?

I'm so sad to see it end, but it did end very well indeed Roel! Thanks for everything and I hope to see more work from you here sometime on Loaded Dice!

Get ready for a regular Loaded Dice, coming soon.

^^

I'm terrible at writing puns, and I do mean terrible.

I wouldn't get any further than having him say: "Ice to meet you" (McBain!)