Discord GM: It's a long process of tearing away at flimsy rock with your bare hooves, but eventually you unearth the pristine jewel. And as you do so, you hear Discord's dulcet tones once again.
Discord: Thou hast embraced the fear of chaos with thine own hooves. From this moment forth, until the game is over… You are cursed to fervently and always covet this "diamond."
Rarity: Well, it's less the diamond itself and more what it can accomplish for me, so– Waaaiiit a second. That tone sounded a lot like invisible air quotes. Just what exactly is the catch?
Discord GM: Oh, by the way, I brought you a prop.
Rarity: Like a plastic emerald?
Discord GM: Oh no, no. I found this outside.
Rarity: … Ahhh. Aha. Ahahaha ha ha. AHAHAHAHA! AAAAAAHAHAHAHA! Aheh. Hehhhh… <sigh> Well played.
Discord GM: Thank you!
Welp, this update lands on the 28th of July, so you may or may not know what that means.
Seven years.
It was a silly little thing from the very start, mashing up ponies and D&D, flagrantly aping the gimmicks of older, wiser webcomics. It should've burnt out ages ago, and yet... here we are. This has been surprisingly fulfilling work, exploring roleplaying this way. I've now accomplished a lot of the ambitious things I wanted to do with Friendship is Dragons, but I'm surprised to find I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel. I feel like there's further I can go. I don't know how far yet, but half the fun of writing organically is not really knowing for sure. We're sticking around for a while yet.
Anyway, got some campaign podcast to drop today, as well.
Tales of New Dunhaven Session 18 - The Leverage Job, Part 2: Podcast | Video
I was also thinking it might be Boulder. Although given the sort of rock he is (I can't recall the name but I did a bit on Youtube analyzing it once), he isn't a rock you'd expect to find away from a volcanic or once-volcanic region.
Though who knows, maybe this group lives near Mt. St. Helens.
...Oh wait, Discord found him outside. Probably not that, then. Unless it ties in later... would be a good origin story for Boulder.
I actually have a soft ban on props in my games. This is due to an incident one time where players brought Nerf guns for a Shadowrun and two players poked their eyes out with the foam darts.
Happened to me in high school, actually - we were doing a "model United Nations" sort of thing, and some of the kids brought in Supersoakers to "assassinate" a few annoying players, one of whom was me - I was not good at separating player and character in those days.
Poking or "putting" an eye out is an expression that means damaging or destroying an eye. The globe doesn't actually have to leave the socket for this to be the case.
I know. That doesn't change anything: How are the odds of this happening TWICE at the same occasion?
The only situations where this could occur involve Darwin Award levels of stupidity or criminal levels of ill-wishing:
"Oh, Paul just went to the hospital and might be permanently blind..."
*shoots the next person in the face*
I find it hard to imagine Digo playing with these kinds of people.
With my old group, the odds of them doing crazy/dumb things was pretty high. They were an entertaining fun bunch of gamers, but not the brightest bag of hammers.
One player flunked out of US Army boot camp for selling his gear for booze money. Another player was once riding his motorcycle when a police officer pulled him over. He gets off his bike and walks up to the officer (still in his squad car) and asks the officer what's the problem today?
Now, they didn't permanently hurt themselves thankfully, but when you say "Darwin Award levels of stupidity", you'll notice I'm not going to argue against that point.
Wait, you hate something because people mock it easily?
As for being pretentious, some instances can be (like anything that tries to be "gritty", suspensful, or melancholic can be), it's not part of the genre itself.
There's a really good reason this comic keeps going while hundreds of other webcomics fail: You stick to your schedule. You put something here Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday every single week, and even arrange guest comics when you have to miss a few days.
As far as I know, this is the only webcomic that can say that, and also the only webcomic I still follow. There has to be a connection. :P
As some random examples, I can't think of any time Dumbing of Age or Questionable Content has missed an update, and Darths and Droids has only missed updates if you count scheduled breaks between movies as missed comics.
Keeping a regular update schedule is demanding, but a lot of people do manage it.
I recall they almost came close to missing an update one time when a transformer in the electrical room powering some nine thousand webservers (including their own) exploded.
Irregular Webcomic hasn't missed a scheduled update since I think it was mid 2002. Of course there's also comics like Megatokyo and Order of the Stick who regularly go weeks between updates and still have massive followings.
Keeping to a steady schedule is a big reason why webcomics succeed. But I should note that this is definitely not the only one that keeps to a schedule. Kevin & Kell, Schlock Mercenary, GPF, Penny Arcade, El Goonish Shive, and Girl Genius (Just to name a few) all have been running at least a decade or more on a consistent schedule of their choice (of these Kevin & Kell and Schlock Mercenary update daily).
Seven years.
It was a silly little thing from the very start, mashing up ponies and D&D, flagrantly aping the gimmicks of older, wiser webcomics. It should've burnt out ages ago, and yet... here we are. This has been surprisingly fulfilling work, exploring roleplaying this way. I've now accomplished a lot of the ambitious things I wanted to do with Friendship is Dragons, but I'm surprised to find I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel. I feel like there's further I can go. I don't know how far yet, but half the fun of writing organically is not really knowing for sure. We're sticking around for a while yet.
Anyway, got some campaign podcast to drop today, as well.
Tales of New Dunhaven Session 18 - The Leverage Job, Part 2: Podcast | Video