Q: How come your art sucks so much? Can.t you draw?
A: Grumble. Let.s be clear: I choose to draw stick figures because I think they bring the right air of humor to the strip, and because they create a unique style. People often criticize the OOTS style under the assumption that I am incapable of doing .better.. I would argue that there is no .better. or .worse. involved. I use stick figures because the stick figure style is what is right for the comic. If I were doing a serious fantasy epic, I would draw more realistic pictures. Top
Q: What does .The Stick. refer to in the comic.s name?
A: It mostly refers to the fact that they are stick figures.
Q: Yeah, but the characters also refer to themselves as .The Order of the Stick.. Presumably they don.t know they.re being drawn as stick figures, right?
A: Very true. There is a story behind why they are called .The Order of the Stick. within the context of the strip. That story, however has yet to be revealed. Top
Q: What are the character.s D&D stats? Will you ever create character sheets for us to see?
A: There are no hard-and-fast stats for the characters. I find that if I were to ever commit exact stats to paper, I would feel limited in what I could have these characters do in the future. For example, I might want to make a strip spoofing a particular feat, only to find that I didn.t give it to any of my characters. As a result, there will never be official game statistics for Roy, Elan, and the rest. As a rule of thumb, I tend to think of them as being around 7th-9th level or so; powerful enough to have a bunch of different storytelling options, weak enough that I can justify them running away from anything I throw at them. Top
Q: In Strip #X, why didn.t character Y take action Z? If they had done so, they could have avoided a whole lot of trouble.
A: You just answered your own question. The strip is ABOUT the trouble these characters get in; if a tactic would result in an effortless solution to their latest problem, there would be little point in showing it, see? The characters are woefully inefficient as a result, and often take actions that are rarely seen in a real D&D game, like running away from moderate danger or .forgetting. major abilities for the sake of a joke. But their foibles are what fuel the humor.
Writer and Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski had a standard answer for overzealous fans who would ask him obscure questions like, .How fast does a Starfury (the show.s standard fighter ship) fly?. He would say, .They travel at the speed of plot,. meaning that if the script called for them to get somewhere in a certain amount of time, they could.and if the script called for them to get there too late, they couldn.t. The Order of the Stick travels almost exclusively at the speed of plot.
Q: Hey, in Panel X, the character is doing Y, but in Panel X+1, the character is doing Z. What happened?
A: Between panels, the character moved/cast a spell/had a spell cast on him/etc. There are limited panels in each strip, and I give priority to panels that tell jokes first, then advance the plot, and then, only if I have extra room, do I show transitional panels that are not strictly necessary. Use your imagination when it comes to exactly how it happened. Top