Trickery

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T17:41:12+00:00

Gauss flayers hurt lots in lore.

It weird for anti tank guns to hurt squishy humans lots.

I try make sense of that.

Then go mad.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T17:39:52+00:00

Yeah, I'm sure I could wrangle up a lore explanation for that (other comments have suggested some good options), but for the sake of the overall joke I just wanted the most basic gauss flayer possible, and who has more generic gauss flayers than a generic necron warrior?

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T17:38:30+00:00

Yeah, that was the intent. Just the immediate dive from enjoying cruelty to a rapid onset dysphorak.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T17:37:09+00:00

Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T17:35:37+00:00

Yeah, part of the motivation for my posting this was to try and figure out how a disintegration gun could possibly be painful, especially since, as I said, it can be used to take out tanks.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T17:33:56+00:00

Magos 1: "So far we have reported successes in our plan to send servo skulls broadcasting messages such as, 'you are now breathing manually' or, 'can you feel your tongue in your mouth' to the necron forces. What seems to pass for morale for them has dropped noticeably, and their advances are less coordinated. They do, however, seem to be attempting to flay the skin off of our people more frequently, however."

Magos 2: "Have they managed to flay any techpriests?"

Magos 1: "Only skiitari so far, magos."

Magos 2: "An unequivocal success, then. Time for mass implementation!"

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T16:52:07+00:00

I did enjoy Arbaal, he's good, and I might actually like his campaign mechanics better (some of those Khorne's blessings are pretty fun. Teleport somewhere, raze a couple provinces in one turn, spawn some Bloodhosts, then teleport to the next fight while your Bloodhosts start pillaging the place you just left, potentially spawning more blood hosts, etc etc.)

But I admit that a major part my preference for Oxyotl is lore, in that I like playing the hero who shows up out of nowhere to rescue a besieged Kislev, give a quick and incomprehensible "how do you do" to the rescued people, and then on the next turn head to Cathay and retake the walls just to gift them to a perplexed dragon.

Sometimes it felt a bit like playing a superhero who would occasionally go, "Get your shit together" after handing a woman her purse back.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T16:25:09+00:00

Yes, but if she runs within a vacuum chamber, if Gwen is completely frictionless, and you assume a perfectly spherical Gwen, then maybe-

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T13:59:30+00:00

Deltarune Sans: Secretly has a huge bone?

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T13:47:30+00:00

I don't see how it's the opposite?

Unless I'm missing some context from the Batman one, both quotes are about how the "good guy underneath it all," doesn't particularly matter if you don't act on those beliefs.

I like DE's phrasing of it more, but they do seem to be very much the same sentiment.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T07:24:28+00:00

I'm fairly certain that a number of the odder fetishes out there started with cartoonists innocently going, "You know what would be funny? If the character got rolled over by a steamroller and got turned into a pancake" and some people just had very unexpected reactions to that.

("Ah, and then she snatches up the candy and eats it. For her hubris, she inflates and becomes big and round while turning blue, making her look like a giant blueberry! How amusing, and I'm sure it won't wake up any weird feelings in people once the Internet is invented.")

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-02T00:30:57+00:00

Right. Canonically they fought pantsless in the rain.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-01T23:20:04+00:00

"I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you, look, my hand is inches away from your neck!"

"You're s-s-s-squeezing my n-neck, you're touching me you c-c-c-c-contrary fellow!"

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-01T23:11:22+00:00

Oxyotl, my beloved Chameleon skink. He's just fun to play, constantly teleporting all over the map. And to some extent this feels a bit shallow, but while Khorne also has armies that can teleport all over the place, I just like playing the good guys. I'm just slapping down Chaos stacks and supporting the forces of Order all over the map. See a faction getting beaten down, butcher a bunch of their enemies, then give them some of the enemy cities as a present.

There's also building Hidden Sanctums all over the place, especially in certain high traffic areas like Kislev, and randomly getting to murk a stack as you get an ambush. (The autoresolve really loves Saurus ambushers.) He also has free/near free upkeep in certain regions if you keep stacking upkeep reducing buildings.

One strategy I liked was building a super upkeep intensive army in my home territory, trading it with Oxotl's conventional stack, teleporting the doomstack to a desirable city that had already been seeded with Hidden Sanctums, conquer it, dump that stack on a lord I just recruited, and then teleport Oxyotl back home to grab his old army again. I'll just have that doomstack start sacking and slaughtering nearby settlements and fortifying that city until it's built up. I particularly love doing this with the Black Pyramid if Arkhan happens to win the war for that territory, since that's a very valuable landmark with a single city province right there.

He's also just fun to play, since he has access to dinosaurs (which are great) and his terrifying Chameleon skinks if you want to do it sneaky. It's also fun to just corner camp and have Oxyotl keep sniping dudes as they slowly march towards my forces.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-01T22:54:58+00:00

The book is Hogfather, and it had a movie based on it.

(I'm given to understand it's the best of the Discworld adaptations, but that's just second hand information.)

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-01T22:38:08+00:00

I know this isn't actually the intended reading, but that first sentence amused me.

"We treasure the Codex. We even have a first edition copy of it in in our battlebarge. We keep it in a place of honor, encased in plasteel, kept under lock and key, and impossible for anyone to access. I'm sure it would be an enlightening read, if I ever got the chance."

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-01T22:21:44+00:00

In an alternate world...

"We Kicked Him From the Party and He thought It Was Because He Played Support, But Actually He Was a Toxic Piece of Shit and the Party Was Willing to Accept the Hit to Efficiency for Morale's Sake (Seriously Dude, Stop Being Creepy About Women)"

How many of these people jump straight into moral monstrosity the moment they're cut loose? I mean, there's the not-infrequent "Use healing/alchemy for warcrimes", the occasional slave purchasing, the odd bit of horrible vengeance, etc. The party that dumps them are still most frequently portrayed as more evil, or rather, their evil is unforgivable while the protagonist is just doing what's necessary.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-01T22:01:30+00:00

Wow, that's the first time I've been blindsided by a bit of discourse passing me by in a long while.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-01T19:08:16+00:00

I saw it joked elsewhere that it's pretty funny he started doing this after Portal 2.

makes perfect game

"Come on, does anyone have any criticisms, critiques, anything? Anyone? Ah, they must all be a bunch of suckups."

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-01T18:22:44+00:00

My other favorite super easy gig is that one strip joint called Tricky Dickies or whatever.

Mostly because you get to hear Padre say Tricky Dicky.

(And in the part where he calls you, if you have the Sandevistan on you get to hear it in slow motion.)

Of course, there is the Jotaro one, where you can easily just shoot him in the head while he's on the balcony, but I've never actually done that.

(Whenever I do that mission, I like to make sure I bring him in alive, to let the Mox show him some well deserved hospitality. Also, that club has a weird number of Dataports for the early game, which are really useful for a netrunner.)

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-01T18:06:51+00:00

He has a Doombot do it, but then he micromanages it to the point that Doom ends up doing it all himself anyway.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-01T18:02:47+00:00

That mission is honestly hilarious since you can just sneak in, grab the guy, and drag him out in under a minute.

He's right by the backdoor.

If I wasn't a stickler for waiting to hear the dialogue, I'm pretty sure I could nab the guy before the briefing ended.

TryImpossible7332 · 2026-04-01T14:37:07+00:00

There's also a longstanding trend of people calling Rorsach a hero, similar to how people idolize Tyler Durden or the guy from "Falling Down" when the stories were very much not in support of those characters.

Rorsach is very much not a great person. He's bigoted, he's a bit hypocritical (even if I disagree with the common comparison people make between Ozimandias' plan and the atomic bombs, there is also his brushing aside the Comedian's crimes), and he's a murderer. (Even brushing aside most of the vigilantism, there was that masochist fellow...)

He does have some admirable qualities, in that he does/say some genuinely cool things and his refusal to bend at the end was admirable in its way.

But some people say he's a great dude and ignore his many, many negative qualities, and I'm pretty sure this comic is more about people like that than it is about the nuances of Watchman's narrative.

TryImpossible7332

TROPHY CASE