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Penny Arcade - Comic - Reductionism
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Reductionism
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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I don't think he ever Talks To Moths, though - I guess that's from the movies?
Of course, the actual answer is that he isn't even a wizard at all and is instead just some sort of angel with a magic ring and a power limiter. And he's evenly matched with a Balrog in a straight-up melee fight, which isn't really something that you can say for most D&D magicians. Especially not when the Balrog (or Balor or Type VI Demon, post-Eldritch Wizardry) keeps getting stronger with every edition they put out.
Seriously, it's "level" (or "hit dice", or "challenge rating", or "challenge") went from 10 to 8+8 to 13 to 20 to 27 to 19. That kind of just goes to show how varied the answers to this question are going to be depending on what game you're talking about.
I think Jim would probably win in a magical fight and Gandalf in a nonmagical one? Dude's divine and is pretty good at just straight-up stabbing people. Movie Gandalf might have a chance in a magical duel, though.
Reminds me of a thing I saw once arguing that Gandalf was really a melee fighter character who had multiclassed into being able to use some magical objects who was pretending to be a wizard.
Ah, here it is.
http://www.henneth-annun.net/events_view.cfm?evid=190
That stoner explanation ties it, though.
I'd argue it beats it. "LOTR is just the story of the skeevy homeless stoner from The Hobbit getting clean and trying to atone for all the shit he caused while High."
Genius.
Inquisitor77: Rius, you are Sisyphus and melee Wizard is your boulder
Tube: This must be what it felt like to be an Iraqi when Saddam was killed
Bookish Stickers - Mrs. Rius' Etsy shop with bumper stickers and vinyl decals.
Word Origin and History for lich
n.
also litch, lych, "body, corpse," southern England dialectal survival of Old English lic "body, dead body, corpse," cognate with Old Frisian lik, Dutch lijk, Old High German lih, German leiche "dead body," Old Norse lik, Danish lig, Gothic leik, from Proto-Germanic *likow. Cf. litch-gate "roofed gate to a churchyard under which a bier is placed to await the coming of the clergyman."
tl;dr Gabe is right from the old English cognate, you're right from the word's likely original roots.
I've always heard lich rhymed with "itch" or "sick". According to Webster's, it comes from 'lik' which means corpse. So I guess it originally rhymed with sick. But now I think it's whatever people want, since the overwhelming majority of users learned the word from fantasy books.
That is certainly my route to learning the word. "Tomb of Horrors" didn't come with a pronunciation guide and my DM pronounced a hard-C followed by an audible "h". As with most things a DM does, it just seemed like a good idea to go with it. And I guess I've been doing that for 30 years.
Remember that "Life's a lich and then you never die" T-shirt the PA store used to sell?
What would you call a concept like this?
Hmm, something like... Death Batt- no, Kill Fight. Or Kill-Battle Death-Fight. One of the two.
Cognate to german "Leiche", and older forms use simple k-sound, but english likes the tch, possibly since anglo-saxon days.
Of course, you also have to keep in mind that this is a setting where good guys really don't use magic much. Heck, the Elven rings of power were basically used as construction equipment, and that was considered a pretty big deal.
Makes him sound more like a Sorcerer (by current D&D standards). Someone with a limited knowledge of magic, but a huge innate ability to supercharge the spells he does know.
True. Magic in Middle Earth was really rare. Not many people could even sense it yet alone use it.
That, and Gandalf, Saruman, Radaghast, and Sauron were immensely powerful demi-gods that purposefully hid their true power. Well, Sauron kinda flaunted it, but see how that turned out for him?
Nah, I think Jim is native to D&D, where Balors exist and are considered a valid challenge for a full 4-person party of characters of higher level than I seem to remember Jim being? And Gandalf soloed the thing that Balors are a ripoff from! So even in D&D-world, unless he flies the heck out of there Jim is getting turned into a shish-kebab by Gandalf's superior stabbing skills and unnecessarily large set of resistances.
Whatever Christopher. Maybe try writing at least one book on your own.