March 13th, 2008
Dexterity Roll
(361 votes, average: 4.8 out of 5)
Loading ...I’ve only played pen-and-paper D&D once. I was a sorcerer, and I had some kind of “shoot flames out of your hands” spell. I figured that over the course of learning such a thing, a guy might become a pyromaniac. I spent the whole game trying to light villagers on fire.
Don’t forget to enter the contest! There have only been a couple of entries so far - give those keeners some competition!
March 13th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
awesome, my favorite in a while =P
March 13th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Aww man, that was my idea! Except it was werewolves and vampires in a CPA larp.
March 13th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
LMAO!
This one is brilliant. =D
March 14th, 2008 at 12:23 am
This is the best one for a while now.
Good Concept and Funny
Nice one!
March 14th, 2008 at 12:27 am
One drunken night, long ago, me and a few others made rules for Papers & Paychecks so our D&D characters could play it.
March 14th, 2008 at 4:14 am
Ha!
So that’s an Owlbear, a Goblin and Gelatonious Blob playing “P&P”? (Nice one jfizer!) I love the OM (Office Master) screen with the watercooler.
March 14th, 2008 at 5:39 am
I would totally play that!
March 14th, 2008 at 6:06 am
Yes, funny, brilliant. It’s strips like this that remind me why I check this site every day, even when I know there’s not going to be an update.
March 14th, 2008 at 8:30 am
i saw this joke on robot chicken.
March 14th, 2008 at 9:26 am
If it were a gelatinous cube, that’s what it would be called, but it’s actually a beholder.
March 14th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Oh, you probably meant the electric lime green corner at lower right. Yeah, I suppose that could be a gelatinous cube, though I don’t remember them being quite that color.
March 14th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
I like Papers & Paychecks as a working title (urgh, as a Canadian, it was very hard for me to not write “paycheques”) but I submit Cubicles & Copiers as an alternative which keeps the original “Location” & “Challenge” dynamic intact.
The thing I love about this strip is that even when the punchline is telegraphed, it’s just delivered so damn well that I still laugh.
March 14th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Seriously? No one here has ever seen this joke before? The D&D monsters playing normal people in a pen-and-paper game? In webcomics alone I’m positive I’ve seen this before at least 3 times, I’ve read it in a book at least once, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it in at least one video game.
It’s a good joke, it really is. It’s just only funny for so long.
March 14th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
I’m pretty sure that I’ve never seen it before. . .
March 15th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
a good name for it to be called would be “workplaces & wives”
March 15th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Hillarious! I love it
March 16th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Riot: The book you saw it in, was it Barry Trotter?
March 16th, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Aww, I want to play that game with them, too! (Hey… I’ve been in denial of my humanity for years. I’m an ‘elf’ now, it would make just as much sense for me to play with them.)
I hope the monster-creatures had their characters pack a nutritious lunch!
March 17th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Something seems to be wrong with eithere the site or my server- no, and I mean NO grafics are showing up at all! Not even those little holder gizmos (as you can all tell, I am a luddite…
Please explain?
March 18th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
That spell is called Burning Hands.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Good idea, but I’ve seen it before.
(Season 2 of Robot Chicken)
March 27th, 2008 at 10:36 am
OK, so here’s what I posted in the reddit thread about this strip:
After I posted this strip, some readers mentioned having seen similar gags in the past, but couldn’t point to specifics. From these comments I learned about the Simon the Sorcerer and 1st edition DM guide precedents.
I hadn’t seen either before - I think I thought up the gag independently. It’s kind of an obvious joke when you think about it. Take a niche hobby that some people can strongly relate to, and poke fun by inverting an aspect of it. You could do the same thing with lawn darts.
Sigh. I hope that I added a bit to the gag with my version of it. I’m always paranoid that I might be inadvertently copying something that I only half-remember when I’m writing (or even something that I haven’t seen before!). There are a finite number of ideas out there, after all. It reminds me of the short story Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:37 am
Does anyone have a link to the Robot Chicken gag? I haven’t seen it before, but I’m curious.
March 30th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Actually, there is not a finite number of ideas.
April 7th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Actually, the game title “Papers and Paychecks” was used in a similar cartoon in an old issue of “Dragon” magazine.
April 10th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Can we say AWESOME! I love it!
April 15th, 2008 at 3:32 am
This is one of the funniest D&D related comics I’ve ever seen.
April 15th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
[...] ver a versão original, não adulterada, aqui. Cortesia do fantástico Simulated Comic [...]
April 17th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
[...] http://simulatedcomicproduct.com/2008/03/13/dexterity-roll/ [...]
April 21st, 2008 at 2:43 pm
I was never implying that it was stolen from anywhere, it’s just a somewhat obvious joke. I could try to find at least the webcomics I saw it on, but every one I can think of has a ridiculous sized archive that I can’t make myself go through.
For instance: http://www.somethingpositive.net/archive.shtml
To the guy far up on the list: No. It was not anything to do with Harry Potter. I’d never even heard of Barry Trotter before. I just googled it. So, you know. Thanks for making me want to kill myself and everything.
April 21st, 2008 at 2:46 pm
But thanks for not screwing with the joke to make it more available, at least. I think one of the places I saw it on was Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (http://www.smbc-comics.com/) and I HATE how he always dumbs down jokes related to D&D to make sure everyone gets it.
April 29th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
I see no beauty in its eye.
June 14th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
The first edition AD&D Dungeon Master’s guide had a cartoon in which “Papers and Paychecks” was visible on a book being consulted, and one (armored) character is explaining to another (in wizard robes) “We pretend to be workers and students in an industrialized and technological society.”
There was also a story in Dragon magazine that took the idea and ran with it, with teenagers in a fantastic world playing a game in which their characters were teens in a mundane world, and the confusion and suspicion this engendered in their elders…..I remember the cleric speaking darkly about “heresy” because the imaginary world did not have The Gods as an obvious and active presence.
That said, I don’t agree that it’s necessarily all that obvious a joke - it’s just that most people in a position to get the joke have probably met it before. I like your take on it here - I think it’s funny even though it’s not the first time I’ve seen the general idea.
Oh, and for Pete’s sake - there is a beholder but there is also a gelatinous cube. Last panel, bottom right corner, only part of it is visible and you can see through that. I didn’t see it at first either, but it’s there. Very well done - a gelatinous cube is SUPPOSED to be hard to see.
Now, how, I wonder, does someone who “only played it once” know so much about obscure monsters like the gelatinous cube and the beholder?
“NERDS!” indeed.
Lucius Alexander
House of the Palindromedary
July 20th, 2008 at 3:07 am
ROLF LMAO! xD
July 26th, 2008 at 10:59 am
This comic is EPIC!
August 7th, 2008 at 9:10 am
I think I like Coffee & Cubicles better.
I am a female nerdess, by the way. Not actually a D&D player, but the girlfriend of a D&D player. My best friend and I crash his house when they are having their sessions, and they refer to us as “groupies.” Good times, good times.
August 7th, 2008 at 9:11 am
And yes, for all you skeptics out there, some D&D players do actually have girlfriends.
August 26th, 2008 at 1:56 am
^^^Lies.
Anywho, I liked the art on this one, especially the eagle. Holy shit there’s a Jell-o cube! (:P). Nice joke, *I* haven’t seen it anywhere else, so it was new to me.
September 9th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
haha. that is just too good.
simple, yet smart.