Order of the Stick

Spared no expense on the art budget for this climax

A unhumourous comic involving a party of adventurers doing abolutely nothing but making stupid comments and vaguely potraying the rules bcause the writer is too pussy to actually risk getting sued for mentioning any real Dungeons&Dragons rules. Dude even hangs a lampshade on his cowardice when the heroes defeat a villian by pointing out he's a copyright violation.

The story is written by Rich Burlew, who's claim to fame is coming in second place (or, as we like to call it, "first loser") in TSR's contest to write the next great campaign setting. Rich lost to Eberron, which tells you how awful his idea must've been. Still, he couldn't take the hint, and decided to self-publish his D&D material on a website. Surprise surprise, nobody was coming to see it, so he figured he'd add a cheap-ass webcomic just to get people over and look at his other stuff.

Whatever the original material was on his website, it must've been REALLY bad, because he ditched the rest of his website and now it's all webcomics, all the time. How bad was his other stuff? His webcomics are made of STICK FIGURES, and yet people still would rather look at it than what was originally on the website.

After a year or so of dicking around, lame jokes, gag-a-day strips about a dungeon crawl adventure like you'd play during recess, Burlew was at first LOL and then he SRIUSD, and decided to make an overarching plot like in Bablylon 5 (which could be good or bad, depending on what kind of nerd you are and whether Burlew can pull it off). Burlew did an art upgrade, adding more sticks to his stick figures, and wrote an backstory that was told in CRAYON, not even stick figures.

One good thing to come out of Burlew deciding that webcomics is serious business is his awesome paragon of paladins; Miko Miyazaki. Dual-classing into monk and paladin for the broken min-maxing, she puts the Lawful Stupid into Lawful Good. As a special little snowflake, anyone who gets in her way must be evil, even though she has 'Detect Evil' as a class feature. When she decides that her liege lord is obstructing justice, lulz are had by all.

/tg/ of course, loves all of Order of The Stick... but nobody is going to accuse /tg/ of having good taste. Besides, everyone knows that Andrew Hussie's MSPA webcomics are a million times better, because Rich Burlew is Andrew's bitch.

Links

• The website
• The TVTropes article where you can see all the clichés Burlew uses.