This comic follows on from the Previous comic which will almost certainly provide context.
You can follow this comic series from the start Here. Make sure to start at the bottom (oldest comic) and work upwards.
Some people suggested that breaking up tall comics into two images within the post body would help readability in their client, so here’s that.
We’re over the exposition hump now, so hopefully following comics will have smaller/fewer speech bubbles.
I appreciate how well your comics highlight this, leveraging the absurdity into humour.
I love roleplaying like this. This is a wee bit of a tangent, so bear with me, but a phrase that is coming to mind is “ludonarrative dissonance”, which describes when the “gamey” or mechanical aspects of a game (the ludic bits) conflict with the storytelling or roleplaying aspects of a game. I learned this term in a discussion around video games, but it sticks with me because of how it makes me think of games in terms of ludic and narrative components. (The “dissonance” part isn’t relevant right now, that’s just context for the term, and I never hear people talk about ludonarrative synergy(?) because when the ludic and narrative bits work well together, that’s just good game design.
Anyway, with background context done: your Divination example makes me think about how some players/groups parse the spell requirements in a strictly ludic manner — they hone in on the 25gp cost and other requirements, caring little for the flavour text.
On the flip side, some players (especially ones who are new to roleplaying) may lean too hard on the spell descriptions for narrative support. This isn’t a bad thing to do, but I think your wee story is a great example of the kind of ludonarrative synergy that TTRPGs have so much great potential for, if players are able to use the rules as a launch pad to make something with far more flavour than the rules are able to do by themselves.
Edit: formatting