You read Rich Burlew’s Order of the Stick, don’t you? Of course you do – you must. While I myself read only a small handful of web comics, I recommend OOTS without hesitation and really look forward to each new strip. The biggest reason why I know that OOTS is so great is that while it’s up to episode #469 now, the chances are overwhelmingly high that once you get a fellow gamer to read just a few strips, he’ll go all the way back to #1 and read the whole darned thing, lose a couple days of his life in the process (hopefully on work time!), then maybe even go buy the books to share with his friends that only have dialup. It is – literally – unrivaled in the field of “D&D version 3.5 themed entertainment”. Hey, there’s even new books available with all-new material that’s not from online. That’s diabolically clever. It’s almost enough to make me feel – sniff – like a Fan-boy! Or as Dork Tower’s Igor would say – it must be mine!

Oops, wrong vertically-challenged anti-hero quote there, because today’s love is for Belkar, the evil halfling ranger of this motley party.

Now, something I really dig about the ‘Stick is that the characters freely reference the D&D game rules, and in so doing give a uniquely strange and wonderful voicing to the world of metagaming that is part and parcel of any good campaign. I like to imagine the comic as a documentary vision of a campaign whose engine is hitting of all (or at least most) cylinders. So it’s not just the humor, and the bigger story, but also all the knowing commentary. Part of this, for me, is that I like to imagine the players behind the characters, and try to imagine being a fly on the wall in some fictitious place where the ‘Stick D&D sessions are played. After all, it works simply because it is so believable and typical of what our D&D lives are like.

So I like to pretend that there’s fictitious players behind these fictitious characters, and that everyone has – big happy day here – fallen into playing characters that they can really connect with and get into playing. When I take it from this perspective, Belkar really stands out (albeit not head-and-shoulders above) as my favorite character in the strip. The reason? Well, the player behind Belkar’s character would be the high-maintenance sort, always disrupting the expected plot with corruption and other absurdities. But he pays it all back in spades: he makes it worth the party’s while to go along for the ride. I’ve talked before about a DM needing to gain the players’ trust in order to take the campaign to entertaining places. Belkar is an example of the reverse – the DM needs to trust him to make good on all the chaos and wackiness he inserts into the game.

While all the characters in OOTS are parodies or stereotypes, consider that most of them are parodies of specific classes or races, but Belkar is - more than the rest, I would argue – a parody of a certain gaming aesthetic. He’s the greedy, rule-bendy, self-absorbed, well let’s just say it – immature – gamer. And yet, in the context of the strip, he’s played with such a fine command of the rules and sense of the situation, that the “Belkar thing” is to dance around playfully with that line called “too far”, then dash madly past it now and then just to be true to himself, but bringing back nice little souvenirs for everyone else so that no one feels too bad about the whole ordeal.

The obvious truth is that most selfish or immature players don’t do it with the wink-and-a-nod self-knowingness, to say nothing of the skill and style, needed to make it into an art. Trust me, I once played in a large party that included an evil/greedy ranger, and he wasn’t one twentieth as much fun as Belkar is. Which leads to an interesting philosophical question. If an imaginary seat opened up at the imaginary table of imaginary players behind the OOTS campaign, and suddenly there was room for you there,  do you think you could cut the mustard? Why or why not? Me, I’m kind of leaning toward no. I’d probably ended up attacking Belkar… sigh.

Maybe I can only love him from a distance.