Belkar settles in to his role in the gladiator pit.
Cast
- Roy Greenhilt ◀ ▶
- Belkar Bitterleaf ◀ ▶
- Evisceratus ◀ ▶
- Reddish Lizardfolk Gladiator ◀ ▶
- Unshaven Gladiator ◀ ▶
- Gladiator with Red Hair ▶
- Notseenicus ▶
Transcript
- Panel 1
Lizardfolk Gladiator: Come on! He's three feet tall!
Unshaven Gladiator: He's right! We're all unarmed in here, we should be able to overpower him.
Evisceratus: Yeah! You're going down, you little creep!
- Panel 2
Belkar whistles
Belkar: ♪
- Panel 3
Belkar picks up a pebble and smiles.
- Panel 4
Unshaven Gladiator: Crap!
Notseenicus: Look out!
Lizardfolk Gladiators: He's got a pebble!
Evisceratus: What?
Gladiator with Red Hair: Run!
- Panel 5
Evisceratus: What the hell is wrong with you? Someone grab his legs.
Unshaven Gladiator: Don't you get it? He's a halfling. WITH A PEBBLE.
Evisceratus: So what?
Unshaven Gladiator: "So what?" Do you know how many bonuses he could have with a thrown rock?
Lizardfolk Gladiator: I heard a halfling once poked out both of a guy's eyes with the same sling stone!
Notseenicus: I knew a guy whose cousin was hit by a rock thrown by a halfling. Three month later, he was eaten by a tiger!
- Panel 6
Unshaven Gladiator: I'm outta here.
Lizardfolk Gladiator: I'd rather take my chances in the arena!
Notseenicus: At least we'd be armed.
Evisceratus: Get back here, you cowards!
Belkar: There may be no halfling lands here, but our awesomeness precedes us.
- Panel 7
Roy: Don't you have better things to do that harass the locals?
Belkar: Not really. I would be digging a tunnel to freedom and covering it with a poster of Lidda, but you put the kibosh on escaping.
- Panel 8
Roy: Still, I thought you turned over a less bitter leaf. So much for helping out, I guess.
Belkar: Oh, I am helping. I'm helping maintain the structure of civilization.
- Panel 9
Roy: ...OK, see, I want to let that go without comment, but no. It's too much. Explain.
Belkar: Well, I've been thinking about why all these human countries lock people up. And I see now that it's not just about sending the people you don't like to jail.
Belkar: (Though that part is hilarious.)
- Panel 10
Belkar: It's also about scaring all the other people with the threat of going to jail.
Belkar: So anything that makes the prison experience more miserable—such as getting your only food stolen by a ruggedly handsome halfling—
Belkar: —should serve to reduce crime in the long run!
- Panel 11
Belkar: Face it: Me being a total jackass is an important part of the corrections process!
Roy: Personally, I favor corporal punishment. Here, I'll show you.
D&D Context
- Lidda is an iconic character in D&D, introduced in D&D 3.0 Edition (for example, she is used in Player's Handbook to illustrate her class). She is a female halfling rogue.
- Halflings in D&D have a +1 racial bonus to thrown objects and slings as well as +2 to the Dexterity ability, which may give further bonuses to thrown objects.
- The website used to contain The Giant's homebrew articles, including a class called the Halfling Rock-Skipping Champion which could skip a rock off of surfaces and targets in ludicrous, Looney Toons-like ways (including hitting the same target twice, or "between the eyes") - and explicitly become famous for it. Here it is for the 3.5e version on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20130901225119/http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9623050#post9623050
Trivia
- The title refers to the zero-sum game hand game, Rock–paper–scissors, where rock (such as the pebble Belkar holds) beats scissors.
- Belkar's line, "I would be digging a tunnel to freedom and covering it with a poster of Lidda" in Panel 7 refers to the Stephen King's 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (and its 1994 movie adaptation The Shawshank Redemption). In it, the protagonist digs a tunnel out of his jail cell, hiding the entrance under a poster of Rita Hayworth (and, later, other actresses).
- This is the first appearance of the gladiator with red hair and Notseenicus (the kobold gladiator).