As this week’s release of John Rogers and Andrea DeVitos’s excellent Dungeons & Dragons #2 proves, D&D and comic books go together like… well, like escapist fantasies set in worlds with super-powerful characters that are built on tenuous, ever-changing rules. And like comics, the D&D rules invite all sorts of questions to figure out just how the hell they’re supposed to work.
For over thirty years, that was the domain of Dragon Magazine and their “Sage Advice” column, where players could write in with problems to get semi-official answers. Unfortunately for fans of esoteric, incredibly specific knowledge everywhere, the column is no more (having since been replaced by, you know, the Internet), but my pal Mike Sterling recently sent me a link to a searchable archive of 680 “Sage Advice” questions and answers culled from over a hundred issues of Dragon.
Most of them are simple rules questions and people trying to figure out what exactly the difference is between the glaive, guisarme, guisarme-glaive and guisarme-volge (answer: not much), but there are some truly amazing glimpses of nerd minds at work in there. And luckily for you, you don’t have to spend the hours going through all of them, because I’ve found the best and dropped them onto some snazzy parchment for your reading pleasure! So strap on your elven chain, make your save vs. rules lawyering, and enjoy The 11 Strangest D&D Questions Ever Asked!
