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Frequently asked questions

WTF is ... How To Train Your (Dungeons &) Dragon

I'll steal the description from Darths & Droids because they nailed it. How To Train Your (Dungeons &) Dragon is an "RPG screencap comic".

  • RPG — as in pen and paper RPG. Our characters are playing a roleplaying game, which is directed by the Dungeon Master (DM, in some games referred to as Game Master — GM).
  • Screencap — there's a movie and I printscreened the hell out of it. Movie of choice: How To Train Your Dragon by Dreamworks.
  • Comic — should be okay as long as it's not Comic Sans.

    • Whom are you ripping off?

    Hopefully nobody, though HTTYDnD is inspired by both DM of the Rings and Darths & Droids.

    Currently, I don't have any grand plans or goals with this comic — other than making a How To Train Your Dragon themed screencap comic.

    How often is this comic updated?

    Once per week. I try to put out new episodes every Friday evening, failing that Saturday (sometimes I'll be too busy on Fridays), failing that Sunday.

    From early on, I used to pump out one episode every two days (this has proven to be a higly unsustainable rate), then I cut back to twice a week — however, the bi-weekly schedule was also rather unsustainable (even more so now that the release date was pushed to 2019. By pupming out two episodes per week, I'd be out of material way too soon).

    Do you plan on doing all three movies?

    Yes. (Assuming the last one isn't going to suck. Let's hope it doesn't). In fact, I'm pretty excited for the second one as it seems to be the better for adapting into a RPG comic.

    Is this legal? You're screencaping the entire movie.

    I believe that this webcomic is — as a non-commercial parody — fair use. Fair use is legal, therefore this comic is legal.

    Are players aware of How To Train Your Dragon movies?

    Nope (they aren't aware of the books either), but that's more or less the only way in which the world of players is different from the real one.

    Which edition of D&D are they playing?

    They aren't (and this remains unspecified for the writer's convenience), though game system in use is arbitrarily close to D&D 3.5e (and lately 5e); and by 'arbitrarily close' I mean "every now and then I take a look at D&D rulebooks for some general/specific pointers (and: also I ignore things that are inconvenient for me)."

    English isn't your primary language, is it?

    No, it's not.

    If my grammar is really that terrible, you can scream, shout, say something over at Reddit — just don't forget to mention you're talking about this site.
    Image was taken off this blog.

    Reddit contact is also the most sure way to find me in case of other comments, compliments or complaints.

    Slovenski?

    Mogoče.nope

    Is that a technical question you're asking?

    Here's answers to some technical questions one might have.

    I've inspected the code for this site. Honestly mate it's shit.

    That's not really a question, but you aren't wrong. In my defense, it's not super-bloated (super-bloated as in: not using tens of common javascript libraries for this one function). There's only this script that makes the site respond to different display sizes and aspect ratios. Yes, everything is a bit over-engineered thanks to the fact I decided that site should show two pages at once if your monitor is wide enough.

    What programs and fonts are you using

    FontsTypefaces

    Special thanks to Darths&Droids who listed their resources so I could copy (dialogue + sfx) and to Xureality who contributed the latinized version of Iokharic.

    Software

    Video player of choice is SMPlayer+mpv, which allow for frame-by-frame playback (it also much more reliable than VLC in my experience, but ugly AF on windows). Editing is done in GIMP.