Annotated 5-17
For those who, like me when this was being written, are no experts on gaming terms, the phrase “meat shield” means someone who can take the hits aimed at the whole team, giving them time to counterattack. It’s similar to “tank.” Of course, enemies don’t obligingly concentrate fire on the person best able to take it when they can pick off others more easily, but Frigg would quickly make herself a problem the enemy couldn’t ignore.
(I mean, you can also use it to describe a captured enemy or a dead body that you’re literally swinging around to take damage for you, but that’d be a pretty macabre read here.)
A gnomic utterance if ever there was one!
I like “two times the shoeld and three times the meat”. It’s a good line.
shöld
It sounds like a low efficiency shield to me. Works like two, eats like three.
Two times the meat and three times the shield would have been better.
Given Frigg’s eating habits, 3 is probably Syr’nj being conservative in her estimate.
That line always stuck with me, too.
Well the macabre read is actually the more accepted interpretation. What you described previously isn’t ‘similar’ to tank. That’s just a tank…which Frigg is.
“Meat shield” was getting use in tabletop RPG circles for a good while before MMOs really took off and more than one or two people at the table would know what the fuck a DPS is.
It really isn’t. That is a human shield (when the shield is alive…there is no word for using a corpse). I have never in my life heard someone use meat shield to describe a human shield.
A meat shield is exactly what’s said here – someone who throws themselves into a fight to protect the squishier types. (Or who throw themselves into a fight because they like fighting, or have some beef against the enemy, and the squishier types take advantage of the fact that someone else is taking all the fists to the face.)
Likewise. I’ve never heard of anyone using “meat shield” to mean an enemy corpse, or anything other than a (slightly derogatory) term for a tank, unless it was making a joke about the standard meaning (tank).
More specifically, I understand “meat shield” to be a character who didn’t _volunteer_ to soak up all the damage, but whom other characters use that way.
The “Meat” refers to the very high hit points of said character.
Armor is one thing, but being able to soak up damage like Rocky Balboa on diabolic stearoids is the main talent.
No sense of being unwilling. The meat-shield has most likely min-maxed heavily to achieve that level of non-squishiness.
Ahh, the expression on Syr’Nj in panel four.
HAT THIEF.
Bandit looks like she’s stealing Gravy’s coinpurse in that last panel. If she was, then she’s either heard something more interesting than coin and will try to talk her way out of it, or she’s just a kleptomaniac and steals from people without thinking about it.
Aye, that does appear to be GD’s moneybag. < First time I've ever used that word. Might the the last.
That alt text is hilarious.
Based on the way I hear them used, I’d suggest the following definitions:
Tank: Character which can take a serious beating and attempts to draw enemy attacks to protect allies.
Meatshield: Character who is being deliberately used to soak enemy attacks, whether or not they are capable of surviving.
Ablative meat: Group of characters who are individually no sturdier than average, but make up for their weakness with quantity and willingness to throw themselves into certain death to protect more powerful (or important) allies.