Be thankful that commercial airline pilots don't need to make skill rolls to take off and land safely. If real life used the mechanics of a roleplaying game, disastrous things would happen to you several times every day.

But on the other hand, you'd still be able to fight a group of ninjas effectively with multiple serious wounds and would heal fully a week later with virtually zero chance of infection.

In the real world of the Moonshots & Mishaps universe, of course, Apollo 13 doesn't exist. That's the premise of this entire comic, after all. But most of the other things we know and love (such as space exploration) do, albeit modified by the lack of Apollo 13:

• Moonballs is a serious documentary about tennis strategy and tactics.
• Kevin Bacon is known (barely) for doing voiceovers for poorly selling computer games, but gains widespread fame after his appearance in the first Futurama movie.
• Tom Hanks is known primarily for his role in Mazes and Monsters.
• Nerdy guys make YouTube videos of themselves re-enacting 90s video games with live acting and special effects instead of fitting square air filters to round holes.
• Without the success of Apollo 13 to spark interest in space exploration movies, Star Trek was never revisited with numerous series and movies, and remains an obscure two-pilot aborted TV series.
• The Martian was never made into a movie. Fans of Andy Weir never had it so good.
• The major space exploration background that pervades all of Western culture is Lost in Space, despite it never being much good. The original was adapted recently into a new, updated film with a bigger budget, high-tech computerised special effects, and edgy writing. And it sucked.
• Throughout the 1990s, all the greatest Hollywood historical docudrama films were retellings of events surrounding the Avignon Papacy and the Western Schism of the Catholic Church.
• The Comic Irregulars exist and are making a screencap comic based on Pac-Man.

Transcript

Lovell: Our next broadcast will be from Fra Mauro on the surface of the moon.
Lovell: The moon, baby! I'll be searching it for valuable mon rocks!
CAPCOM: Great show. Some housekeeping tasks. Can you roll right to zero six zero.
Swigert: Roger. Rolling right, zero six zero. Pilot roll: 15.
CAPCOM: And give your oxygen tanks a stir.
Swigert: Roger that.
GM: Make an Engineering roll.
Swigert: To stir the tanks?
GM: It's just a routine check for critical systems failure. 2 or higher will be enough. And you get a reroll.
SFX: roll
SFX: roll
{beat}
Lovell: Uh. Houston, we have a problem.