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Episode 1821: Fighting Fire With Flyer

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Villages exist for one of two reasons in roleplaying games.

  1. For the weary and footsore adventurers to get a room for the night and stock up on weapons at the local smithy.
  2. To be attacked by an implacable enemy to establish just how evil that enemy is, and to provide something for the heroes to defend.

Things can kind of go a bit pear-shaped for most adventures if the heroes decide to just abandon the village to its fate.

Commentary by Keybounce (who has not seen the movie)

So what sort of socket do astromech droids plug into, anyways? They seem to come in many different body shapes and sizes. We saw R2 having that "insert probe" arm in the original series, but I'm not recalling that same thing on any other droid, and it's not clear where you'd put that on a rolling ball, anyways.

There doesn't seem to be anything equivalent to a universal socket bus, no USB plug that all things connect to. I mean, we've solved that already. There's USB. ... Usb-C. Micro-usb. Mini-usb. And Thunderbolt.

... OK, ok, fine. Have half a dozen standards. Clearly we need a single unifying improved standard.

Meanwhile: So Poe has decided to not just flee. Jim is going to be a hero. And obvious death is going to be brilliant. After all, his last brilliant plan was in Episode I on the other side of this central-to-everything planet. He has gotten a little bit more humble. He won't call his brilliant plan "brilliant".

Meanwhile, 6 shots, and one Boom! Last chamber.

Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)

And as it turns out, it's Pete. Really, talking things over about a character idea with your GM is probably the best way to see if something is acceptable or not. As long as your idea is reasonable, won't break the game over your leg, and won't be disrespecting the other players, the worst the GM can do is say no. I've had a couple Mutants and Masterminds characters that I wasn't sure would be fine, but I'd asked if things looked fine and it turned out I didn't need to make any changes. But if I hadn't asked, I would have tried other concepts that weren't my first choice, and they wouldn't have been quite as memorable in the long run.

Uh oh. Jim's got another idea. These never turn out like he thinks they will. To be fair though, a large part of his plans seem to have lots of the steps labeled "improvise", so it'll have a good chance of succeeding in the end. Poe and BB might even live through it! My first guess for what the current brilliant plan idea is involved turning the X-wing blasters on the stormtroopers. Close air support is a huge game changer for a land fight as long as the friendly fire is kept to a minimum. Though.... Jim might have thought that the GM thought of that already. Maybe his plan involved shooting down the First Order's ships that get thrown his way and having them crash into the stormtroopers. That still doesn't seem crazy enough for a Jim plan, but that's probably better.

The X-wing itself looks pretty close to what I remember from the first 6 movies and the Battlefront II game I played way back before Star Wars was thinking about selling to Disney. I think the engines look a little smaller, but that's probably just due to improvements in the last 30 years. Which, considering how stagnant the technology advancements seems in-universe, is probably a remarkable feat of engineering. Of course, it's difficult to keep things visually similar enough so that we, the watchers (or readers in Keybounce and my cases) can understand at a glance what it is we're looking at. Heck, Star Trek had tricorder devices back in the 60s/70s or so, and now we've got cell phones that can do very similar things while being smaller. In the last decade, there's been prototypes for tricorder-like devices that can do simple medical scans too! I'm not a writer myself, but relatability always seems to trade off with world building after a certain point in long running media if floating timelines aren't used. Fortunately for Star Wars, the used/stagnated tech feeling works wonderfully, and everything else just serves to help move the story about the characters along.

Transcript

GM: You can hardly complain, Pete. Besides, Annie came to me with a character idea, and...
Finn: I talked him into it.
[SFX]: Pow! Pow! Pow!
GM: Thanks for not implicating me too much.
Finn: Taste some hot plasma, you proletariat rabble!
[SFX]: Pow! Pow!
[SFX]: Boom!
BB-8: Uh, Poe, if we fly off, this village is going to get wiped out.
Poe: {climbing into X-wing} Lucky we’re not flying off then!
BB-8: We’re not?
Poe: Get in!
BB-8: Is this another one of your brilliant plans?
Poe: I wouldn’t call it brilliant...
Poe: But it is pretty brilliant!


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Published: Thursday, 02 April, 2020; 03:11:12 PDT.
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