‘Be like Han.’

The man’s (?) got a point.  At least, if you’re gaming: the GM likes surprises, does s/he*?  Fine.  Here’s my surprise: 3 3d6 Energy attacks, hey diddle, right up the middle.  Multifire and Rapid Shot; and remember, I have Alertness, Heroic Surge, Improved Initiative, Multishot, Point Blank Shot, Precise Shot, Quick Draw, Rapid Shot, and Shot on the Run.  Oh, and Weapon Focus**.

Yeah, I’ll wait while you dig out the combat charts.

Moe Lane

Via AoSHQ. Continue reading ‘Be like Han.’

Bad news on Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Apparently, it’s good.

It’s really, really good, in ways that push all of my buttons when it comes to RPGs, plus the buttons that I presume would get pushed by a MMO, thus putting it absolutely, totally, dangerously into DO NOT BUY THIS GAME IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN A FUNCTIONAL MEMBER OF SOCIETY territory.

But I knew that after I saw the trailer last year:

Continue reading Bad news on Star Wars: The Old Republic.

QotD, That’s Actually Really Good Advice edition.

David Morgan-Mar has set himself a seemingly-impossible task: to wit, trying to make the Star Wars prequels make sense.  Being a clever fellow, he has done so by re-imagining the whole sorry mess as an extended tabletop roleplaying game campaign – which works.  It works frighteningly well.  Jar Jar Binks makes a hell of a lot more sense when you realize that he’s being run by a twelve year old girl who is just getting into this entire gaming thing.  You even like the character, then.  Or will at least forgive him.

Anyway, while trying to make sense of the idea that the Wookiees would charge an enemy assaulting a beachhead when they’ve got all these lovely ranged weapons handy, David writes this bit on how to achieve victory conditions in warfare:

If attempting to defend an impossible position with bowmen and knights on foot against Genoese crossbowmen and tens of thousands of armoured, mounted knights, make sure you are heavily outnumbered. If attempting to repel a force of cavalry and men-at-arms with longbowmen on St Crispin’s Day, make sure you are vastly outnumbered. If defending a hospital stockade against Zulus, make sure you are enormously outnumbered.

You can choose a different, and more creative, path by doing the opposite of what the losers did. If you field an overwhelming force against a paltry number of defenders, whatever you do, make sure the defenders are not English!

Damn straight.  To paraphrase The Boomer Bible, those guys aren’t happy unless they have no choice but to do things the hard way.

‘Southern Jedi.’

Well… OK, it’d be called ‘Redneck Jedi’ – which I don’t want to call it, because people would be using ‘redneck’ as a pejorative, and that’s not cool.  But by GOD I would happily play a lightsaber video game that had a soundtrack like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPA6Rnvwwb4

The problem would be in finding somebody like Pat McManus to write the storyline.  Although… you could actually get Pat McManus to write the storyline, then have somebody tart it up with the obsessive attention to detail that is a hallmark of the Star Wars universe.

QotD, George Lucas edition.

Nodwick makes one prediction of many:

9. George Lucas will announce his next movie, “Indiana Jones and the Saber of Light.” Nerds will eschew rioting and complaining, as they begin to look upon George as a demented relative who “just does that kind of thing, it’s sad, really.”

Given that prior to seeing this I spent five minutes explaining to my wife* how I would have redone a completely hypothetical prequel trilogy to the ONLY EXISTING STAR WARS TRILOGY… yeah.

Moe Lane

*I’d regale you with the details of said redoing, except that all of you could have written a better prequel trilogy in your sleep, too.