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.
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.
