So I just got like sixty pageviews today, all of them from one guy in Canada. You know this blog comes with a follow button, right, buddy? You don’t have to read it all today. It’ll still be here tomorrow. Promise.
Month: December 2017
Star Wars: Vehicle Stats
You can find appropriate vehicle stats to whatever era you’re using in the various Saga Edition sourcebooks. The generic ones I give here can be used to plug in some holes, although many of them are closely based on stats taken from various sourcebooks to begin with. The main draw for this post is going to be the organization of armor or artillery companies, and that is going to be interesting mainly to the extent that your players are fighting an entire enemy regiment, in pieces or all at once as a massive and spectacular set piece.
Star Wars: Company Stats
Continuing on where we left off yesterday, here we have stats for troops that show up at what I call “the company level,” but in retrospect I can’t remember why because they aren’t actually company-level assets at all. I mean, the commandos in particular are guys who are specifically designed to work as individual squads. Oh, well.
Star Wars Saga Edition: Platoon Stats
I run a Star Wars: Saga Edition campaign. This campaign takes place in the misty recesses of the early Republic, so it doesn’t use standard stormtrooper or Sith trooper stats, and in any case I find those statlines to be pretty bland after a while. Granted, they’re only supposed to be first-level encounters, but it’s not like there’s a whole ton of variety as you get into higher levels if your enemy remains more or less “the Empire” (or period equivalent). When Emperor Xim (yes, that is a legends character and not an OC) shows up with an army, is he going to have nothing but “stormtrooper” and “stormtrooper but level 8?” That can work, and for my first campaign, Birth of the Republic, I largely relied on these kinds of things, using combat largely as filler between political scenarios.
For Nine Thrones of Xim, however, I statted out a much more complex and balanced set of military mook stats. I then lost those stats. I have combed over every one of my notes documents and as far as I can tell the full stats for these guys are no longer on my machine. What I do still have are the shorthand stats I use for running them in combat, so that’s what I’m posting to celebrate the upcoming release of Episode VIII: Barely usable abbreviated stats for an edition that stopped publishing nearly a decade ago. That said, even in their abbreviated form they are usable and add a lot of interesting flavor to what would otherwise just be ten identical stormtroopers.
Ace Combat Zero Has A Terrible Last Boss
EDIT: People keep finding this blog post while looking for advice on how to defeat Pixy, so I wrote a post that contains some actual advice for that. This post, as the title implies, is mainly about how Pixy is a much worse final boss than either of the two missions that immediately precede the confrontation with him.
After over a decade (I’m not counting mobile games until they make one that doesn’t suck), the Ace Combat series is finally coming back to Strangereal with Ace Combat 7 some time next year. I’ve been replaying a couple of old Ace Combat games I have lying around to celebrate, and have been reminded how much I hate this guy:
Just Crazy Enough To Work
“That’s just crazy enough to work!” The Hell does that mean? How can any amount of irrationality or delusion help you to accomplish something? This is a meme, and like most memes it’s stupid when applied literally, but also like most memes it’s a shorthand reference to a more complicated idea. Unlike most memes, it’s old as Hell, so you can’t track down the origination of the meme to a 4chan thread from 2008, whose context will make the meme’s meaning immediately obvious.
What I suspect the meme’s origins might be is the answer to the old story of two economists walking down the road when they see a twenty dollar bill on the street. The younger economist bends over to pick it up, but the older economist says “don’t bother. If there were money just lying on the street, someone would’ve come and picked it up already.” Although the older economist is clearly wrong in this story (that’s, y’know, the joke), he’s usually right, which is why the idea that any good idea would already be in use was dominant in economics for a while (it isn’t anymore, which is why the story is about an old and young economist, and not an economist and, like, a plumber or something). Generally speaking, if you think you see an easily exploited opportunity, you’re missing something and are wasting your time and resources when you try to jump on it. If the opportunity were really that obvious and that easy to take advantage of, everyone would already be doing it, like how everyone uses email for business purposes. People who refuse to do that are at a disadvantage because the benefits of email are so obvious and easily accessible that it’s common practice. If you see a business opportunity that’s as easy and straightforward as using email, you have to ask yourself: Why isn’t everyone already doing this? Occasionally the answer is that someone left a twenty dollar bill on the street and you’re lucky enough to be the first person to wander by, but nine times out of ten, the old economics maxim holds true: If it were a good idea, businesses would be doing it already.
Yet that’s obviously not true all the time, or else no one would ever be able to get ahead through innovation. So how can you tell that your idea is actually an untapped opportunity and not a dead end? When it’s just crazy enough to work. That means it’s not so crazy as to be obviously impossible (i.e. it’s not an Underpants Gnome business plan), but it’s still crazy enough that you might plausibly be the first person to have thought of it. Figuring out exactly how crazy an idea has to be to thread that needle is obviously not an exact science, but the meme still helpfully refers to the general idea. Or at least it used to. Maybe.
Monkeys With Guns: Fin
Though I originally planned to ship Monkeys With Guns with a sample campaign, I ultimately decided that was an awful lot of work playtesting and fine-tuning for a game that no one was really asking for. Considering how many unfinished projects I have left to get to, it’s pretty hard to justify spending so much time on this one, especially since many of the others (Project Soul Stone, Project Blood God, Project Erinyes) are more likely to be things that people will actually want. Monkeys With Guns is a complete and playable war game and that certainly meets the minimum project requirements, so I’m calling it finished. You can view the Google Doc here.
Star Wars Is A Terrible Example Of The Hero’s Journey
The Hero’s Journey is frequently illustrated using the example of Star Wars: A New Hope. A New Hope’s plot was based on the Hero’s Journey and follows the model closely, so you might think this is sensible at first glance. On closer examination, however, it turns out that this is the opposite of true. Being based so closely on the Hero’s Journey makes A New Hope a terrible example of the monomyth, and the hackneyed understanding of the Hero’s Journey that you get when you analyze Star Wars (and only Star Wars) to understand it is the reason why so many movies riffing on the Hero’s Journey are so godawful.
The important thing to understand about the Hero’s Journey is that it is an emotional journey. You can have that journey symbolized in the plot by also having a literal journey and that’s fine, but the actual heart of it is the character arc of your protagonist. Joseph Campbell names the steps of the journey after certain common symbols of it, but the symbol is not the story beat. For example, the Meeting With The Goddess is about the hero finding the thing they left home for, on the other side of the road of trials they undertook to get there, in the farthest depths of exotic otherworldliness as they will see in this particular story (sort of – that’s also kind of the Ultimate Boon, but Star Wars uses the two plot beats pretty much interchangeably, which is another reason why it’s a bad example of the Hero’s Journey). An actual goddess is not required. All that matters is that the hero is as far out of their comfort zone as they will ever get, and this meeting denotes the point from which they will begin their ascent back up to where they came from, now imbued with whatever power they derived from overcoming the trials of whatever strange circumstance they’ve been grappling with for the last quarter of the plot.
Star Wars literalizes this beat by having Luke meet Princess Leia at about the same time as he’s become a Death Star-storming space adventurer who doesn’t need Ben Kenobi’s direct guidance or Han Solo’s permission to be a hero, and that literalization is what makes it a terrible example. This strictly literal usage of Campbell’s symbolic reference to the moment of revelation is not only unnecessary, it can confuse people trying to understand the Hero’s Journey into thinking that the story beat here is literally “protagonist meets a powerful female of some sort.” So, a lot of people think that somewhere around the mid-point of the story the protagonist should have a moment with their love interest and that this should spur them on to action. That’s vaguely similar to what it actually represents, but only vaguely. And it’s not even a vital step of the journey! Campbell threw in a lot of common but not ubiquitous elements, because he was writing an anthropological work, not a storytelling guide. You don’t actually need a meeting with the goddess to tell a hero’s journey story at all.
Hogwarts Is Messed Up
Hogwarts is technically a school and from the students’ perspective it’s run like one. From the administration’s perspective, it’s a front for a vigilante counter-terrorist organization, a magical research laboratory, and a vault for containing dangerous magical artifacts. Hogwarts is the most secure place in magical Britain, which means organizations like the Order of the Phoenix use it as a stronghold and lock up their deadliest magical superweapons there to keep them out of the wrong hands while paying so little attention to the professors that Slugworth can found magical prodigy conspiracies complete with handing out powerful magical elixirs and the secrets of fucking horcruxes and Lockheart can totally abandon his students to deal with potentially injurious or even deadly magical creatures on their own, and in neither case are either of them fired. Sure, the Defense Against the Dark Arts position was literally cursed and that made teachers slim pickings, but the death eater infiltrator was a more responsible teacher than Lockheart, so they clearly had some options.
Hogwarts teachers are held to basically no standards at all for student safety and injuries requiring hospitalization are commonplace. For the love of God, each year has about eight-ish students per house for a total population well under 250, and yet they have a hospital ward with enough beds to handle one or two dozen kids. They have magical supermedicine that can heal nearly any injury overnight, and yet they’re all ready to have 5-10% of their student body incapacitated in the hospital at any given time. Hogsmeade must have a comparable population (you can hardly get much lower) and they don’t even have a clinic!
Hogwarts has recognized the threat to student health represented by using their school as a fortress/safehouse and consistently failing to discipline teachers who endanger children, and their answer was to expand the medical facilities. They do not give a fuck if students are in danger. “Professor Dumbledore, St. Mungo’s has sent another letter of complaint. They say they’ve had to dedicate an entire ward of the hospital just to Hogwarts injuries. Should we maybe stop harboring retired aurors who are secretly still pursuing unresolved cases and have dozens if not hundreds of old dark magical enemies seeking revenge?” “Nah, we’ve got some room in the south tower, just set up a medical ward there, problem solved.”
Ensemble Outlines
Plot outlines are a thing that people do sometimes. What I’ve discovered in November, however, is that character outlines are also an important part of my process. I’d been doing them on autopilot as part of the standard idea percolation process preceding a novel that I didn’t notice how damaging they were until I forced a first draft on a very specific schedule for the sake of the NaNoWriMo creative writing challenge. So if nothing else, that writing has taught me the importance of these outlines.
So, you’re probably wondering how a character outline can even work, and if you have any idea at all, you’re probably expecting some kind of template or form that you fill out. That’s not how I do it (although apparently the Snowflake Method works for some people, and it involves doing that). I do ensemble outlines, and not in a Five Man Band “make all characters fit into this kinda loose formula” kind of way. I’ll explain below the break.
Chamomile Has A Blog 