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Jizz wailing is kind of an unfortunate name for cantina music, but it gets worse in the old EU, where there was an instrument simply called the Jizz (as a long single-reeded wind instrument it'd probably be more appropriate to call it a Jizz clarinet), and another called simply the Jizz-box.
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Jan 22, 2017 00:24
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Kwyndig posted:Jizz wailing is kind of an unfortunate name for cantina music, but it gets worse in the old EU, where there was an instrument simply called the Jizz (as a long single-reeded wind instrument it'd probably be more appropriate to call it a Jizz clarinet), and another called simply the Jizz-box. Yeah, anytime there's a possibility that I might start taking the plot of this Star Wars game too seriously, I remember the existence of the Jizz Clarinet, and lighten up a bit.
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Jan 22, 2017 00:27
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Calling it Jizz was likely quite intentional on George's part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(word) "Jism, or its variant jizz (which, however, is not attested in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang until 1941), has also been suggested as a direct source for jazz." I know there is a large contingent of people who insist Lucas is a bumbling idiot who only stumbles into success completely by accident, despite ample evidence that he puts quite a bit of thought and effort into what he does.
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Jan 22, 2017 02:14
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quote:and another called simply the Jizz-box. Stop doxxing my ex-wife! MODS?
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Jan 22, 2017 02:15
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HotCanadianChick posted:Calling it Jizz was likely quite intentional on George's part: Counterpoint: all of the prequels. I don't really want to derail the thread with this topic, but it's more likely George Lucas is both a bumbling moron and a gifted technical mind who gets things right from time to time. The disagreement is in how often he gets things right or wrong. I take the point about the origin of the word jazz, but that doesn't make Lucas' decision wise. It at least explains it, though.
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Jan 22, 2017 04:19
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HotCanadianChick posted:I know there is a large contingent of people who insist Lucas is a bumbling idiot who only stumbles into success completely by accident, despite ample evidence that he puts quite a bit of thought and effort into what he does. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Yarael_Poof
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Jan 23, 2017 02:03
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Honestly it's a bit of both, Lucas did put a lot of thought into some things, but during the prequels he clearly dropped the ball and didn't put in as much effort. You can be both brilliant and a bumbler.
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Jan 23, 2017 02:28
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Kwyndig posted:Honestly it's a bit of both, Lucas did put a lot of thought into some things, but during the prequels he clearly dropped the ball and didn't put in as much effort. Lucas is really good at building worlds and making unique things, but he's also really a guy who needs to be reined in by a support team. If you give him 100% creative control (he wrote and directed the prequels by himself for the most part, with episodes V, VI, and VII being written and directed by other people with just input and guidance from Lucas) he starts going way beyond what he's actually competent at and we get Anakin Skywalker. He seems like a less wacky Hideo Kojima in the sense that both work best when not just letting their crazy brains take flight 24/7.
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Jan 23, 2017 02:34
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Wait, did TIE Fighters have ejector seats or not? I just read the Rogue Squadron book series and there are repeated mentions they don't have them installed, whereas the Wookieepedia says otherwise (although only TFA sources). Other EU sources do indicate that TIEs can land on their wings as well - how do Rebellion/New Republic forces actually capture them in the event of a surrender? Tractor them into a landing bay?
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Jan 23, 2017 02:57
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I imagine a wing landing is possible but a very delicate thing, since there's no real landing gear. First Order models having ejector seats was probably by pilot demand, much like Kylo Ren's focusing of his rage onto consoles and equipment and away from officers.
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Jan 23, 2017 03:04
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First Order TIE probably have ejectors because they don't have a galactic empire's worth of disposable fighter pilots.
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Jan 23, 2017 03:21
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TIE fighters certainly had low speed VTOL capability or else they'd never be able to launch and recover from Star Destroyers without the latter having a TIE-sized railgun since the former lacks landing gear. Even so, landing directly on the wings in rough terrain would be difficult at best and severely damaging if not downright suicidal at worst. That's assuming the standard TIE, an interceptor, bomber, or advanced model it would prove impossible without landing gear as there's no way to passively balance the weight of those designs except under the lightest of gravity (unless for some reason they had really insane weight distribution).
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Jan 23, 2017 03:24
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Kwyndig posted:TIE fighters certainly had low speed VTOL capability or else they'd never be able to launch and recover from Star Destroyers without the latter having a TIE-sized railgun since the former lacks landing gear. They just turn off the artificial gravity to land them, silly.
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Jan 23, 2017 03:35
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The old Kenner TIE toys had ejectors, at least.
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Jan 23, 2017 03:38
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Bearing in mind that all of this is from hazy memory of long-ago books and just a couple minutes of Wookiepedia skimming: Standard TIE fighters had no ejector seat because they were designed to be cheap, plentiful, and disposable. The basic model - the TIE/LN - didn't even have life support systems, for crying out loud, which is why TIE pilots were always wearing those bulky-rear end suits. Note also "While the ships were structurally capable of "sitting" on their wings, they were not designed to land or disembark their pilots without special support" - IIRC they were recovered by their carrier via tractor. Wookiepedia also tells me that "Contrary to popular belief, the ships did possess ejection seats, but the nature of space warfare often resulted in pilots riding their craft down to a swift end rather than ejecting and risking slow death by heat loss and oxygen starvation in the vacuum of space." (I'd bet you anything that it's the Kenner toys that led to that sentence's addition, since IIRC we never see TIE pilots ejecting in the films)
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Jan 23, 2017 04:07
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Considering the Empire almost certainly told their pilots "We don't do sweeps for ejectees" in that situation I'd rather burn out than fade away. I mean, that's even assuming that you win the fight, I doubt the Rebel Alliance ever stayed for a shooting match they weren't sure they could win unless it was vitally necessary to the cause (in other words, any fight involving or participating against a Death Star).
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Jan 23, 2017 04:11
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chitoryu12 posted:Lucas is really good at building worlds and making unique things, but he's also really a guy who needs to be reined in by a support team. If you give him 100% creative control (he wrote and directed the prequels by himself for the most part, with episodes V, VI, and VII being written and directed by other people with just input and guidance from Lucas) he starts going way beyond what he's actually competent at and we get Anakin Skywalker. In particular, unrestrained Lucas is consistently loving awful at names, regardless of the quality of the film. Planet names, species names, character names, names for anything. There's a throwaway character in Episode II literally named 'Sleazebaggano'. Luke Skywalker was originally named 'Anikin Starkiller'. Also, got the first catpiss of this campaign: we had to postpone the upcoming session, because we're playing over Roll20 at the moment due to our players being scattered across the Earth for at least the next month or so (from the Phillippines to South Korea to Montana to loving Norway), and four separate players had four separate computers fail on the same night for unrelated reasons, including one guy who somehow managed to wipe his Windows install and has no idea how it happened. On the bright side, they're all happy that their individual computer trouble isn't going to cause them to miss any of the game.
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Jan 23, 2017 04:32
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Your game is cursed, get out while you still can.
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Jan 23, 2017 04:33
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Mister Bates posted:Also, got the first catpiss of this campaign: we had to postpone the upcoming session, because we're playing over Roll20 at the moment due to our players being scattered across the Earth for at least the next month or so (from the Phillippines to South Korea to Montana to loving Norway), and four separate players had four separate computers fail on the same night for unrelated reasons, including one guy who somehow managed to wipe his Windows install and has no idea how it happened. It could be worse. I missed the first session of an online game because our apartment building caught on fire and we had to evacuate. (No injuries, thankfully, and minimal property loss, bot to say it caused some logistical issues would be an understatement.) I got worked into the narrative in the second session, and things went okay from there. Said online campaign has been running on and off for 3+ years now and has been very successful, so clearly my absence wasn't an omen of doom. If there had been four independent apartment fires, though, that would be a different story.
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Jan 23, 2017 04:42
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Masini: rolling 1d10!+0-99 defense unconscious (3)+0-99 = -96 Prudenzio of Flambeau: lol Giraldo of Milan: almost Archibald of Guernicus: His health should overflow Condottieri: It does not. Archibald of Guernicus: Into postive integers again Condottieri: He instead takes 132 damage 8 times.
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Jan 23, 2017 04:52
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this was a good session btw and that was justified and the player is staying in the game. big numbers ftw
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Jan 23, 2017 04:53
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It's okay, all the TIE pilots parachuted to safety offscreen!
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Jan 23, 2017 04:58
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Way off topic for this thread, but I cannot keep it in any longer: George Lucas has some really poo poo names. It's as if the older he gets the further into full-retard mode he goes. I mean: we start with Ben, Han, Luke, Lea with Greedo and Jabba as outliers. Then five movies later you get Poof, Jar-Jar, Dooku and Naboo. We need to thank god that he isn't involved with 7-9, otherwise we'd be dealing with Darth Do'ki'e-Dingl and Lord Twist'd Nachers. Also "Jizz Wailers" makes me giggle. Always has. Always will.
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Jan 23, 2017 05:36
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In one of the earliest surviving two-page story outlines, "The Journal of the Whills, Part I", the names given are Chuiee Two Thorpe of Kissel, his father Han Dardell Thorpe, and a Warlord named Mace Windy. The story is basically one of court intrigue. It took a lot of revising to get the Star Wars we saw in 1977.
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Jan 23, 2017 05:58
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RE: TIE fighters - In one of the new Disney novels, Aftermath by Chuck Wendig, one of the protagonists steals a TIE and comments how they removed a number of safety features in order to improve handling and performance. Pretty sure ejector seats were one of the things no longer included. And I'm sure what I said had been mentioned before in other Star Wars media, I was just reaffirming it.
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Jan 23, 2017 06:08
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Whether or not these particular TIEs have ejection seats will be based solely on whether or not my players steal them. While it would admittedly be hilarious for my untrained, Piloting-skill-lacking players to end up careening around in fragile deathtrap fighters with no landing gear and no ejection seats, I'm not that kind of GM.
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Jan 23, 2017 06:28
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Agrikk posted:Then five movies later you get Poof, Jar-Jar, Dooku and Naboo. When I first saw the name show up in the opening scrawl, I was imagining the Count's name to be pronounced as if it was a Japanese word in romaji. Of course, that then just makes his name "Dork" in Japanese, so it's not much better. Lemniscate Blue posted:It took a lot of revising to get the Star Wars we saw in 1977. And a lot of solid post-production editing.
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Jan 23, 2017 06:40
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All this Star Wars talk reminds me of something I encountered a while back that attempted to explain why there were small children in the Jedi temple and why Anakin was 'too old' to train. Basically the gist of it was that before a certain age (around 4-5 or so) a child has no concept of or fear of death, and if you're a total monster you can exploit that and condition them so that they will be utterly fearless. You can then keep going and just strip out every emotion a Jedi doesn't need to do their job (like love, or anger, or jealousy). If you assume this is correct, your average Old Republic Jedi is actually incapable of falling to the Dark Side because they lack the emotions required. This would also explain why they believe they've defeated the Sith, if they hunted down all the known Dark Side users that would be it unless someone trained more. Of course the EU was full of examples of things like Sith ghosts, ancient Sith temples, and forgotten Sith holocrons that could have easily served to train a naive young Force sensitive in the ways of the Sith. But not scrolls of forbidden lore. Star Wars doesn't have paper.
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Jan 23, 2017 06:55
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Coward posted:And a lot of solid post-production editing. Yeah, Marcia Lucas is an unsung hero.
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Jan 23, 2017 08:31
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Game Informer posted:A similar situation arose with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed’s protagonist, Starkiller. “[That name] was only supposed to be a nickname or call sign, not a proper name from the beginning,” a former LucasArts employee says. The development team hoped that Lucas would give Vader’s apprentice a Darth moniker, which at the time, was something that didn’t happen often.
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Jan 23, 2017 10:48
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Kavak posted:I imagine a wing landing is possible but a very delicate thing, since there's no real landing gear. They show them landed on the wings all the time in Rebels, which is a canonical show. http://beyondthemarquee.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/STAR-WARS-REBELS-Sabine-and-TIE-Fighters.jpg
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Jan 23, 2017 14:46
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I'm pretty sure they also steal a TIE and give it a loud paint job in Rebels.
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Jan 23, 2017 22:56
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Under the vegetable posted:this was a good session btw and that was justified and the player is staying in the game. big numbers ftw I was running a 7th Sea game years ago which registered the highest damage I will likely ever see in that game. We've been using a home-brewed "second edition" (which we wrote years before the actual second edition that just came out), but at the time we were using straight-up First Edition 7th Sea. That's important because 1st ed. 7th Sea was broken as hell and had things like Natural Aptitude. Let me explain: Normally in 7th Sea, you can "take raises" to get extra effects on rolls. Each raise is a voluntary -5 on a check, prior to the roll, and is basically a bet against yourself that you can hit a roll's target number with that much extra to spare. In combat, you can take raises in rolls to hit to get extra dice for damage. For example, if you take two raises to hit, you'd need an extra 10 in addition to whatever you need to hit the bad guy. But if you succeed anyway, you'd get an extra 2 dice to roll for damage. Got it? So here's how Natural Aptitude worked: Natural Aptitude was an Advantage that you had to buy at character creation. You chose a single knack (skill) to attached NA to. In the chosen skill, and only the chosen skill, you got to take raises after you rolled. One of my players had Natural Aptitude for Firearms: Attack. He was also a spy for a secret society, and kept the fact that he even had a pistol a secret, even from the other PCs. He had used the pistol twice before, but was otherwise a swordsman. This was the end of the last campaign in a series of six campaigns that a friend and I took turns running. It being the end, I brought out the big guns and based the last campaign on an NOM plot. Think of NOM like the Illuminati: it's a secret society of bad guys. The thing is, PCs are rarely ever able to get directly involved with their plots. They usually don't even learn about the existence of NOM. But this was the big finish, so the PCs had enough information to bring the thing crashing down at the climax of the plot. NOM employs a school of assassins known as the Quinn School. Mechanically, they're designed to be plot devices: you can chuck one through a window, spend a bunch of drama dice, and an NPC (or a PC who's being an rear end in a top hat) just dies. They never stand and fight. For Quinn, it's always: In. Murder. Out. (Or if escape isn't in the cards: In. Murder. Suicide pill.) So with most of the PCs off fighting on the main stage during the final battle, the spy PC, the one with Natural Aptitude, has gotten word that the progenitor of the Quinn School is on the scene to personally deal with the PCs. He keeps this information from the other PCs because he got the information from his own secret society. He decides to go it alone and intercept Quinn himself, alone. He's stalking around a ruined church in Eisen (Germany). He knows Quinn is out there somewhere, doing the same. He's basically using himself as bait and is waiting for Quinn to jump out and try to murder him before he springs his own trap: that pistol he keeps hidden in his coat. But there's one more thing the PC has up his sleeve: the Catch knack. Catch is a skill that a PC can use to defend themselves against a thrown weapon attack. It's pretty corner-case, and this PC has literally never used it. He bought it about 2/3 of the way through the campaign when the PCs started learning about NOM, the Quinn School, and how Quinn assassins will often use lethal poisons on thrown daggers. So his plan is: draw out Quinn, catch the first poisoned knife that's lobbed at him, and quick draw his pistol to kill Quinn. Mechanically, this is a tall order, since a single gunshot isn't usually enough to kill a villain. But maybe, he hopes, Natural Aptitude will at least let him Cripple Quinn (i.e. get him to half health). Then it's a real fight. Then Quinn appears. He drops from the rafters and throws a knife at the PC. Mechanically, if that knife hits the PC, he's a dead man. (The poison is "Prophet's Breath," which outright kills a character in 1d10 phases, each of which is about a second. There is no resistance roll. Normally, I'd avoid cheesy poo poo like that, but this was the end of everything, so I let it rip.) The PC catches the knife, beating the attack roll with his own Catch roll. Whew. But then Quinn does something he doesn't expect: he charges. He takes out two long knives and looks like he's going to barrel into the PC, knock him down, and knife the poo poo out of him while he's prone. The PC has literally one second (one phase) to react. He pulls his pistol (no action required because of Quick Draw) and fires on the same phase as Quinn's corps-a-corps attack (the body blow is a separate attack form the knives, which would have come next). The PC manages to squeeze off a shot into Quinn as both of them go to the ground. The player rolls the attack. Remember: he can call raises afterward for Firearms: Attack, so basically the higher he gets, the more excess he can take into his damage roll. the only thing he doesn't know is what Quinn's defense is, and he only needs to bet against that. He spends a Drama Die so that he's rolling ten dice and keeping five, with 10's exploding, so he ends up with a hefty 77. But that's not the roll. He plays it safe and bets that Quinn has a pretty much maxed-out defense of 30, so that lets him take nine raises (77 - 30 = 47. 47/5 = 9). Nine raises will get him nine extra unkept dice for the damage roll. But here's the thing: you can never roll more than ten dice in 7th Sea. Any excess dice start becoming kept dice. And, he's using a gun, which will deal extra wounds to Quinn at twice the rate of a sword (it's one of the perks you get for using a weapon that can be used once per combat). Normally, a pistol does 4k3 (roll four dice, keep three of them). Now it's going to do more. A lot more. He also spends the last of his Drama Dice on the damage roll, which gives him an extra 1k1. After going "around the bar" in exceeding ten dice, the damage die pool is 10k8. Most damage pools don't exceed three kept dice. The players rolls an astronomical 133 damage. He got, I think, four or five 10's on the initial roll, all of which explode. Some of those explosions exploded. Suffice it to say, things got out of hand and there was much hooting and hollering around the table. But I still had to roll Quinn's resistance to that damage. He rolls Brawn (an attribute) to resist. He is wounded if he fails to meet the damage (which he will). The only question is: by how much? Swords do an additional wound for every 20 you fail the wound check. Guns do an extra fro every 10. Quinn must take 8 wounds to die outright. If he doesn't, he's going to put a poisoned knife or three into the PC on the next combat phase, crippled or not. He needs to die outright, or the PC is dead. I spend two Drama Dice on the wound check, because I have them to spare and it was the very end. The wound check would be 3k3 but becomes 5k5. It comes up something like 25. 133 - 25 = 102. That's ten additional wounds. Quinn barrels into the PC just as the PC puts the pistol under his chin and pulls the trigger. Quinn's brains are splattered all over the ruined church. Two knives clatter to the ground on each side of the PC. They are both slick with poison and inches from the PC's face when they finally skid to a halt. One of the other players said: "Phinneas Quinn died as he lived: suddenly, and violently." 
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Jan 24, 2017 11:49
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Railing Kill posted:
Epic. I've been in one, maybe two, tense scenes like that over the years and I imagine the atmosphere at the table was goddamn electric during that.
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Jan 24, 2017 12:05
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You might call those mechanics broken as hell; I call them godsdamned perfect for capturing the cinematic flavor on which the game/setting is based. 
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Jan 24, 2017 13:28
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Ilor posted:You might call those mechanics broken as hell; I call them godsdamned perfect for capturing the cinematic flavor on which the game/setting is based. They can be both. I'd say about 80% of 7th Sea's mechanics are great for being dramatic and risk-taking, but 20% of it is either pointless or over-powered. Natural Aptitude is overpowered as hell, and the player in that story using it on a skill he used only a handful of times is the only thing that kept it from being horrible. A player with less restraint, and less care for the plot and GM's sanity, could take NA attached to their primary attack skill and do insane damage with every swing. That would dull the drama of that story, and good players are the only reason that story works the way that it does.
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Jan 24, 2017 13:57
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What does it mean for dice to explode? I'm noticing a lack of explosions in game and because of that, i must sadly say that my first theory was wrong.
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Jan 24, 2017 15:20
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HardDiskD posted:What does it mean for dice to explode? I'm noticing a lack of explosions in game and because of that, i must sadly say that my first theory was wrong. A die 'explodes' when you roll the maximum value on it (6 for a d6, 10 for a d10, etc) and then you roll the die again and add the two results together. Most games with exploding dice are unlimited, you can keep doing this as long as you roll the maximum value (I once saw a guy roll 41 on a single d6). Edit: Personally I feel like exploding dice are poor game design, since they throw your probability curve completely off track especially when using multiple dice. Players don't understand probability well to begin with and exploding dice can lead them to taking especially stupid risks. Now, if that's the goal of your system, sure go ahead with it, but unless you're designing an especially grimdark game of utter darkness your penalties for failure should be mild. Double Edit because I can't seem to get off this soapbox this morning: Also, unless you're using PC exceptionalism (PCs are immune to crits, sudden no-save death, etc) baked into your rules the swinginess of exploding dice can rapidly leave characters as a smear on the pavement in combat. Exploding dice benefit the players because it can let hit otherwise 'impossible' numbers with good luck, but it also works against the players because they're on the receiving end of more attack rolls than NPCs are unless you alter the mechanics. It's the same sort of idea as critical hits/misses, over the lifetime of a campaign they'll happen more often to the PCs simply because the PCs are there all the time. Kwyndig fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Jan 24, 2017 |
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Jan 24, 2017 15:25
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Kwyndig posted:A die 'explodes' when you roll the maximum value on it (6 for a d6, 10 for a d10, etc) and then you roll the die again and add the two results together. Most games with exploding dice are unlimited, you can keep doing this as long as you roll the maximum value (I once saw a guy roll 41 on a single d6). Normally, I would agree, but 7th Sea is a bit different. PC exceptionalism is baked into the game, and the PCs are literally heroes that are supposed to do crazy poo poo all the time. PCs can't die unless they are totally incapacitated (the game literally calls it "Knocked Out"), and then a villain has to deliberately take an action to off them after that. Even then, the rules encourage the GM to invent (or contrive) some near-death escape. But the villains often get the same treatment. It's part of the metaphysics of the renaissance high adventure genre. There are no critical hits in the game, except for what exploding dice allow. It's definitely not a grimdark game, so I like it for 7th Sea. But I would agree exploding dice are bad idea for 90% of games. I crunched numbers to build a probability table for 7th Sea, which has the exploding dice built into the calculations. The players in our group know the table well enough, but it does help for some of the less common rolls (anything above 8 total dice, or more than 4 kept dice is pretty unusual).
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Jan 24, 2017 16:00
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Yeah not an indictment of 7th Sea in particular, more of a general rant and a warning to game designers who might otherwise consider adding exploding dice to a game.
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Jan 24, 2017 16:12
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