Bored Druid ThreadFollow

In my younger and nerdier days when I played PnP RPGs a lot, I remember reading about hit points, and what they might actually represent. The idea was, no matter how many HP your level 20 raging barbarian has, a well-placed non-magical dagger can kill him dead. That's a weapon capable of doing 4 damage, 8 on a critical hit. One idea was that hit points aren't so much your characters physical toughness as they are hours upon hours of training in turning what would have been a heavy hit into a glancing blow, or a glancing blow into a near miss. Eventually, your character becomes fatigued, and the next blow lands and does actual real damage. And after one or two more, you're dead.

But that's building all the stats and happenings that are now seperate in games. Parry, dodge, blocks, misses, etc. all have their own stats, and generally their own animations in a game. It just doesn't make sense for me to get hit by a sword 46 times before I die. Especially when 12 of them were "critical" hits.

Gaming just pretty much requires you to accept that, for it to be FUN, you need to suspend that disbelief. Creating armor and portable shield generators to help you deal with light sabers and blaster bolts helps you do that.

And, frankly, Star Wars is in a MUCH better position than the fantasy genre here. The armor excuse in fantasy genres stops working when you get to cloth wearers--I have no reason to believe my linen robe can stop a sword. But, when discussing a technologically advanced setting, synthetic fibers COULD realistically be highly resistant and remain light. Especially if you think about them as being able to absorb the energy from blaster bolts or something. It's less obvious when it comes to blunt/bladed weapons, but it's still easier to imagine some kind of really durable fiber that mitigates impacts/resists being severed.

And that's not even relying on unobtanium. We already have fabrics (or at least synthetic thread-like objects) that are extraordinarily resilient. They just happen to come with extraordinary price tags.

I like this thread more when it's about boobs, beer, sex or spiders.

I know fantasy games are absolutely no better at this than Star Wars, or sci-fi as a whole. Does it make sense that that raid boss is being blasted with fireballs, his knees are being hacked at by daggers, his mind is being assaulted by shadow magic, etc. but he continues on fighting like normal until the instant his hp hits 0? No. There's a trope for that, by the way.

That's pretty much games as a whole. Not just fantasy or Star Wars or shooters or any specific genre. It's a mechanic that we have all come to live with.

What gets me about Star Wars is that in the movies, the Jedi and the Sith, i.e. the Force users in general, are so much better than the average trooper. If you went at a Jedi with a blaster, chances are you would end up as chunky salsa. Part of that was because the storm troopers apparently blacked out the inside of their helmets and were trying to shoot targets they couldn't see or something, but even ignoring that, an army of them likely wouldn't have been able to stand up against a single well-trained Jedi.

My issue is that the Jedi and the Sith are portrayed as so much more vastly powerful than anyone else that it just doesn't translate well to an MMO.

Let's imagine they made a Harry Potter MMO. The available classes were a wizard, a muggle, and oh I don't know, a centaur. Centaurs got archery related skills, muggles got guns and stuff, but were pretty much powerless against wizards as in the books, and wizards got a huge array of spells, including the killing curse. Obviously, that would be horribly imbalanced and they would never do that in a real MMO, because everyone would just play as a wizard, right? Well, it's the same thing with Star Wars. If it were like it were in the movies, then Jedi and Sith would be vastly overpowered and would be the one everyone plays. The fact that it's not is because they had to change a lot to make it work, and that huge amount of changing makes it so different from the movies that I just have a hard time working with it.



I know that, as elaborated earlier in this post. I guess it's not the hit points, or the Force points, or the fact that lightsabers aren't insta-kill for me that bugs me. Those are all necessary game mechanics. What bugs me is that they have to change so much from the movies just to make it work, and to me it's just not the same Star Wars any more.

I liked Star Wars for its basic, archetypal plot. Sure, it was cool seeing the epic fights, the music by John Williams made my ears ******, etc. But the basic reason I liked Star Wars was because it was a good story at heart, about a boy being one of the last of the Jedi, and he's the only one that can save the galaxy from the Sith. In an MMO, that doesn't translate. And while Bioware has some excellent stories involved (I mean, it's freaking Bioware) it's not Star Wars, and I feel like an MMO is just them trying to prolong the value of the name more than it should. One of the things that bugs me the most is carrying on a franchise long after it should have died, keeping it on life support to try and squeeze out every last dollar. And I feel like that's what this MMO is. They're making new stories to keep it going, making an excellent MMO, but it's not the same Star Wars as the movies.

No.

WARNING: Terrible, awful, horrifying spider here

And Fish, don't think I didn't see what you did there. Trying to trap us in tvtropes.

I CAUGHT YOU.

That picture isn't scary, but we used to pit those to fight against each other while I was in the desert so I'm used to seeing them.

Curses! Foiled again.



That must have been... terrifying, seeing two things like that go at each other.

Aha! I clicked the link and was pleased to see that my detective skills were right.

You see, you mentioned pitting the spiders against each other in the desert and since I suspected Aeth would link something big and nasty, your post had me thinking it might have been camel spiders.

Camel spiders aren't spiders, though. Not true spiders. They're from a different species of arachnids, like scorpions (they're actually called wind scorpions).

So, believing the link would lead to camel spiders, I dared click it.

Digg, it's boobies.

Camel spiders are still nasty, though, but they're not "I'mma sh*t myself and fall off my chair" nasty.

Edit: The second link is not relevant to my interests, though.

Edited, Dec 5th 2011 10:37pm by Mazra

So Mazra.
Whatcha gonna do when I link to a spider pic next time?

Thar be spider on her hand. Gave me a bit of a shiver, but nothing too bad.

Speaking of spiders, though, I was helping my buddy with a nature/science class today. They were going to look at some stuffed birds, so I helped find them while he handled the class. I had to find a... titmouse (what kind of name is that for a bird, seriously?), but the damn thing is so small, I couldn't see if it was a black or blue one. Stuck my entire face into the cabinet to get a better look and only then realized that the cabinet also held stuffed tarantulas of various sizes.

I came this close to losing it in front of 20 kids.

I liked Jedis in Star Wars Galaxies before the patches. Back when they were alpha classes that suffered from perma-death and in-game bounties. A single Jedi Master could wipe out an entire Imperial base on his or her own, not to mention the dozen players trying their luck everywhere they went.

But becoming a Jedi Master took months, even years, and dying sucked... hard. Like, you spent years getting here and now you have to start over, luls, hard.