Ghost Rider wrote:How does all this exist in the shadows long enough that the powers to be....do not notice a vast military build up, an immense procurement of force users, and the theft of high end military weaponry?
Military build-up: It's easy enough to get a military build-up going if you're taking pains to hide it, whilst simultainously letting it slip that the build-up isn't meant for you: IE, if Darth Oster lets it be believed that his build-up is in plan to consolidate control of the remnant with no further aim on the N.R., then the NR will be wary, but not immediately go and pull all the old ships out of mothballs until it's too late. See, his initial problem will be that those who choose to throw in with him will have fewer ships than crew to man them; this is where the hijackings come in.
Procurement of force-users: (at least0 Thrice before the powers that be have missed this one. During the Reborn crisis, during the Disciples of Ragnos crisis, and during the Shadow Academy/Second Imperium Crisis. Frankly, the PTB are bollocks about not caring about the procurement of force users. They consistantly underestimate the Force, possibly because the Jedi have always taken care of it before it needed any serious commitment from the PTB to fix.
Theft of high-end military weaponry: They certainly won't fail to notice this, which is why it's part of the late-game. By the time this happens, Borsk will be conducting the business of government from atop his refresher to prevent his trousers from being soilt every twenty minutes. This is the point where the boy will realize he done fucked up and fucked up
good.
But, as per Borsk Fey'lya's Hierarchy of Importance, covering his own ass will come first, covering the asses of his friends will come second, covering Bothan asses will come third through fifth, and only then will covering the Republic's ass come sixth.
What does Borsk Fey'lya do when it gets to this point? What all real politicians would do: deny, cover-up, and
send in the spies. It goes without saying that the Bothan Spy Network and Republic Intelligence will be burning the midnight oil, the 2 AM oil, the 5 AM oil, the sunup oil, and the taking sunup speed to take care of the situation.
If you answer: Because I wrote it so. That's useless. You are set in your ways and this entire exercise is just for you to show us what you and your gaming group spanks off to. Otherwise, you either need to flesh this out over several sessions or it's just "And then Luke II became a Jedi Knight, slayed Emperor Anakin Palpatine Skywalker Solo who was possessed by Darth Omnus". Your opponents are all geared to some high end with no real hint that they are nothing more then shoehorned in there by using reputations you simply inserted.
I'm fleshing it out over quite some time, you know. I
have thought about this, you know. I'm not an idiot.
For plot? You've presented : Plucky heroes, retard government, uber Sith Lord #8908797812, Crime Lord that outdoes Kuat and Sienar and the CSA combined, and last but not least....name dropping helpers. Combine with a story that is nothing short of conquering the known galaxy.
Of course they're plucky heroes. There's plucky heroes as the protagonists of everything.
Retard Government is a problem that is persistant throughout the Star Wars mythos, and why not? It's deeper than just saying "here's a bad guy, he wants to eat up everyone you know and love, go shove a lightsaber where the sun don't shine." This puts them in a conundrum; Borsk Fey'lya's actions are
materially harming them and the Republic they're sworn to protect, but he is also the
leader of that Republic. They can't simply remove him by force - think about the precedent
that would set! They have to work
around this problem, including the problem that Jedi have already been arrested at least once for vigilantism when they brought in a kidnapper/slaver that had been preying on Courscant's younglings. It gives them problems to deal with, which they cannot simply solve through lightsabering, and which will require creativity, roleplay, compromise, and the art of social activity.
As for Zann, I'll point out that it is canon (a lower canon, but still canon) that he
had the potential to conquer the galaxy during the Galactic Civil War. His vessels were capable of going toe-to-toe with Alliance and Imperial forces, and were arguably superior in his vast use of special ship-killer weapons (mass drivers, axial fuckoff guns,) clever technology, and even the ability to shut down Jedi with Ysalamiri cages.
Obviously, he did not do this. But he had the potential, and now he's come back to realize that potential. Tyber Zann is not a motherfucker to be trifled with.
As for name-dropping helpers...? Wha?
Your actions would have to be multiple confrontations that will either be vast fleet battles given the armies and vehicles you are pointing out to us.
Yes, that's the idea. The players will need to bring a fleet with them when they come to take down Eclipse/Malevolance/Whatever or Lusankya. They might even decide that
both vessels should be recaptured for the Republic, which would require boarding them. But first, they'd need to disable the big bad ship's combat ability with their starfighters, quite possibly by escorting in B-Wings and Y-Wing in the company of Rogue Squadron whilst the rest of the fleet fights a desperate battle against the
rest of Zann's/Oster's forces. Once they've done that - scuttled her Axial Fuckoff Laser and her turbolaser batteries, they can board, then they get treated to a running fight through the ship's hull, on their side: whatever allies they managed to bring together. On the bad guy's side: a fuckton of stormtroopers/Sith Soldiers and all of the darksided bad guys the enemy can bring to bear.
Your Climax is either a final confrontation with the SUPER SUPER SUPER STAR DREADNOUGHT WANK! with an obligatory Lightsaber spank fest. Maybe the villains flee ala Cobra or die.
Yeah, and? Is there something wrong with that?
Your falling action is the galaxy either being fucking dumber then usual or make your group the galaxy's greatest since Luke.
It's not impossible for dumb politicians to run things into the ground. See also: Righttards, healthcare. And why shouldn't they be; they're the player characters, the protagonists. They have a right to be as great as they can be, and if that means outstripping Luke Skywalker in power - at least collectively - then so be it.
Your finale is...RETURN OF THE SITH or they died, what else to do on this fine Saturday evening.
And again, what's wrong with that? Sith are a classic, and none of them are more classic than Darth Vader. That alone justifies it, the fact that I have actually thought out how and why someone is going to be going about the business of
impersonating him allows it to take place sensibly; it'll come as a moment of deep relief when they realize the guy they're fighting is
not in fact Darth Vader... But it should be nothing short of a "holy shit!" moment when they realize he's powerful enough to give them a run for their money anyway.
Even with your telling us of building and structuring, it still sounds nothing more then a bad Del Ray novel. And you are still telling us that it's not, because you're telling us.
Okay then,
you care to come up a plot that gives a group of Jedi characters, in the New Jedi Order era, 23 ABY, a gigantic, galaxy-spanning, seemingly-hopeless situation to deal with that does
not involve the Yuuzan Vong (who will never,
ever, EVER appear in my games) or yet
another fucking Corellian uprising the likes of which make me wonder why they haven't just BDZ'd the damn insufferable world and had done with it.
The plot you come up with must have equal parts struggle against seemingly-hopeless odds, such as battle droids or stormtroopers in seemingly inexhaustable supply, epic, whirling space battles in their starfighters and space transport while towards the end game entire fleets clash in the background, and lightsaber duels against competant, Force-wielding, lightsaber-wielding bad guys. It must also have struggles against obstacles which may
not be expediantly solved by the application of violence, such as obstructionist or difficult politicians pursuing agendas which are genuinely-held and thought out but ultimately wrong.
Show your work.
Simon_Jester wrote:ShadowDragon8685 wrote:Well, they like it so far. They're learning to dislike Borsk Fey'lya with an intensity that rivals Rogue Squadron's pilots, and they're liking the recent plot with Ackbar.
OK, fun dominates. But remember, you ASKED us to help you make your plot make sense; don't be surprised and defensive if you get complaints that it doesn't make as much sense as you thought it did.
It makes plenty of sense to me. Nothing I've plotted has so far gone out of character for the actors involved. Darth Oster doesn't come out of nowhere, I know exactly who he is (the third Red Guard, the one who survives the Shadow Academy,) and his motivation is the same as the one he just attempted (re-forge the Empire by using dark Jedi) only with a lot more competance. Tyber Zann is a canon bad-guy who was left with a plot that's
ready-made for this sort of thing, what with his whole
carbonite-frozen Sith Army and Sliri and Nightsisters support and what-not.
And while it may be stretching things to have him retain Eclipse, it's less stretching than that "oh and by the way, he discovered some lost CIS warship that, despite being the better part of a century old, is still powerful enough that it's the most powerful ship in space today."
That genuinely comes out of
nowhere, whereas fudging already-existing facts to have him retaining a ship
he laid his hands on and hyperspaced off with once does not. Like I said, if you're going to take the goods and vanish for a few decades, it's pretty easy to vanish no matter
who's tracking you down. He might have simply stocked the ship with thousands of Ysalamiri and plenty of food dispensors to ensure that they bred strong, and that would've easily prevented Palpatine, even if he personally decided to track the ship down, from finding him through the Force. Use swarms of MSE-6 and astromech droids to prevent the Ysalamiri from destroying the ship (or more likely, to tend to their cages,) with Urai Fen (the ageless old owl) awake to oversee the whole operation while everyone is asleep.
It can even be reconciled with all the canon facts except the ending of the campaign of EaW:FoC, by simply stating that the Rebellion believed the canon ending to be true, the Empire worked to make it seem to be true, and by the time he was ressurected, the Emperor thought it to be true because they'd built him another ship with the same name and it never crossed his mind that they would have done that rather than tracked down Zann. Or hell, maybe he didn't care; as long as he had an Eclipse and the Galaxy Gun, he held the galaxy by the throat anyway.
If he's powerful enough to convincingly impersonate Darth Vader, then this objection basically vanishes. But that is damned powerful.
It is, and unashamedly so. This dude is hardcore dangerous. It's not without precedent; Desann was big enough and bad enough with the Force that he pulled the Darth Vader Take-Over of star destroyers whilst being a gigantic tyrannosaurus-thing. Oster has power armor and is
actively impersonating Vader, and doing so convincingly. I want even my players to wonder if Luke might be wrong and that he might really be Vader. I want them to
hear the Imperial March.
So, in other words, the reasoning that Zann canonically applied was just plain wrong? Oh...kay... I mean really, why not just use another big evil battleship? Do you have some specific motive for making it the Eclipse? Does there even NEED to be a big evil battleship, as opposed to a larger fleet of more normal ships?
Because making it any other battleship is just "Oh, and he somehow found this, too. Yes, while he was asleep." Whereas he
had Eclipse
under his command, he was literally standing on the bridge and ordering the ship to make the jump to light-speed. It is
undisputable that Zann had his hands on the Eclipse, so I'm simply reasoning that,
if he was planning to go dark for two decades, he would have known he could pull it off with the Eclipse in tow.
As for there needing to be a big evil battleship, yes, yes there does. He's a Big Bad Evil Guy, he needs a Big Bad Evil Command Ship, he needs a Cool Ship. Frankly, his personal Agressor doesn't cut it for
his flagship when even the Keldabes that will be part of his regular forces are bigger and badder. It might be his away-from-home ship, but when it comes time to take Zann on in his home territory, it should be as daunting a challenge as the second Death Star run was. They might even find it above Mandalore itself; a
fully-armed and
operational battleship.
And no. Their cruisers
won't be able to repel firepower of that magnitude. But Ackbar won't say it, he'll be too busy experiancing deja vu. Though it may not actually be a trap. That depends on whether Zann knows they're coming or not.
Anyway, Malevolence is neither big nor bad enough. His standard Agressor-class Destroyers are bigger and have twin fuckoff cannons.
OK, this is simply not true. Looking at the game,
Aggressors are built to the same scale as ordinary star destroyers.
Malevolence was more like the size of the
Executor- or the
Eclipse. In addition, the
Malevolence had one hell of a "fuckoff cannon" in its own right, capable of one-shotting a
Venator.
So I think you've got your sense of exactly what Zann had on hand and how it compared to the rest of the galaxy badly miscalibrated.
Well, I know that in the Vongshit stories, Luke bemoaned the fact that they'd destroyed all the Eclipse-class dreadnoughts, since one of them would have been capable of popping Vong Worldships. Anyway, Malevolance is only listed as ">5Km" long. Eclipse is
17.5, and it
vastly out-masses even an
Executor-class SSD. It is true that one of the estimates of Malevolance's size was 17Km; I'm certainly capable of extrapolating from the stats from
Executor and
Eclipse and the other CIS ships to come up with stats for a 17Km
Malevolance with a fuckoff gun capable of erasing entire Star Destroyers.
But again, this begs the question of
where it was; how did the Emperor
fail to find it once he'd shut off the Clone Wars? If it was out there, wouldn't Palps have hung onto it? If it was gone, wouldn't he have destroyed the shipyard that built it, so nobody could build ships capable of challenging his Star Destroyers? And where and how the hell did
Tyber Zann get his hands on it? Any argument against him keeping Eclipse goes just as much if he'd stolen Malevolance from Palpatine, since Palpatine wouldn't want a finished warship with a fuckoff gun capable of being a credible threat to his Eclipse in Zann's hands anymore than he'd want the Eclipse itself in his hands. If he just "found it", then I have to ask, how and why? Did he
coincidentally find it floating in space where he went to go and hide? What happened to the crew; there had to be some organic in charge. What did that guy do at the end of the Clone Wars, eat his blaster? Go into piracy? Make a long-jump to another galaxy?
It's a lot of variables, a lot of questions, and all of them feel
more contrived than Zann simply having retained a ship that we know
he was in command of. Don't get me wrong, I think
Malevolance is
fucking cool. She reminds me of the ships from EVE Online, from Homeworld 2. I can very, very easily see that beast with an axial fuckoff cannon that lights up her middle and spits out between the upper and lower prongs.
I mean.
Look at this beast! (Huge image warning; 56.6 beware). She's
fucking beautiful. I count dozens - well over a hundred - of what look like Dual Light Turbolaser emplacements and plenty of dual heavy turbolaser turrets. Give her an axial fuckoff cannon and she'd easily commit horrible rape to any unprepared vessels or fleets that come near her. And that's
visible guns on the hull; the official stats give it a much greater story (though they seem to consider a single turret to be a battery, for some reason.)
I just
cannot rationalize Zann having gotten his hands on her.
I think I've adequately explained how he has Eclipse, unfinished, but in a usable if fragile state. It's really not that much of a stretch; Emperor dead, Alliance believes that the Empire has it, Empire trying to prevent anyone from knowing they don't have it while hurriedly building another... It's easy to lose track of those things, and Eclipse is both really, really fearsome, and has the benefit of having unquestionably been under Zann's control. As well, the Emperor couldn't have farscryed it if he'd filled the thing with Ysalamiri, after all.
SD, what I'm not clear on:
Are you looking for an
excuse to give Zann the
Eclipse, when canonically he decided to abandon the ship because of the heat it was drawing him? Or are you looking for a logical plot? Pick one and stick with it; don't just keep insisting that it "has to be this way!" when people are raising problems with the idea?
Appealing to the canonicty of an event that I've already decided I don't mind retconning isn't an argument winner any more than "but I said so!" is.
Frankly, of all the superships he could have, Eclipse is the least
implausable. I've already decided he has to have a supership, that's nonoptional. Hell, if even the Hutts could have one, Zann should. Sure, there are other ways; it's not
impossible Zann could have found the Malevolance. Hell, her captain might have given it to him while he was dying, seeing Tyber Zann as the best hope for a non-Republic, non-Imperial galaxy, the last, greatest Seperatist hope.
But that's still more implausable than Zann simply having decided that the level of heat that was being turned up on him was irrelevant if he was going to go dark by freezing himself and all his loyal men in carbonite, and freezing the disloyal ones in the vacuum of space. To my point of view, it's perfectly logical; he's going away to nowhere. The Emperor won't be able to track him down since he'll be dead, and the Rebels will think he let the Empire have it back. He makes a clean getaway, the heat drops off, and he's poised to return in twenty years.
How does this not work logically?
Also... Zann? Ysalamiri? When and where did he get those? It's not as if everyone in the galaxy knew about them.
Tyber Zann did. He used them during the Galactic Civil War in the form of Ysalamiri Cages which he built on top of Mobile Defense Units in order to shut down the force powers of opposing Jedi so his forces could perform horrible rape upon them.
I suggest that the trick is to make options for bypassing the trap (without spending Destiny Points) available, but make them difficult and taxing. They can go through the hangar bay (which is obviously rigged to blow the atmosphere out into space), or they can crawl through the maintenance tunnels with berserk flamethrower-bots harassing them or something.
A better option than save-or-die red jam traps, and certainly I'm not opposed to using obvious bad-choice/worse-choice situations on the players, that still doesn't change the fact that it would make actually taking the guy down once you get to him pathetically easy, which feels like an anticlimax.
Given that it will have been mothballed with a bare skeleton crew and a mere one X-Wing squadron to protect itself and the starship mothball yard it was stuck in, yes. The place was preferring security through obscurity, but that's going to fail, obviously. Lusankya's no longer a flagship of anything; Borsk mothballed it.
Why would they do that?
Don't be married to your existing ideas if they don't make sense, at least not if you
want them to make sense? You may have a rationale that you cooked up for how it happens because the result of it happening would be Just. So. Cool! But that doesn't make the rationale into a good reason.
Why would the New Republic cripple itself so thoroughly? Why would Fey'lya suddenly catch a case of stupidity worse than anything he'd ever had before?
Funnily enough, nobody in my game seems to have a problem with Borsk behaving this way. I've explained his reasoning to their satisfaction; I'm playing him as holding genuine Libertarian ideals. One can hold ideals and still be a corrupt motherfucker; it's no secret at all that he blatently favors himself, and then the Bothan people, but that doesn't stop him from
still wanting to ease the tax and tarrif burden on the Republic's member states (and by doing so get them to look more favorably upon him) by cutting a lot of headachy old machinery out of the New Republic's military budget.
Basically, he wants to replace all the ships of the Rebellion and early New Republic with the New Class ships. He's doing so slowly, so as not to strain the budget, and he mothballed all the old ships instead of having them scrapped, because he felt that if nessessary, they
could be brought up to active duty status.
That's what makes him dangerous; it's not that he hasn't thought this through, it's that he
has. And there's enough crisis-weary senators from cash-strapped worlds out there to go with him on it if it'll mean lower taxes and tarrifs and more 'incentive' for the Republic to solve it's current and future problems through diplomacy rather than with Rogue Squadron.
Because they're an expensive boondoggle. He views everything pre-New Class as a logistical headache, sucking up excess resources in exchange for subpar performance. He is, as I said, pursuing an aggressively libertarian agenda, which involved cutting out the Mon Cal vessels, the Star Destroyers, and drastically cutting back on military expenditure in favor of reducing taxes and tarrifs to make him very, very popular, and using diplomacy instead of military might to mollify the Empire.
Is this in character for him? Is this in line with his normal policies?
It's not
out of character from what's been seen of him so far. It's expounding upon what we've seen and taking some liberties with his motivations. Borsk is a corrupt, self-serving opportuist, but when the chips were down in the YV crisis he did lay down his own life to buy everyone who had a better handle on things time to get away and organize a military resistance against the Vong. He genuinely believes that he's doing right by the Republic with his actions - righter by himself, his friends, and the Bothans, but still right by the Republic. He believes that the military expenditures they have now are wasteful and excessive, maintaining old, outmoded equipment that needs too much maintenance, too many seperate supply lines, and that the ships have far too vast crew requirements, requiring far too many people to be maintained under arms and trained.
In his mind, the Republic does not need the gigantic fleets it had, when the existing New Class fleets are enough to maintain order. (He's underestimating, but he's genuine in his belief, if not his figures.) He is continuing military procurement, but only of new class starships and fighters - which is itself a mistake, since the New Class fighters are rubbish compared to the modernized X-, A- and B-Wings, but he's looking at the standardized parts supplies as being efficient.
Basically, when thinking about what he's doing with the New Republic's military, think of the vitriol with which Shep hates Robert MacNamara. Borsk is the Republic's MacNamara. He's looking at "how
cheaply can we maintain order." Except he's not scrapping the old stuff, he's just putting it up on a shelf up high in case of emergency. He's not planning for someone else to come and take what was on his shelf five-fingered discount, but that's because he's not a military man, and he fired the best military man in the fleet (out of an airlock,) with the rest of the best military men resigning in protest.
He's not 100% incompetant. He's just competant enough to be more dangerous than someone who
is 100% incompetant.
Again, the precedent exists: the Katana Fleet. But it's questionable whether Zann would decide to do that rather than simply abandon the ship, especially if it involves cryogenically freezing himself for decades. Remember, that's exactly what he did decide in the main timeline.
Yes, I know. However, in the main timeline, they were obviously setting themselves up for a sequal to Forces of Corruption which
never happened. Since I'm usurping that for myself, I see no reason for him
not to have been planning to pull off the uberheist and escape retribution by going dark for a few decades.
Since he was planning that all along, it (a) dovetailed beautifully when he found the Sith Army frozen in carbonite, and (b) gave him no particular reason to divest himself of
Eclipse.
The rest of the Eclipse-class is gone with the destruction of Byss, and Zann needs a big fuckoff weapon powerful enough to oneshot any capital warship that comes calling up to and including Lusankya (on a good damage roll, anyway.) Malevolance, while cool as all hell, simply lacks the size and power he needs. It's sufficient to wax a Star Destroyer or three, but it's not a serious contender in the realm of Super-Star Destroyers.
I'm not sure I agree.
Also, if you really want, you can surely create a fictional type. Imagine Malevolence with a low-power superlaser, something in the dreadnought-killer class, instead of its superheavy ion cannon? I mean, if some random private citizen could fit a superlaser to an
Imperator-II, couldn't Zann manage the same?
Booster Terrik's not some random private citizen, he's the guy who combines all the slickness of Lando Calrissian with all the luck of Han Solo and all the military brilliance of Ackbar.
Anyway, I surely
could come up with a custom ship class for Zann, probably drawing on his Mandalorian ship design wanking and giving it some kind of retardedly huge mass driver that ignores shields and can shoot it's projectiles through hyperspace. Basically a Galaxy Gun with a Keldabe-class battleship++ wrapped around it. I could also have him somehow come up with a gravitational-based weapon that simply pastes a ship's insides, or even some kind of super-super lightning gun.
But none of that, I think, is as
cool as giving him an existing ship type. While I could give him Malevolance using the 17km figure to put it in the threatening size range, or have him steal an SSD from somewhere, we
already know that he
had his hands on Eclipse.
Basically, I'm employing Occam's razor here. If he already knew he was going to go dark when he got Eclipse, why would he abandon it for the Empire to reclaim when he could simply take it and run. Why go out of the way and invent a reason for him to have a
different ship with his trademark axial fuckoff cannons when he could simply have retained the
one he already had his hands on.
For that matter, why wouldn't he have simply dumped Eclipse into the Maw or something and said "if I can't have her, nobody will!" I know, retaliation, right, but you'd think if they were going to hunt him down like a dog, they'd have done it regardless, simply for doing what he did.
The idea of Zann making his own supership makes a great deal more sense than Zann managing to pirate one of the few existing ones out from under the nose of the Empire and keep it hidden for decades.
I do not agree. I
cannot see how anyone could agree with this. How could it possibly be easier to make his own supership than keeping one
he had his hands on and had the ability to jump to hyperspace in?! Keeping it hidden for decades is
easy if you just picked a spot in the random middle of nowhere and didn't have any through traffic.
How does this add up to him downsizing the military, which he never did during his twenty years in political office?
How does it
preclude it? I am not obliged to contact Timothy Zahn whenever I want Borsk Fey'lya to do or say something in my game any more than I am obliged to contact George Lucas when I want Luke Skywalker to do something.
Rather, I am simply obliged to play the characters as if they were sane, rational actors (unless they're not sane, rational actors,) coloured by their emotions, prejudices, prides, personal beliefs, and values. If nessessary, I can and will expound upon them; for example, Borsk Fey'lya is allergic to seafood. There, I've expounded upon him. The stories don't mention any such allergy because they don't come up, and I strongly doubt there's any references to him eating
anything, but if nessessary I can and will expound upon his character; I just have to not
violate it.
Now,
Ackbar downsizing the fleets would be entirely out-of-character, but for Fey'lya, it's not so. He's an obstroperous diplomat with no love of the military. He doesn't have to hate it, he just has to hate expenditure and taxation; in his mind, as Cheif of State, it is his
duty, Duty to the Republic, duty to the Bothan people, and duty to himself, to ease the financial burden upon everyone by drastically cutting back on unnessary and wasteful expenditure.
He can acomplish this by putting all of the old, inefficient, bodged-together classes and the old, Imperial-sized vessels (to go with an Imperial budget) on a shelf, up high, away, not draining but a pittance of money to have them guarded, in deep space where nothing breaks, while building more of the New Class vessels to flesh out the fleet.
Is this a
dumb idea,
yes. But in his mind, it makes sense, and in the beancounter minds of the Bothans he surrounds himself with, it makes sense. And because he would automatically assume that any military sentient who objects is biased because of obvious self-interest, the only people he's listening to are the beancounters.
I mean, I get him being corrupt, I get him fighting wars of intrigue against genuine heroes within the New Republic (like Ackbar). I get him being ambitious. That's all in character. But for him to suddenly turn into a libertarian stereotype? I mean, does libertarianism as we know it even exist in Star Wars?
Sure, I can't see why a philosphy of less governmental intervention and less taxation needs not exist. It might not exist in that word, but then, "Democracy" did. So why not "Libertarianism". Hell, he's seen firsthand that individual actors with motivation and drive can acomplish what entire governments cannot - Rogue Squadron took down Courscant, with the Rebel fleet as backup, not the other way 'round. Skywalker dueled Darth Vader and Palpatine and emerged alive. So why
shouldn't the idea that there's a lot of slightly-less-skilled individual super-beings out there, just waiting to break free and become super businessbeings or super-charitybeings, just that they're chained by undue taxes and unnessary, cumbersome regulations; isn't it Borsk's
duty to ease the budgetary burdens of the New Republic, his
duty to 'cut the fat' and the unnessessary regulations, so that more that are like him can succeed?
Bollocks, of course, but if he believes it, that makes him more dangerous than any cynical bastard unbeliever. The fact that he's a cynical bastard believer who's more than happy to be corrupt whilst still pursuing such ideals just makes him even more dangerous.
Why not just have the military not be downsized, but have Fey'lya mismanage the war? Or crank up the power of the opposition so that even when Fey'lya makes the right tactical calls, he's still outgunned?
Well frankly, it's because it's
already happened. The Republic's military has been downsized, Lusankya and many other vessels are being put in mothballs, the MC80s and MC30s are flying back to Mon Calamari to be delivered back into the hands of their true owners.
You've already got two really great villains. Why add a third, much lamer one on your PCs' own side?
Borsk Fey'lya is not lame. He adds a third dimensional villain because he's not malevolantly opposed to the players, he's just genuinely pursuing goals that are at crossed purposes to them. He's not someone they can point to and say "he's a clear-cut bad-guy, if we ever get a chance to drop a proton torpedo on him while he's taking his morning walk, we're bringing the rain." He's
not a malevolant villain, he's someone they have to deal with diplomatically; they might talk him around to their way of thinking, they might talk him into stepping down. If either of those fail, they face the hard choice of trying to subvert enough of his inner council to have him ejected from office, outright staging a coup d'etat and removing him from office at the point of a lightsaber, or trying to work around him by subverting the Republic-under-Borsk into impotancy by going to the member worlds directly and asking them to throw in their forces and money with the Jedi.
None of those are easy options. None of them will be without fallout or consequences, and none of them is the clear-cut 'right' answer. None of them is clear-cut as a
wrong answer, either. With Darth Oster and Tyber Zann, killing them outright in as cheap and lame a way as possible is clearly justified, since they both seem to be making a claim to the title of Dark Lord of Sith and Emperor or Overlord of the Galaxy. If they caught Oster out in the open with a starfighter, I would
expect them to drop a proton torpedo on him - but with Fey'lya, it's not nearly so simple.
I'm not sure you understood me. The point is that you can make Zann a dangerous enemy without having the PCs come face to face with him and demolish him with their Force powers. His minions are dangerous, his battledroids are dangerous (because you can reasonably make battledroids superhuman in strength and firepower), and so on.
It's the minions that are the threat, not Zann himself. If they ever even interact with Zann, it's over a commlink in another star system; he doesn't want to get near this bunch of Jedi super-commandos.
Of course he doesn't want to get near them, but eventually he'll have to when they hunt him down like dogs. It's not impossible they might just vape him in space, but if they decide to get him the hard way, I'd like him not to go down like a chump? Obviously, his forces will be annoying and dangerous, but it just feels wrong if the BBEG goes down like a chump. After all, Palpatine was just a frail old man... Until he busted out a red lightsaber and personally waxed four Jedi Masters in three seconds. He probably could've done the same to Vader if it had occured to him that Vader would sacrifice his own life to kill Palpatine and save Luke, but Vader took him completely off-guard with that one.
Let me put it this way.
Force users have an uncanny knack for achieving extremely difficult feats (like destroying the Death Star, or taking over the galaxy). That goes double for extremely powerful Force users, who do difficult feats all the time and make it look easy. Just as your PCs tend to overpower their opposition easily, NPC Force users who are active in the galaxy should be doing the same thing.
So a Dark Jedi with Vader-level powers is a great threat because he can accomplish things that would not normally be possible. Even if he can't physically blow up a planet, he can do other things that have as much impact in a galactic war as blowing up a planet would.
I am not saying that's
not true, however, I
am saying that the ability to destroy a planet is
not insignificant. No more, no less. Less powerful and cool and useful than the Force, yes, but
not insignificant.
I mean, think about what Luke accomplished when he killed the Death Star using the Force. Strategically, that was at least as important as the destruction of Alderaan, because it saved the Rebellion from immediate defeat, and because it removed (for years) the Empire's ability to destroy planets. Thus, while in a sense Vader lied (because the Sith cannot physically destroy planets), in another sense he did not (because they can do other things that are roughly as significant).
Darth Vader does not need to be able to destroy planets to be a menace. He certainly didn't in the movie; was Vader any less impressive in Episode V when he didn't have planet-destroying weapons than in Episode IV when he did?
I
agree with you. I am, however, saying that the ability to destroy a planet is not insignificant. If Zann were to get Eclipse mobile, he could hold the galaxy in the grip of fear because he could glass entire planetary surfaces, no matter how strong the planetary shield. He'd be a major force to be reckoned with. That would make him not-insignificant.
But it seems like you made this up to justify using him to sabotage the NR military. Why not just strip that out of the character and make him a perfectly normal politician? It isn't even necessary for him to sabotage the military in order for Fake Vader to steal the Lusankya; the ship could simply be down for routine refitting and maintenance.
It's
already happened. You might as well argue, during ESB, why not have Tarkin just blow up a moon of Alderaan to make his point instead of blowing up all of Alderaan.
You're adding plot elements that don't need to be there, and that weaken the character of the NPCs you're relying on to drive the plot.
You guys are the only ones who think so. I don't know why, I wish you'd come 'round. All of my players
love my expounding on Borsk Fey'lya as a libertarian with an agenda that does not include them or a vast number of old military ships.
As I've cited previously, when he feels guilty or useless, Ackbar is given to retreating to solitude.
I was not aware of this aspect of his character, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Could you explain?
From his Wookiepedia entry. When Ackbar felt that he was responsible for destroying the Cathedral of Winds and killing hundreds of Vors, he was stricken with grief and went into self-imposed exile. He basically fucked off to the middle of the wilderness of Mon Calamari and had to be tracked down by Leia and Cilghal (one of his nieces,) to be convinced to come out of it, and even then he didn't come out easily; he only came out to help track down Terpfen, who had been brainwashed into sabotaging his shuttle. It was only when he told Terpfen that he had a great many things still to offer the republic that he realized that applied to himself as well.
So, that's the aspect of his character I'm drawing on for this. He feels like an obsolete old fish, a relic as old and unwanted as
Home One itself. It's untrue, but that's how he feels, and what he needs is for young people to drag him out on adventure to realize that he and the ship both still have much to offer the galaxy.
Home One's a heavy cruiser, but she currently has a crew consisting mainly of R-series astromech droids. While they're more than competant to keep the ship in good repair and fly her about, they can't fire the turbolasers at all, and they're untrained with the ion cannons and tractor beams. The players could personally man the guns, it's true, but she's nowhere near full fighting trim. Primarily, Home One is a cool flying base for them to play around with for the time being, a mobile base with all the trimmings. If they come up with a good reason for her to be fully-crewed, I won't object, of course; I welcome such innovations.
Well, I suggest reading Eleventh Century Remnant's stuff anyway, because it's well in line with the quality of EU stuff that is itself worth reading- though I have low standards, so take that with a grain of salt.
Who/what is Eleventh Century Remnant, and where can I find that stuff?
If you want to write capital ship battles, I think that ECR's stuff becomes required reading, much as you shouldn't be allowed to write Star Wars dogfights without reading the Rogue Squadron series.
Roger-roger. Where can I find it?
Why?
I mean, you can write GREAT adventures where the PCs think they're screwed, they're outgunned, they're scrambling to save what they can and find a way to survive... and then the NPCs they'd dismissed as useless idiots have a change of heart and come storming in to back them up. Well, you can if you do it right.
Sure, that's a thought. But by the time Fey'lya would, on his own, come around to realizing he does need the Jedi, he'd be too late to send much help, since the Core Worlds would be under siege and he'd need most of his remaining military to protect it. If they convince him to come around earlier, well, that's a perfectly valid way to resolve the situation; as is staging a coup d'etat to remove him and the inner council and install the person the Senate elects, and as is going around him by going to all the worlds they can think of and recruiting a war-fleet of their own.
It's up to them how to solve it. Persuading Borsk Fey'lya to give up his current, destructive course of action, is one of them.
What I don't understand:
Why do you keep talking about the way this Will Be? It sounds as if you aren't really interested in advice...
I'm not interested in people taking the pre-sets that I've already made and saying "this is no good," I'm interested in advice of "okay, here's how to make this work better."
I'm sorry, I may not have been clear on that when I started. Taking the plot that's already in motion and telling me it's no good would be like telling Michealangelo to scrap David half-way through. Even if I thought your arguments against the plots I've set in motion were right (I don't,) to rectify the situation I'd have to tell all of my players the game is over and start from step 1 again.
The opportunity cost of revising the plot points that are so widely disliked is too high to change those things. That wasn't what I was asking for, I was asking for stuff like "okay, you've decided Borsk is a libertarian. Here, here, and here are ways you can play that up reasonably and sensibly while still putting him at cross-purposes with the players," and "okay, this guy is impersonating Darth Vader. Here, here, and here, are probable steps he could take towards becoming the Emperor of the Imperial Remnant and expanding it," and "okay, you've decided that Zann is back. Have you considered how he's going to expand his power base from frozen men? Here's what a sociopath of his stature could do in this kind of situation..."
Thanas wrote:Also, the fact that despite repeated showings of why this is a bad idea, you have even refused to change the non-essential ubership detail really shows that you did not want to receive advice at all, but rather to just list stuff and expect us to praise it.
You assume it's non-essential. I
disagree. I think it's
very essential.
Your plot makes less sense than one of Karen Traviss novels. And that is quite an achievement in itself.
How does it not make sense? The third Red Guard decides not to die like a chump but that he's going to make his own bid for Emperor, and Tyber Zann returns to take over the galaxy. That's perfectly sensible, inasmuch as
anything in Star Wars makes sense!
Gor, you guys would have, if consulted in the 70s, advised Lucas that the bad guys don't need these ridiculous "death star" things when the resources which go into making one could have been more efficiently spent on making more Star Destroyers, wouldn't you?!
Sheridan wrote:ShadowDragon8685 wrote:I think you guys are conflating Tyber Zann and Darth Oster. They're different people; this is going to be a three-way throw-down. <snip>
Crud. Sorry, I
was doing that.
No worries.
Simon_Jester wrote:<snip> So I think it might be smarter to do something like what Vehrec suggests: find Zann another supership, such as a Malevolence-class type from the Clone War era. Superships in and of themselves, even ones with a devastating spinal mount weapon like Eclipse or Malevolence are not implausible. The Eclipse, specifically... kind of is. To make matters more interesting, a Clone Wars-era dreadnought will have the infrastructure for a droid-heavy crew. Which reduces the trained manpower problem Zann faces, and creates problems for boarding Jedi if the defenders are clever and play games with the atmosphere and such.
<snip>
So have Fey'lya come to his senses and remobilize the fleet, refit the ships, and so on. Fake Vader manages to steal some, and Zann has an exponentially growing number of droid warships of his own, but at least the New Republic is actually responding intelligently to a threat for once. Even so, they're still in danger of being overwhelmed, so the heroes still get to feel overwhelmed. Imagine they feel great because half a dozen rebel ISD-weight ships appear to support them... only to find their enemies throwing two dozen at them.
This is actually a really good idea. I'd expand on it by throwing the galaxy into war again, with both (all three? all four? all seventeen?; fuck it, just Balkanize the whole galaxy) sides scrambling for more ships, more territory, more manpower, etc.
This is what's essentially going to happen, but I'm starting the New Republic off in a seriously tight spot. They'll have to go to the Mon Calamari, hat-in-hand, to get their warships back, and even then they're going to be stuffed; enter the players. If nessessary, they could capture Kuat and/or Fondor and seize the starships under construction above them. Though they're staunchly Imperial worlds, they're in the frigging middle of the New Republic, far away from either Tyber Zann or the rest of the Remnant. It would constitute a violation of the Gavisrom-Pellalon treaties, but by the time it gets this desperate that document will be worth the flimsiplast it's written on. They'd also need to seriously amp-up construction underway at Mon Calamari while at the same time amping up the defenses at MonCal, since they'd be in striking range of both Zann
and the Empire. They'd need to source back all the sold-off surplussed starfighters, and go around to regional powers, hat-in-hand, for more help; like the Naboo, even the Hutts (who would certainly be willing to back anyone willing to kick Tyber Zann's teeth in.) They do have a bit of a leg-up in that I've wrote-in a custom race which hid in a state of paranoid military build-up for three hundred years, acting on a three-hundred year old prophecy, so they can secure a lot of military aid there. (I wrote them as an example of a custom race, basically combining a lot of the Draenei, egalistarianism, and the video game Dead Space, but the players loved them and now I have one player playing a space goat with a lightsaber.)
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:<snip> Given that it [the Lusankya] will have been mothballed with a bare skeleton crew and a mere one X-Wing squadron to protect itself and the starship mothball yard it was stuck in, yes. The place was preferring security through obscurity, but that's going to fail, obviously. Lusankya's no longer a flagship of anything; Borsk mothballed it. <snip>
This actually kinda stretches my credulity. You want the ship mothballed? Sure, I can see that (if Fey'lya's opinions on the military run to this sort of thing: I've never really seen his personality that way, but I've never seen evidence to the contrary either [note: my knowledge of the EU is very limited]). However, having
one freaking X-wing squadron running CSP for the place is not likely. There's gonna be
at least an ISD-II commanded taskforce guarding the place, since the ships (even disabled) are going to be
extremely valuable to any number of powers.
I don't think an entire task force, though just one squadron is probably too little. Maybe one fully-crewed
Nebula-class Star Destroyer per depot, and if you assume each depot has five or ten ships in the middle of nowhere... Well, it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for Oster to bring along three star destroyers, overpower the Nebula by leading with TIE defenders, and then quickly board and seize the mothballed vessels, especally if he brings support vessels with lots of crew ready to board the other ships which are going to exit hyperspace ten minutes after the first wave.
This actually ties in really well with the idea of finding an old CIS shipyard/droid manufacturing facility out in the middle of nowhere. If they can reproduce themselves (and, remember, it's primarily a social stigma against droid/AI-driven militaries in Star Wars, not a technological one), then they should have some way to alter the designs to correct for noted flaws. While this may not overlap into making new designs, it wouldn't cause my suspension of disbelief to burst a leaf spring thinking that new designs could be created either. Figure that instead of keeping the Eclipse, he instead kept a complete technical readout. Incorporating that into an already-existing design, while not being a trivial excersize, is also not completely out of hand.
While you've got a point, I should point out that Tyber Zann's ownership of battle droid technology is primarily because he has the plans to fabricate an automated Destroyer 2.0 plant, not because he's found an old Confederacy shipyard. I mean, it's possible he could do so, but it would have had to have been
very secret for Palpatine not to know about it... It's also not impossible he could have kept a read-out of
Eclipse and could incorporate and fashion it's superlaser if he found a shipyard capable of producing
Malevolance-class Star Dreadnoughts...
Actually, that
would be like him - he's very fond of dual axial weapons. Use the super-ion-cannon to bring down a ship's or planet's shields and then follow up with a blast from the Eclipse-class superlaser.
It wouldn't be impossible, especially if he set up the auto-factory
before going into deep-sleep. But that still begs the question of how he found the auto-factory and all. Plus, being in deep sleep at a location where there's something of interest is a bigger risk than buggering off to the middle of nowhere... Still, that's
not a bad idea. I just don't like it that much because I like having a picture to show my players. With Oster, it's easy; just use a picture of Vader, and there's pictures of Tyber Zann. They've all seen SSDs, and even with Eclipse or Malevolance, I could link them to the wookiepedia entry..... But it's not a bad idea at that.
Simon_Jester wrote:<snip> I'm not sure you understood me. The point is that you can make Zann a dangerous enemy without having the PCs come face to face with him and demolish him with their Force powers. His minions are dangerous, his battledroids are dangerous (because you can reasonably make battledroids superhuman in strength and firepower), and so on.
It's the minions that are the threat, not Zann himself. If they ever even interact with Zann, it's over a commlink in another star system; he doesn't want to get near this bunch of Jedi super-commandos. <snip>
This, right here, is one of the best pieces of advice for making villains great. Think about, for example, Bond movies. Does the leader of S.P.E.C.T.E.R. have any martial arts skills or super-sniper talents? No, he's just smart enough to get the right people to work for him in convoluted plots that are difficult to unravel (well, not so difficult, but you get my point).
No, and it does, I admit, make for a cool Bond movie when Bond just corners him and the bad guy launches into some speech and Bond just shoots him.
Not for a good RPG, though. In a game, you want the big bad to stand up and let you beat the holy fuckwads out of him. Even at the end, with his armies materially beaten and his cause hopeless, it doesn't feel right if he doesn't say "Fuck this and fuck you, if I go down, I'm taking you with me," pull out a lightsaber, and go totally crazy-shit on your ass.
Think about RotS, which was more climactic; the battle with Palpatine, or when Obi-Wan just pulled a blaster to him and gunned Grevious down. Grevious went down like a chump, like sword guy from Indiana Jones, which made him a bad final battle. Phantom Menace had the fight with Maul, AotC had the brawl with Dooku, RotS had the fight with Palpatine (several of them.) ANH had the starfighter battle with the Death Star, ESB had the battle with Vader, and RotJ had the fight with Vader/Palps
and the Death Star run at the same time.
It's not very epic if you beat down the bad guy's lieutenants, corner him, and he dies like a punk. Just like SLJ didn't want Mace Windu to die like a punk, it's unsatisfying for the players if the bad guy they fight so hard just to
get to simply dies like a punk.
The K.I.S.S. principle is one of the best to apply to any game. The less crap that you have to explain in order to keep the story moving, the better. Most folks (myself included) will accept something that looks plausible on the surface, even if the logic underneath is not entirely correct--as long as we don't have to think about it. The less that you have to handwave in order to make things work, the less your players will have to work to understand things, and the better your game will be.
I agree, but KISS has to be balanced by the Rule of Cool. If it won't be cool to go through it, there was no point in having it.
Tiriol wrote:I don't know how well a military dismantling fits Fey'lya, actually: it was during his tenure that the New Republic military started to receive new, updated warships outside MonCal cruisers and some Rebel-based designs (new Star Defenders etc.). His major weakness was that he was unwilling to engage that force and when he did, he mostly protected the Core Worlds (and the Bothan Space) against the Yuuzhan Vong (although arguably there might be a good reason for that: if the New Republic military was in enough a bad shape, like during the Camaasi Document crisis, they couldn't afford thinning their forces too much).
As of right now, there's no apparent military threat to the New Republic. Everything seems to be safe; in Borsk's mind, this seems to be precisely the time to shed old deadweight and build newer, updated, more efficient warships. That's exactly what he's planning; he hasn't halted military procurement at all, he's simply cut out the old and, in his mind, money-sinkish Mon Cal designs and the Imperial designs to focus on entirely Republican designs like the New Class stuff.
yourself. You sound like you need a good self-pleasure session, anyway.
s who just want to rag on me can go 