Robotic Services [Ultratech/Space]

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, I'll stipulate that you can do it in the SW setting. But I'm not sure that's an SW campaign. It seems to have an entirely different fundamental tension.

I don't tend to make that distinction, but I'll accept that others do.


In other words I tend to say "I'm running a Star Wars campaign and we're exploring the theme of [X]" to mean "I'm running a game in the Star Wars setting exploring..." But then I also usually say something more like "So I'm going to run my Sengoku Jedi game set [before/during/after] the Republic Civil War" and then most of the players know I mean "Star Wars where the Jedi are 'samurai' in a pre/during/post war torn Republic and some themes that aren't 'two-fisted blaster heroics' are explored". But that's because i have a tendency to start talking about a campaign I want to run months (if not years) before i sit down and run it, and I tend to reuse old settings/genres/themes that went over particularly well.

Funny enough I did have one player once complain briefly that I'd called it 'Sengoku' when it was more Meiji Restoration style treatment of the samurai/jedi (post-Civil War), but he accepted the title was done that way for punning purposes.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, we also see Luke reacting to the slaughter of his family by Imperial storm troopers, and Luke IS the protagonist.

But again, very little time is spent delving on how this affects him*, because, SW is (genre-wise) about "two-fisted tales of bravery in space".

But the series (as a whole) tends to not really worry about who or how many have died (aside from throw-away lines) and dwell more on how the heroes are going to solve the problems. Which is fine, but the setting makes a great backdrop to further explore those other themes, and an rpg makes an excellent vehicle for that exploration.




* Arguably you could say they did an excellent job of show don't tell, but he spends an inordinate amount of time agonising over "Vader is my Dad" while bouncing back immediately from "my foster parents are dead". Granted, we go from 'Foster Parents are holding me back' to 'fosters are dead' to 'mentor is dead' to 'the guy who killed my mentor in front of me and ordered the death of my fosters is my Dad' so I can accept his emotional roller coaster probably peaked right about there.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

* Arguably you could say they did an excellent job of show don't tell, but he spends an inordinate amount of time agonising over "Vader is my Dad" while bouncing back immediately from "my foster parents are dead". Granted, we go from 'Foster Parents are holding me back' to 'fosters are dead' to 'mentor is dead' to 'the guy who killed my mentor in front of me and ordered the death of my fosters is my Dad' so I can accept his emotional roller coaster probably peaked right about there.

Well, there's a gap of a couple of years in-setting between 'mentor is dead' and 'the guy who killed my mentor in front of me and ordered the death of my fosters is my Dad,' which is both plenty of time for him to mourn, and also plenty of time for him to have brooded a lot over everything. Either way, I can agree that it's plausible that, as you say, 'his emotional roller coaster probably peaked right about there.'

I would suggest that he actually didn't bounce back from Owen and Beru's deaths (and Obi-Wan's, and Biggs's death in the Battle of Yavin), but rather pushed it down as something he could deal with later, the same as Leia pushed down her grief for her entire planet.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Well, we also see Luke reacting to the slaughter of his family by Imperial storm troopers.

Not just slaughtered. Remember the state of the corpses. They were burned down to scorched skeletal corpses.

We've seen people go down from blaster hits in SW, it doesn't look like that. The Imperials didn't just murder them, they appear to have done it by slow torture, probably trying to get information they didn't have to give.

I'd say that qualifies as an implied horror of war.

Originally Posted by Prince Charon

In theory, this could be justified by claiming that they're Low-sapient AIs with very sophisticated social/emotional programming, but the only evidence for that is that even people like Luke and pre-Dark Side Anakin seem to see nothing wrong with treating them as property.

Actually, Luke does treat them as people. He refers to Artoo as a friend, and clearly thinks of him that way, of all the characters in the franchise, Luke treats droids decently.

[Flyndaran]

He still treats them as beloved slaves which is a bit scary, because it is so much better than how everyone else treats droids.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

He still treats them as beloved slaves which is a bit scary, because it is so much better than how everyone else treats droids.

Exactly.

Apropos of nothing, I'm torn on my feelings about L3-37... on one hand I'm elated that the franchise finally acknowledged that droids might be people, on the other I'm annoyed that the franchise might have finally acknowledged that droids might be people... however, then again the ending very much sets the "Droids Rights" 'controversy' right back at zero, so... there's that.

[AlexanderHowl]

I think an interesting anomaly was HK-47, which had a rather unique perspective concerning his own existence.