OOC - Rancor Pit (OoC Chat)

[DM Vitkyng]

Hello all I find myself pulled here from the SWC forums. I will be looking at creating a character to join you all in the days ahead and am curious what kind of skills set exist among the remaining players? Do you need a healer, a meat shield, or pilot?

Welcome Xerralt,

Currently we have 
Shunna - forcewielder /pilot - force healing
Callie forecwielder/physical combat specialist/ tank
Ubi Sunt - pistols (short range combat specialist)/ mechanic (minor)/ tank

?? - healer/biotech/computer expert - character ready yet to be introduced 

..and then you.  That leaves you free to pretty much play what you want, my only request is no more force wielders for the time being. This is just before A A New Hope, fore wielders are not exactly commonplace.

[Shunna Maza]

WELCOME!!

To be clear, I'm a Jedi with the Pilot skill.  I doubt that I will put anything extra into specializing in piloting so if you want to make someone with extra Piloting feats or a Piloting Prestige Class then don't let me stop you.

[Callie]

Woo! Welcome! I kick ass. I believe that's in my class description somewhere.

[Xerralt]

Just an update while I work on the stacks of homework. I've got most of the idea figured out just need to get it all down on paper and submitted.

[Shunna Maza]

Has anyone seen, The Last Jedi, yet?  Since I don't care about spoilers, I've been looking online for reviews and I haven't heard very good things.  I've seen people comment that it's not that it's a bad film but they take crap all over the original characters and prequels.  Many characters who die are killed off with little thought in how important they were to fans.  Apparently one character in particular was just sucked out into space off camera and the viewer wouldn't even have noticed if it weren't for someone mentioning what happened.  For those of you who do care about spoilers, I don't want to say too much more other than they really turned Luke into someone unrecognizable from the original trilogy, which is really sad.

[Ubi Sunt]

I saw the movie.  I give it a B- on a personal scale and an A+ on making money scale. Maybe it's because i'm older or maybe it's because i'm sensitive but there is one thing the movie has that none of the others really ever did.  It induced real emotions at certain points for the viewer, me I'll  put the rest of my thoughts in a spoiler.

If you opened the spoiler than you must not care about spoilers! I left the theatre feeling let down story-wise of the movie.  I just didn't like where it was taken.  What I didn't like.  

1) The whole plot was terrible and unexplained.   Running from the Empire, cough, I mean First Order in real space?  Serious flaw here, my 5 year old can imagine a more enticing chase sequence.  How about a series of hyper-space jumps to get away, then there would be multiple locations to offer excitement.  Asteroid fields, nebulas, black holes, the Kessel run in 12 parsecs, anything else!  Actual tactics and thinking ahead would be nice. Star Wars is filled with diverse and interesting locales yet this entire movie revolved around a slow chase through empty space... The George Lucas films did chase scenes much better.  If you are a Star Wars fan you know what I mean.
2) The WW2 feel just didn't feel right here.  I liked the bombers and worn equipment look in the beginning but seriously, a society that can travel through hyperspace can come up with something better than ships that move at a snails pace and drop dumb bombs in a zero gravity environment...  Suspension of disbelief was lost here.
3) Casino idea was just terrible.  Just... such a waste of my time.  The Star Wars universe is filled with interesting places and people and yet we get to watch rich people gamble on Earth.  No imagination here.  I've seen slaves before, show us poor people.  I don't know if this was just a political talking point but it was put in the wrong film.
4) The whole story of Fin and what's her face getting to the casino world, dumb. I'm not going to waste anymore time with this.
5) Luke, Snoke, Yoda.  Luke was too funny.  They should've stopped while they were ahead, at the "Oh you feel the Force leaf bit." Snoke who? Exactly.  Who the fuck was this asshole?  Nobody knows yet Han Solo died because of him, Why???  Yoda is great and it was great seeing him on film again calling down thunder and lightning like a bad-ass but how much cooler would it have been for Luke to have been talking to Anakin or Obi-Wan all these years as well.  I wanted Luke to talk to Anakin more than anything, or maybe he could've appeared in the stoopid cave for Rey which, like Snoke, amounted to nothing.  Oh and how can she swim having been raised on a desert world?
6) Bad editing, Rey goes from leaving Ben having failed to bring him to the light side, an emotional moment, to blowing up tie fighters happy as fuck.  Scratched my head on that one.
It might seem like i'm nitpicking but this was the movie.

What I liked.
1) The Force Skyping between Rey and Ben.  That was cool and drove the movie further as well as each character.
2) Mark Hamill was amazing.  I didn't like a lot was done with Luke, but Mark Hamill was great.  His reaction to Rey kind-of reminded me of a spin on Yoda's reaction to him.  That continuity keeps a large story together, but I think I may be reading in to this one.
3) Fin getting a backbone, since Kylo Ren cut out his non-existent one.  I like Fin, I don't know why but I want to watch him turn into the man he's going to be.  It was nice to finally see him and Captain Phasma go at it.  
4) Leia.  She was good and in her own way she got others to be better and it was subtle, like a true master.  They toyed with our hearts with her but it was good.
5) Poe lighting shit up in an X-wing.  Need more of that... which they took away after the first bit

Overall, I want to give the series a chance.  This movie was a let down with a few highlights.  After watching The Last Jedi I have more of an appreciation for the effort GL put into the prequels.  This movie made JarJar Binks cool again.

[Shunna Maza]

You spoiled it for me...     Kidding.  I really don't care about spoilers.  

A lot of people are saying that there IS a political agenda in these films.  That the woman in charge wants to promote feminism and diversity.  The problem is, Star Wars has always had strong women and diversity.  I AM happy they finally decided to have a female force user take the lead as even in the prequels there were few shown to do much of anything.  (The exception is Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV show).  The fact they made Rey a Mary Sue is a little annoying and it does a disservice to the character that she struggles very little for all this power that is basically just handed to her.  So Rey, who has no force training, managed to overpower Kylo Ren in a mental contest and in a lightsaber battle, also knows as much about the Falcon as Solo and as you mentioned, she can even swim despite growing up on a desert planet!!     And from my understanding there is no time jump between the first and second film but she is still able to do over the top things with the force and win in a light saber battle against Snoke's guards with very little training!  So why do Jedi bother with training at all?  Apparently using a light saber is as easy and no more dangerous than using a staff.

One thing that you said that really jumped out at me is that even though Snoke is the m.f. reason for Han Solo dying they gave the fans no information about him.   If someone is going to be the reason for killing such an important character in Star Wars, we should know a little bit about them! 

[Ubi Sunt]

You spoiled it for me...     Kidding.  I really don't care about spoilers.  

A lot of people are saying that there IS a political agenda in these films.  That the woman in charge wants to promote feminism and diversity.  The problem is, Star Wars has always had strong women and diversity.  I AM happy they finally decided to have a female force user take the lead as even in the prequels there were few shown to do much of anything.  (The exception is Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV show).  The fact they made Rey a Mary Sue is a little annoying and it does a disservice to the character that she struggles very little for all this power that is basically just handed to her.  So Rey, who has no force training, managed to overpower Kylo Ren in a mental contest and in a lightsaber battle, also knows as much about the Falcon as Solo and as you mentioned, she can even swim despite growing up on a desert planet!!     And from my understanding there is no time jump between the first and second film but she is still able to do over the top things with the force and win in a light saber battle against Snoke's guards with very little training!  So why do Jedi bother with training at all?  Apparently using a light saber is as easy and no more dangerous than using a staff.

One thing that you said that really jumped out at me is that even though Snoke is the m.f. reason for Han Solo dying they gave the fans no information about him.   If someone is going to be the reason for killing such an important character in Star Wars, we should know a little bit about them! 

Gosh, we could talk for days about this movie. Lol. You have a pretty good assessment of Rey. I still love her, she reminds me of one of my daughters. Star Wars is such a great canvas for story telling and that is why this movie is so divisive.  I'm not really sure how to define this film but gut tells me I'm not happy with it. Maybe I'm not looking at it the way it was intended?

[Shunna Maza]

It seems, and this is only my opinion, that they know that half their audience are young people (Millennials) and this audience is just going to grow larger.  They also know that this younger audience have different attention spans than us older folks and they love flashy lights and things that go boom.  (Hey, I like that too but not at the expense of the story) So they want to finish all the older character's story arcs to make way for a younger generation.  I can understand this because the sudden death of Carry Fisher must have really threw them into chaos.  I'm sure they wondered how many more movies can Mark Hamill (66) and Harrison Ford (75) do before they (might) suddenly pass away too.  

Harrison Ford wanted Han Solo to die for a long time so I'm not too annoyed with his death scene but we miss out on seeing Luke do so much cool stuff by them killing him off.  They did show that Force Ghosts can now do a lot more than they use to so maybe they will let his ghost do some amazing feats.  They also had their chance to give Leia her tragic send off but instead the lady in charge told the writers that she wanted the audience to see Leia use her Force powers.  So they came up with the Mary Poppins/Supergirl scene.  So now what will they do?  Just hospitalize her for all of the last movie?  We don't know what additional footage she filmed so it's possible they will use that to finish her arc.  To me, if they wanted to kill Luke they should have waited until the 3rd movie and had Leia pass away in The Last Jedi.

[DM Vitkyng]

Too busy with work today to get a post done. Hoping tomorrow evening after work I shall have time.