see i know that we all like to make fun of luke skywalker, hick farmer from the back of nowhere, thinking that shooting womp rats with the space equivalent of his dad’s old rifle is somehow sufficient preparation for taking down the death star; but i love the idea that actually womp rats are six foot abominations of teeth, spines & poison and bulls-eyeing them is actually excellent preparation for the rebellion. think about it: swarms of six foot rats, and some skinny kid with an outdated weapon taking them out, cool as paint. hardened soldiers whisper scary stories to each other, about the monsters who scavenge in the sands, stripping a camp of everything living in five seconds flat, and luke just saying oh, womp rats? they’re nothing. great with a bit of butter and some toast.
REMEMBER THAT HE TOLD WEDGE, “THEY’RE NOTMUCH BIGGER THAN TWO METERS” LIKE THAT’S SOME MINOR INCONVENIENCE
BIGGER THAN TWO METERS
Wedge: So, you’ve been to Tatooine
Han: Yeah
Wedge: Womp rats?
Han: Sure. Chewie uses ‘em for bowcaster practice. Kinda gamey tasting. Sandy colored fur, lotsa teeth, little over two meters…
Wedge: Luke wasn’t lying???
Luke (head inside X-wing panel, tinkering): Why would I make THAT up?
Honestly, I’ve always thought that farm work on Tatooine, unintentionally, must have provided a fairly excellent groundwork in establishing Luke’s baby Jedi skills outside of an academy context.
There are of course the aforementioned womp rats, which are both terrifying and a fantastic way to develop shooting skills.
There’s beggar’s canyon for piloting. And if Phantom Menace brought us nothing else, it actually showed us the living death trap that is beggar’s canyon. He’s not like zipping around the Grand Canyon, he’s literally goofing off in a place that killed off a shit ton of professional pod racers. So needless to say, Luke’s had a chance to develop scary good reflexes, information processing, and spacial relation skills.
The Lars’s economic status means that they had to make do with ancient, crap equipment. Luke would have learned how to make incredibly fine tuned repairs, and keep shit going forever. And sure, he never built a C3PO or a pod racer, but honestly, if he found the materials to do it, he probably would have used them in a moisture collector.
And there’s even combat experience. From what we know about Tatooine, a farm like the Lars Homestead, would have been at risk for attacks by raiders, Jabba’s goons, and any of the terrifying hellbeasts that populate that planet. It’s not like Jedi temple training or anything. But Luke definitely learned to be cool under pressure, even when outnumbered or with really old, shit equipment.
I would just like to note that in The Old Republic MMORPG (set three thousand years before the movies) the womp rats are not only two meters long, covered in spines, with teeth as long as my hand, and sometimes DISEASED
BUT THEY ALSO ATTACK IN PACKS
You think you just pissed off ONE rodent as long as you are tall? Oh no. It’s calling ALL SIXTEEN OF ITS FRIENDS
AND THEY ARE ALL AIMING TO BITE YOUR CROTCH OFF.
*THAT’S* what Luke grew up sniping to keep them away from the droids and moisture vaporators. *THAT* (and Beggar’s Canyon) is what prepared him to take down the Death Star.
Womp rats are bad news.
My favorite thing is that they are just one example of how Luke doesn’t know he’s from a Death Planet until he leaves it.
i’m just going to reblog this so you can all enjoy the excellent commentary about my space son who is equal parts sunshine and tempered death
I appreciate this most of all, was hoping I’d find this when I got back! My favorite thing about rping stealth is when people are doing something sneaky or dark or worth taking note of, but never actually bother to emote looking around and trying to detect people.
I mean if you want to say you can passively detect everything around you 24/7 that’s your prerogative, but not mine. Meanwhile any time someone has bothered to emote looking for snoops, I’ve always whispered them telling them where they may sense things if they want to pursue it. Which has led to many fun rps, where people caught shely.
Then she faced consequences to it, which led to more rp. As opposed to waving my hand in the air and saying ‘nope you can’t see me’ which I find far less enjoyable. Still, thanks for thinking of me!
Is there a rule where you need to inform someone that you’re snooping? That’s a little extreme. Sure as shit, no one’s ever told me– and that’s fine. Look up the observer effect, no one is above it.
You’re one of my favorites, Shely– and I know you’ve been through those roleplays: being caught.
Come back to me bby I miss you.
Personally, if I do snoop – and I haven’t for about a year or so – I make it a combination of stealth, camouflage for that particular environment, and practical visual barriers (e.g.: a corner, the half-wall of a stairwell; hiding inside a bush, up a tree, &c.) Over-reliance on any one mechanic leads to a higher probability of failure.
If I see that an individual has shut the door, everything in that room is OOC knowledge and off-limits. However, many of those meetings are guarded, those guards – like all mooks – often talk to one another outside of that room either during or after the meeting… therefore, what they say, even if second-hand and possibly somewhat inaccurate, is IC knowledge. I know this seems like a silly thing to highlight, but you’d be amazed at the info slippage on this end – remember Ben Franklin’s adage: “Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”? Completely apropos.
Now, should I be cornered in a small room without cover, there would be a high likelihood of discovery. In this event, I’ve always rolled with it. If they call ‘spy,’ or I get a whisper, or anything of that sort, the jig’s up and I’ve got some explaining to do. For this reason, I rarely snooped inside – give yourself as many outs as possible.
Obviously, I wouldn’t go so far as to inform individuals as to the fact that espionage is being performed. It runs contrary to everything that espionage entails and just kills the fantasy (and the very real fact) that, yes, people snoop without others’ knowledge. Such is the nature of spy- & statecraft.
Those are just my 2¢.
Here’s the two cents from someone who RP’s one of the most un-sneaky guard mooks ever. (Seriously Mal is 9 feet tall, it takes a moderately sized hill to give him a cover save.)
There is one critical part of playing a character that is stealth based which people ignore, which just -grinds my nerves-. Stealth is a skill. While some people are naturally more gifted at it than others. Their body might be more appropriately sized or they might have some magic do-whats-it that muffles their aura. But its still a skill. Every standard tabletop roleplaying game recognizes this. In any system with dice (the common medium for probability generation) there is ALWAYS a chance of failure. Even if you’re the most stealthy silent ninja-assassin-rogue in existence, you can role a one.
You might be invisible, completely silent, and move like quicksilver. But there’s still a chance that there’s a slippery spot on that floor that you didn’t spot quick enough. Someone might open a door when you’re not expecting it. Hell, a seagull flying a hundred feet overhead could get a bit queasy and suddenly you have bird feces in your sniper rifle’s lense. There is always a chance of some quirk of fate or mistake on your part breaking your cover.
The point being, no matter how sneaky you are, there’s a chance you can get caught.
As a guard, I’ve often roleplayed in a way that there is both the outright stated methods of detection (my line of sight, where I’m standing, am I paying attention to a conversation or listening carefully, etc) and the hidden methods (tripwires, a magic rune, a conveniently placed banana peel hidden right behind a door). When I know that there is a sneaky person trying to do something nearby, I expect them to account for the former. If I know they are sneaking, I will OOC’ly inform them of the latter and then respect them enough to let them figure out their own success or failure against those hidden methods.
There is a mutual trust necessary for Guard and Stealth Rp.
The Guards have to trust and respect the Stealth roleplayers to treat their guarding efforts fairly. Likewise, the Stealth roleplayers have to give the Guards SOME chance to do their jobs. Often enough it simply comes down to a negotiated dice roll, because you can’t argue with it. You either succeed or fail. You can negotiate on how difficult the rolls are, but in the end someone succeeds and the other fails.
Roleplay for Stealth and Guards falls apart OOC when there is a mutual lack of trust and respect for both sides.
If you’re a guard, there’s a chance someone can slip under your notice. No defense is impregnable. If you’re a stealth character, there’s ALWAYS a chance of your plan going wrong. As roleplayers it is IMPERATIVE that we give those we roleplay with a chance, a choice, the ability to act and succeed or fail on their own merits. By simply assuming that you succeed you are by default the other parties ability to roleplay and have fun. This goes for both Guards and Stealth characters.
It’s more fun when we all play together, and not over each other.
As a rogue player who has been known to spy from time to time (though now I have my own spies to do things for me)…lights, line of sight, getting too close, afking in stupid areas, hunters, etc have all been factors when playing the specific way I play a rogue. Mal is correct in that stealth is a ‘skill’. It’s why the game allows you to see lower level rogues because they are not at max level and thus not max skill; not that being 110 should proclaim you as master of shadows, sometimes it’s fun to get caught as Shel said.
LOGIC.
I won’t go near lights, I always have something in front of me, I never move into a hunter’s line of sight until I know the radius is deep enough or approach from behind, I don’t follow /say or /emote range as I could hear you through walls and halfway across a field. Thinking logically when approaching your mark is part of the responsibility as the stealth player. Can’t hear through roof tops or stone buildings or re-enforced wood buildings BUT you could whisper who you think is the leader of that rp group and inquire if a window was left open or if it were logical to slip into a ‘rear window’ to overhear. You can’t hear from the water through a boat hull BUT if you somehow snuck past any guards and got close enough inside to have a visual it’s plausible.
Being stealthed but in logical distance and in a logical place to retrieve information is a legitimate means of spying.
I would never expect another rogue to reach out to me prior to the scene to ask if I’m okay with being spied on. If I’m stupid enough to talk openly about discreet matters then I should be caught or I could be purposely leaking them, but if I take those discreet matters inside a building or better yet inside my own private home, you better find a damn good reason why you somehow know said matters IC because I will call you out and have called out supposed spy players before for being dumb.
Use your head, think logically, don’t be an asshole when caught or called out and understand that if a group of people take it to party it’s because they’ve experienced shit behaviors from supposed spy players who feel they’re above reproach.
Remember communication and logic can get you pretty far as a spy roleplayer.
Reblogging with above information, which I believe is the correct way not to powerstealth. You can’t expect me to accept your knowledge from stealth if you didn’t act/rp as a stealthy person would. It’s not just some automatic perfect invisibility. Just like any in game mechanic or skill, stealth should be roleplayed out if you’re in character.
key characteristics: mysterious, self-destructive, charming, subversiveyou are capable of using charm, beauty, and wit to work for your own gain. you understand people’s desires easily and know how to use them. you may find yourself relying on others too often, and have difficulty extracting yourself from a situation once it has begun. you may one day find yourself accused of something unjustly, but if you take a moment to step back from the driving force within yourself you may avoid destruction. film recommendations: double indemnity, out of the past, murder, my sweet
When I was nine, possibly ten, an author came to our school to talk about writing. His name was Hugh Scott, and I doubt he’s known outside of Scotland. And even then I haven’t seen him on many shelves in recent years in Scotland either. But he wrote wonderfully creepy children’s stories, where the supernatural was scary, but it was the mundane that was truly terrifying. At least to little ten year old me. It was Scooby Doo meets Paranormal Activity with a bonny braw Scottish-ness to it that I’d never experienced before.
I remember him as a gangling man with a wiry beard that made him look older than he probably was, and he carried a leather bag filled with paper. He had a pen too that was shaped like a carrot, and he used it to scribble down notes between answering our (frankly disinterested) questions. We had no idea who he was you see, no one had made an effort to introduce us to his books. We were simply told one morning, ‘class 1b, there is an author here to talk to you about writing’, and this you see was our introduction to creative writing. We’d surpassed finger painting and macaroni collages. It was time to attempt Words That Were Untrue.
You could tell from the look on Mrs M’s face she thought it was a waste of time. I remember her sitting off to one side marking papers while this tall man sat down on our ridiculously short chairs, and tried to talk to us about what it meant to tell a story. She wasn’t big on telling stories, Mrs M. She was also one of the teachers who used to take my books away from me because they were “too complicated” for me, despite the fact that I was reading them with both interest and ease. When dad found out he hit the roof. It’s the one and only time he ever showed up to the school when it wasn’t parents night or the school play. After that she just left me alone, but she made it clear to my parents that she resented the fact that a ten year old used words like ‘ubiquitous’ in their essays. Presumably because she had to look it up.
Anyway, Mr Scott, was doing his best to talk to us while Mrs M made scoffing noises from her corner every so often, and you could just tell he was deflating faster than a bouncy castle at a knife sharpening party, so when he asked if any of us had any further questions and no one put their hand up I felt awful. I knew this was not only insulting but also humiliating, even if we were only little children. So I did the only thing I could think of, put my hand up and said “Why do you write?”
I’d always read about characters blinking owlishly, but I’d never actually seen it before. But that’s what he did, peering down at me from behind his wire rim spectacles and dragging tired fingers through his curly beard. I don’t think he expected anyone to ask why he wrote stories. What he wrote about, and where he got his ideas from maybe, and certainly why he wrote about ghosts and other creepy things, but probably not why do you write. And I think he thought perhaps he could have got away with “because it’s fun, and learning is fun, right kids?!”, but part of me will always remember the way the world shifted ever so slightly as it does when something important is about to happen, and this tall streak of a man looked down at me, narrowed his eyes in an assessing manner and said, “Because people told me not to, and words are important.”
I nodded, very seriously in the way children do, and knew this to be a truth. In my limited experience at that point, I knew certain people (with a sidelong glance to Mrs M who was in turn looking at me as though she’d just known it’d be me that type of question) didn’t like fiction. At least certain types of fiction. I knew for instance that Mrs M liked to read Pride and Prejudice on her lunch break but only because it was sensible fiction, about people that could conceivably be real. The idea that one could not relate to a character simply because they had pointy ears or a jet pack had never occurred to me, and the fact that it’s now twenty years later and people are still arguing about the validity of genre fiction is beyond me, but right there in that little moment, I knew something important had just transpired, with my teacher glaring at me, and this man who told stories to live beginning to smile. After that the audience turned into a two person conversation, with gradually more and more of my classmates joining in because suddenly it was fun. Mrs M was pissed and this bedraggled looking man who might have been Santa after some serious dieting, was starting to enjoy himself. As it turned out we had all of his books in our tiny corner library, and in the words of my friend Andrew “hey there’s a giant spider fighting a ghost on this cover! neat!” and the presentation devolved into chaos as we all began reading different books at once and asking questions about each one. “Does she live?”— “What about the talking trees” —“is the ghost evil?” —“can I go to the bathroom, Miss?” —“Wow neat, more spiders!”
After that we were supposed to sit down, quietly (glare glare) and write a short story to show what we had learned from listening to Mr Scott. I wont pretend I wrote anything remotely good, I was ten and all I could come up with was a story about a magic carrot that made you see words in the dark, but Mr Scott seemed to like it. In fact he seemed to like all of them, probably because they were done with such vibrant enthusiasm in defiance of the people who didn’t want us to.
The following year, when I’d moved into Mrs H’s class—the kind of woman that didn’t take away books from children who loved to read and let them write nonsense in the back of their journals provided they got all their work done—a letter arrived to the school, carefully wedged between several copies of a book which was unheard of at the time, by a new author known as J.K. Rowling. Mrs H remarked that it was strange that an author would send copies of books that weren’t even his to a school, but I knew why he’d done it. I knew before Mrs H even read the letter.
Because words are important. Words are magical. They’re powerful. And that power ought to be shared. There’s no petty rivalry between story tellers, although there’s plenty who try to insinuate it. There’s plenty who try to say some words are more valuable than others, that somehow their meaning is more important because of when it was written and by whom. Those are the same people who laud Shakespeare from the heavens but refuse to acknowledge that the quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them“ is a dick joke.
And although Mr Scott seems to have faded from public literary consumption, I still think about him. I think about his stories, I think about how he recommended another author and sent copies of her books because he knew our school was a puritan shithole that fought against the Wrong Type of Wordes and would never buy them into the library otherwise. But mostly I think about how he looked at a ten year old like an equal and told her words and important, and people will try to keep you from writing them—so write them anyway.
*sobs for like the umpteenth time this day and reblogs the fuck out of this*
out of all the posts on this site meant to help people get and keep the urge to write, i think this one speaks the most to me. because of all the voices saying your writing is dumb, one of the most insidious is the one in your own head.
i think i finally have something to fight back with now
“Why do you write?”
“Because people told me not to[.]”
Hugh Scott won the Whitbread Prize for “Why Weeps the Brogan?”
Amazon.co.uk has very little available from him, but making “Likely Stories” better known seems a good idea.
I’m certainly getting a copy for the workbook shelf…
It’s always a kick when @petermorwood reblogs something of mine, because my follower count jumps up by about 100 every time haha
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