OOTS #1217 - The Discussion Thread

[Ruck]

Pretty sure that's show only. Book!Daenerys seems to believe she's redistant to fire but she burns herself a few times. And she never contradicts Viserys' right to rule, she just ends up thinking he'd have made a terrible king.

She doesn't really contradict it in the show, either, but

Spoiler: does anyone still need GOT book 1 / season spoiled?

Show

After he gets his skull melted in

She says it, which, it's hard to argue with at that point.

[Worldsong]

Ah, Viserys. If there ever was a character who deserved everything that was coming to him it was him. Not only was he vile but he was just so incredibly stupid and self-destructive.

[Shirow]

So there are a lot of fantasy stories and settings and the hero/heroes might be in one of many scenarios.

Currently in power in a Monarchy and they are chosen ones of royal blood.
Currently in power in a non-Monarchy and they are the chosen ones of royal/special blood.

Not currently in power in a monarchy but they are chose ones of royal/special blood.
Not currently in a monarchy but they are chosen ones of royal/special blood.

Currently in power in a Monarchy and they are regular people.
Currently in power(office?) in a non-Monarchy and they are are regular people.

Not currently in power in a monarchy and they are are regular people.
Not currently in a monarchy and they are are regular people.

The Good King, a-la-Arthur is definitely one way to go when playing, and it seems easier to DM than for example the whole Dwarven Council from UD. I don't know about it being inherently funner. Simpler to grasp, perhaps. Both monarchies and republics have middle-management that can serve for a lot of intrigue if you want it. I guess I just dislike the idea of monarchy or empires as a must or a default in fantasy settings, game or otherwise. You can do lots of other interesting valid things.
(Not that it matters but I just noticed I usually never use them in my games, except as short lived rogue states.)

Maybe it is just that it's ALL I have personally been seeing lately on popular media and I am a bit(?) fed up with the trope.

[ijuinkun]

HPMOR specifically goes into a bit of a tangent about how a proper defence system should not include puzzles or challenges. It should require passwords and keys. In that sense Dumbledore still managed to achieve the minimum requirements by having the criteria for obtaining the Stone be the password 'I want to obtain the stone but I don't want to use it' but he fell for the much more common pitfall of picking a password that an outsider could accidentally guess.

It mostly worked with Quirrel because Voldemort is so selfishly stupid it hurts. Then again that kind of tied into the series's overarching moral that selfishness is bad for your mental faculties.

The way I read it is that the whole thing was basically a honey trap for Voldemort. The "trials" were all things that Voldemort was skilled at--chess, logic, Quidditch, etc. Dumbledore wanted Voldemort to get to the mirror, and then get stuck at the mirror for long enough that Dumbledore (with possible reinforcements) could catch up to him.

Harry Potters set in the UK, not US, and in one of the posher parts of the country. The only one in Hogwarts likely to have a gun licence is Hagrid, and he seems the type to keep it locked away till needed (ie not easy to steal)

The British Wizards appear to be appallingly ignorant of the most basic aspects of the Muggle World, to the point where in "Prisoner of Azkaban" the Daily Prophet, Wizarding Britain's most prominent newspaper, felt that they needed to describe for their readers what a "gun" even was. Even Arthur Weasely, a government official whose literal job description is to study Wizard-enchanted Muggle technology, can't get the word "firearms" correct--he calls them "firelegs". I seriously doubt that any Wizard not raised by Muggles even knows which end of a gun to hold onto.

It feels quite unlikely to me that, the moment the Falcon was detected, the imperials decided "Oh hell yea, let's use this ship to find the rebels' home base!" At that moment, there was no indication that the ship was rebel-affiliated. And, really, it wasn't. Luke just wanted to pork the pretty damsel in distress. Han just wanted the reward to pay off his debts to Jabba. There's Obi-Wan, but he's not really within the rebel alliance, he's doing his own thing of guiding Luke to become a jedi.

So, at what point was the plan to let them escape devised? He couldn't really know they were coming for the princess, until they freed her. And the only presence he was aware about, Obi-Wan's, wasn't actively out to go get the princess, he was off to sabotage the Death Star to enable the Falcon's escape.

After writing this, I've stumbled across a few more lines suggeting Vader might indeed have been planning a lot of this since their arrival... but... man. Tarquin would not approve of all these moving parts.

There's also the matter that Luke and Leia are his own son and daughter. As soon as Vader had any inkling of their identity as such, he would have had a high interest in capturing them alive, to the point that he would let them escape rather than killing them if capturing-without-killing seemed impossible at the time.