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<     Episode 2558: Off-by-One Error

Episode 2558: Off-by-One Error

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Teleportation is a classic power in both fantasy and science fiction. In games, it often comes with dire potential for mishaps, to partly offset the enormously potent advantages it offers. This can manifest in the possibility of arrival targeting errors, which get worse with exertions like longer range or greater mass teleported or (as here) familiarity with the target zone.

The thing is, if you generate arrival error directions randomly, almost all errors in arrival position will be fatal. Assuming flat ground, virtually 50% of them will have you arrive partly or wholly embedded in the ground. And the other 50% will have you arrive some distance above the ground. It's only if the distance error is fairly small (a few metres or less) that you'll have any realistic chance of surviving the resulting fall. The odds of a random direction landing you exactly on the surface are vanishingly small.

If you want to avoid this you need to skew the randomness and produce an effect that shifts your arrival some distance, but also keeps you landing safely on the surface. Which many games actually do, for practical purposes, to make teleporting anything other than an instant death sentence.

Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)

..... Or Force Teleporting could be a thing as well! Teleporting and falling down only a bit is a pretty classic visual. And since we're moving on from the fighting for the moment, a small bit of levity does seem appropriate. The clowns, I mean droids, are hardly in the scenes at the moment, so they can't provide any commentary or funny actions. Rey and Finn are having an odd reunion of some kind with Poe in the background. So that just leaves Luke as the option even if he's meant to be the mostly dignified old mentor. "Mostly" is doing a fair bit of work there.

Luke's gonna have problems doing anything else now though, since he left the X-wing behind. Where is he gonna teleport to from here? Back to Tatooine? Owen and Beru's place is probably buried in sand by this point. That could be a good story moment though. Luke reflecting on his life while staring at the burnt out and half-sand-buried ruins of his childhood home pair nicely with the scenes we've had so far. Assuming the story about starting an academy is accurate on that point with Kylo anyway.

Transcript

GM: So where are you teleporting to?
Luke: Around the back of the bunker to meet everyone.
GM: You only glimpsed it briefly as you arrived. That’s a -6 familiarity penalty.
Luke: And if I fail the roll?
GM: You arrive off-target, exponentially greater distances the larger the failure. Potentially inside solid rock.
Luke: Mmm. I want somewhere I’m really familiar with. Are there range modifiers?
GM: No, just familiarity.
Luke: I go to my lunch spot on Ahch-To. I’ve spent thousands of hours there.
GM: That’s thousands of light years away!
Luke: No range modifiers! Ooh... dang. Missed it by 1.
GM: You arrive... <roll>... 25 centimetres above your target.
[SFX]: thud! {Luke, in a sitting pose, falls onto the rock platform outside the Jedi cave on Ahch-To}
Luke: Oof! Remind me to put a pillow on this rock.


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Published: Tuesday, 17 December, 2024; 01:11:15 PST.
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