Have you played any other Bethesda games, such as Oblivion or Skyrim? If so, you should be familiar with their formula.

Entirely as a matter of curiosity, who made the American Girl Doll shoes?

Then please answer with that, not with "as many as the story needs". Thanks.

as many as the story needs

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People have answered extensively about how Anakin, even as Vader, is still a drama queen at heart, and this is true. But you'll notice that a lot of times even Jedi will pose with their lightsaber before the fight starts. Examples include Obi-Wan's signature Soresu stance where he points two fingers forward, Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon/Yoda posing with their lightsabers next to their heads in the Ataru ready stance, the four Jedi masters posing with their lightsabers at the doorstep of the Chancellor's office, etc.

This is meant to intimidate the opponent into surrendering. After all, if one side can be persuaded to surrender, then no blood needs to be shed, and that's generally better for all parties involved.

So, basically, Vader's trying to scare his opponent into submission. If that doesn't work, that's fine as well, Vader's perfectly comfortable beating his opponent into submission too.

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the real reason is that rowling is not competent enough

Please scroll up to the stickied mod comment at the top of this thread and tell me what it says.

it's just Marvel Editorial

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Because the plot needs some kind of struggle

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COME ON, GUYS.

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Please remember to keep answers Watsonian. Further Doylist answers will incur a ban.

Fallout New Vegas, Ulysses's vendetta against the Courier.

A whole lot could be written about this, but the Sparknotes version is that about 200 years after the Great War, in which the US and China nuked the living shit out of each other, there was a community called the Divide, located in the western US, that managed to prosper in the post-war wasteland. The Divide had a person known as the Courier, who was responsible for bringing supplies to the settlement. Also, the Divide was located on/near a former US military base, which had nuclear missiles, but for some reason the base's nukes weren't launched during the Great War, so the nukes were still sitting in their silos at the Divide.

A guy named Ulysses came across the Divide, and he was impressed with how this community had managed to survive and even thrive in the post-war wasteland. He believed that the Divide could serve as a model for other settlements in the wasteland, and maybe he could even settle here in the future and turn it into his home.

One day, the Courier brought back a mysterious package, which unbeknownst to the Courier was actually a wireless radio transmitter broadcasting the codes to activate the nuclear warheads. The nukes blew up in their silos, completely devastating the settlement and turning the Divide into a blasted, radioactive wasteland. Ulysses was heartbroken at the loss of this place he could've called home, and blamed the Courier (despite the Courier having had no idea about the true nature of the package), and then went to great lengths to make the Courier's life hell.

From a Doylist perspective

Please don't do that, thanks, discussions are meant to be strictly Watsonian.

Also happy cake day.

Firstly, questions about real life are not allowed. Secondly, questions about real world religions are not allowed. Thirdly, questions that are open-ended hypotheticals are not allowed, they should go on r/whatiffiction. Please take a moment to look over our rules, thanks.

This war in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said, “I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style,” a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant Galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the VI’hurgs, resplendent in his black jeweled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G’Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapor, and at that very moment the words I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the VI’Hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually, of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy—now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years, the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across—which happened to be the Earth—where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.

“It’s just life,” they say.

So I play this MUD. (For the young'uns among us, MUD stands for multi-user dungeon, and it's basically a text-based MMO.) The MUD has a main town, and there's a main shop in the main town, where most players will go to sell their loot. The shop has a shopkeeper, and if the shopkeeper isn't there, then people can't sell their stuff or buy things, so generally speaking you want the shopkeeper to be there. This shopkeeper is an NPC mob like any other, but to make sure that players don't kill the shopkeeper (whether accidentally or deliberately), it's coded to have vastly inflated HP and damage values, thereby ensuring that players who attack it will almost certainly die.

However, as the MUD grew and developed, players became stronger, new powers and items were introduced to the game, and the playerbase learned new ways to exploit the game's mechanics. Every now and then someone would figure out a new way to kill the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper does huge damage? Well there's this new item/power that allows several consecutive rounds of invincibility for the player, so players who stack this item/power will be able to tank the damage. The shopkeeper has high armor values? Well there's this new poison power that bypasses armor and attacks a mob's HP directly. The shopkeeper has a huge HP pool? Well a new item was added to prevent mobs from regenerating their HP out of combat, so a player could gradually whittle down the shopkeeper's health over a long period of time.

Every time the shopkeeper died again (which was exceedingly rare, like once every 5-10 years) the MUD's main coder would upgrade the shopkeeper again, as well as kick the offending player's ass. And then we'd wait a few years more before we heard of another player succeeding at killing the shopkeeper again.

I think the coder could've easily coded the shopkeeper to be unkillable, for example by making it bypass the invincibility powers/items, or having it simply stop combat whenever it was attacked, but the coder never did. My personal theory is that the guy derived a perverse pleasure from 1) seeing the shopkeeper kill unwary newbies, 2) seeing people come up with new strategies to kill the shopkeeper, and 3) punishing the players who did come up with new strategies to kill the shopkeeper.

For a hypothetical question as open-ended as this, r/whatiffiction would be a better place to ask, thanks.

Oooh, thanks!

Although, now that you mention it, how did you write that?

Regarding spoilers:

We have a six month spoiler policy on this subreddit, during which unhidden spoilers are not allowed. However, the fact that Vision bought land was revealed in Wandavision, which was released in 2021, so we are well outside the spoiler deadline regarding Vision buying land. Nonetheless, I understand it's possible that people will want to talk about events in Visionquest (I haven't seen it yet, so I don't know if the fact that Vision bought land is related to anything in Visionquest), so I've preemptively marked this thread as having spoilers. If anyone wants to discuss the events in Visionquest, I would ask that you use Reddit's spoiler formatting liberally: Enclose your spoilers in > ! and ! < symbols, just take out the spaces.

He was being useful by keeping Cinder occupied.

Granted, she was 100% toying with him just for her own amusement, but then again a Cinder who's toying with Jaune is a Cinder who's not killing everyone else.

I'd personally say play them in release order, starting with FO1 and 2 if you can stomach them, because this will give you the best intro to the games and universe. Each game introduces new elements to the story and lore, so having them unveiled to you in the order the devs released them would be the intended way to experience them. But if the dated visuals and isometric turn-based gameplay of the earlier games aren't your cup of tea (and there's nothing wrong with that, we all have our subjective preferences) then you can jump straight to FO3, FNV, and then FO4. The games share a universe but generally speaking each game's storyline is sufficiently self-contained, so at worst you'll miss some references to earlier games, such as returning characters.

As for hours, this is hard to quantify because FO3, FNV, and FO4 are open-world games where you're expected to spend a lot of time wandering, exploring, doing side quests, etc. If you just focus on the main storylines, you could probably run through each of these games in 20-30 hours, maybe less. But if you really take the time to explore their game worlds, your playtime will easily hit triple digit hours. Also, FNV and FO4 feature branching storylines in their main quests, so if you want to see everything you'll need to do multiple playthroughs.

The OOP in this one has a few good zingers. TW: SA

Because the editors

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This is probably my favorite wholesome story on this subreddit:

My (53F) ex-husband's daughter announced she's getting married. What should I do with their family's heirloom ring?

In Legends, dianogas are actually an invasive species spread by spaceships.

A dianoga is one of those tentacled aquatic creatures that Luke, Leia, and Han encountered in the Death Star's trash compactor, the one with an eye stalk that can pop up through the surface of the water. The dianoga's larval form is microscopic in size, which means it can easily hitch a ride in any moisture found on a spaceship. Once the ship reaches its destination, the dianoga can then look for a suitable aquatic habitat to dwell in, such as a swamp or sewer (or, if the ship is big enough to have a suitable wet environment, like the Death Star, the dianoga will just stay aboard).

So, basically, yeah the scenario you're suggesting, of a species hitching a ride on a spaceship to a new environment on a different planet, has happened and does happen in the Legends continuity.

Plus, in the second game XCOM's fighting a guerilla war against the aliens. Yes, the aliens out-gun and out-tech XCOM (for the most part, anyway), but XCOM is capable of out-sneaking the aliens and striking at key vulnerabilities.