One of the periodic thoughts that I have is about how easily my brain comes up with random shit from its inputs that often is some kind of amusing. That tends to remind me that as a child, I was often bored and had to entertain myself for hours at a time. Recently, that train of thought made me recall one of my favorite past times from that stage in my childhood: designing Jedi traps!
It’s a great problem, it works like this: your goal is to kill the Jedi in the trap but they are a bloody space wizard with a laser sword, so they can do just about anything! Literally, you’re trying to stop someone who can do nigh anything.
Let’s say you drop a Jedi through a trap door. Okay, let’s put shooters to storm him, a dozen blasters! Well, between a lightsaber and the force that won’t work for long. The Jedi could deflect the blaster bolts back at them, go melee with their saber, even knock them over with the force or fling lightning bolts until we run out of cannon fodder.
Okay, let’s make it turrets that are remote controlled! But the Jedi could deflect bolts, so let’s put shield generators to protect the turrets. But what if they rip the cameras off the walls with the force? Okay, if the shields can’t guard agains that then we make the turrets automated – blast anything and everything ahead of them.
But, what if the Jedi just keeps deflecting blaster bolts until the shield fails? We can make redundancies, we can make multiple turret systems. We can solve that!
Alright, damn it, the Jedi will just do some foolish shit like cut a hole through the floor and escape. Okay, let’s put spike traps on the lower level and when they force magic themselves out of that deadly drop, we put dart throwers or more turrets to plunge them back into another more deadly trap.
And on and on it goes from the prospective that yes, that darn space wizard with their laser sword, I mean, that really cool Jedi with a lightsaber, can basically cheat their way out of anything that you can think up, but if you make the trap large enough and keep the pressure up, eventually the Jedi either escapes or they are overwhelmed by exhaustion or they just happen to make a mistake and get unlucky. May the force be with them.
Yeah, as a kid I was often really bored and often had to wait around for stuff or be dragged around as an extra bump on a log. The kind of mechanical, orderly problem solving type of thinking that designing Jedi traps calls for can also be pleasant for passing the time. It also has a fair bit of room for creativity, unless you just assume the Jedi will have a force vision of your trap and decide to hide in your closet to whack you over the head with a rubber hose instead of letting you turn them into a rat in a maze.
It was probably a good thing that my mom bought me a GameBoy Color at the pawn shop, lol.