The Mighty Ducks (Part 1)
Added 2022-06-16 07:41:55 +0000 UTCI have long been a fan of the episodes with a lot of people in them for what they can bring to the story, the sheer number of different ideas and impulses at the table brings a real richness. But they're also a technical nightmare, so I avoid them unless I really can't resist their appeal. I would not have thought to go big cast for a movie like Mighty Ducks, but Joz's instinct was spot-on in that we got a reproduction of the madcap feel of ensemble kids comedies of the 90s.
Sports movies are a unique challenge. I think this is the first one we've done. In a certain sense they're pretty natural to our show, there is a distinct physical challenge which is intimately tied in to the plot and characters. However, there is the challenge of how to run the actual games. Fully running them in GURPS would take literal years (GURPS combat turns take 1 second each.) Even if you reduced each full play to a single roll, there's just too many plays in a game to go that route. My first instinct would be to just make each game a single quick contest of sports skill. Which would be fine for a movie in which a hockey game happened incidentally, but unsatisfying for a sports movie where the events of the actual game are too narratively important to elide. Clearly, some kind of in-between is needed. And Joz and Tim put the leg work in to come up with their homebrew hockey system which I think works pretty elegantly. I hope it's as fun to hear as it was to play.
