If you're not gonna have to law on your side, you better have the public. And being able to tell in detail how you tried doing everything the proper way and were left with no choice helps a ton.
Also you might actually be successful with legitmate means or at least build a profile for the cause that will be useful for mobilizing people if it comes to more...
Bicycles don't even need drive throughs! The whole reason why cars "need" them is because they are huge and thus parking lots are huge and thus the walk from the car to the restaurant is inconvenient. Parking lots are roughly 16x as large per vehicles as a simple bicycle parking design. Which mean your average trip from the vehicle to the entrance is gonna four times as far than if the whole place was dedicated for bikes. with more advanced designs like two layer racks this ratio would grow even more.
On top of that, a place that's catering to bicycle traffic would inherently be set up on a more human scale and aim to serve fewer people, thus the space needed for customer vehicles would be even smaller. So you're likely be able to more or less park directly in front of the business anyway and just walk in, grab your takeout and hop back onto your bike at roughly the same effort as waiting in the drive through would be.
The real problem in this isn't the lack of bike-throughs but the limited number or restaurants that a reasonable number of people could bike without risking their lives.
One of the biggest pitfalls of Spirit Island is that the rulebook is a terrible teaching tool. The app is a significant improvement on that giving you a pretty indepth tutorial.
But if you can learn it in person or via TTS that's probably ideal.
Last year I had the extremely annoying situation that the Android version of Spirit Island required internet access to play anything beyond the demo version. I had bought a month's worth of pro access, started a game at the airport then mid transatlantic flight i was done and couldn't start another.
Other than that I'll echo that it's doable but cumbersome to play multiple spirits on a single screen.
When I started my current job I was I switched to cars because of this. While my home town was great in terms of PT and I had a bus stop next to the house, where I worked I would have had to walk 20 minutes - about as long as my complete car commute.
Then last summer I re-ran the numbers taking into account the advent of e-scooters. I could now get to work about as fast as by car but so much more comfortable. I absolutely loved it and reignited my love for PT.
I feel the ability to blast your own music is a weird consolation prize for having to drive.
I've listened to music on public transport for years and the difference between headphones and car speakers does not compensate for the difference between driving and riding.
Damn. Getting food brought to you anywhere on the train sounds dope! I'm Swiss and even we don't have that.
I heard his voice starting at "economies of scale". If you get past "articulated hypercar" then you must have never seen one of his videos.
Point 1: There's nothing inherently stopping you from starting with 13 warriors. They don't necessarily have to follow the player party. During part 1 your group of 13 warriors might split up to guard two or more parts of the town. This gives your player party one or two red shirts for that fight. It's probably more work for you to play those on top of the enemies but, you can...
Point 2: Nothing dictates that a "warrior" HAS to be a barbarian class melee fighter. If you say that your setting has all kinds of fighting styles and classes then it does.
Point 3: There's nothing saying that your players have to be ready for the adventure when it begins. Particularly if you fill the party up with higher level NPCs you could definitely give your players the same "arc" as the protagonist had. Starting inexperienced before growing into themselves and becoming an integral part of solving the problem. Might require some behind the scenes fudging of rolls until they catch.
Another idea would be to start ALL 13 characters somewhat underleveled and when a player character dies, they get one of the remaining ones to continue.
I’m always wary of basing campaigns around movies because there’s always the potential that the players will make radically different choices.
We're doing Lost Mines of Phandelver. Nothing is technically stopping us from just packing up our gear and heading down the coast for shits and giggles. I feel that part of playing a campaign is the commitment to try and follow the story at least in the general sense. And I think part of the allure of DMing is watching your group tackle a story in their own way - which may be very different from what you had imagined.
I've always hated clicking through the dialog options just to find the one that will move the plot along. For me, chatting up townspeople is like making me roll perception when the DM already knows there's nothing to find.
I'm already terrible at socializing with real people. Why would I spend my precious free time pretending to socialize with imaginary people?