>>68509
arbitrary character limits suck bouncy balls. bncyball-kind I guess?

The seven gate thing sounds about right. but We have an Inverse session where you have to defeat the white king as a thing so if we feel like it we can just say the gates are glitched or that we have the gate patch.

"how the fuck can you play sburb without the gate patch?"

I think patches should become a thing for the sburb RPG...

>>68509
I typed it as bncyballkind initially. Throwing that out there.

>>68504
Ultimate weapons like the flourite and the crosshairs would be tier 5+ weapons, nigh unique and possibly requiring lengthy crafting shenanigans.

Portals would likely just teleport you to the next quest area after you build up to the first one. It's a GM sort of thing, really.

>>68513
There's a specific existent structure for the Gates either way. The first gate is above the house and leads to somewhere on the planet itself, the second leads to your server player's house, the third is above their house and leads to their planet, where the fourth leads to their server, and so on, until you get to the seventh far above your entry point which leads to your Denizen, which is the halfway boss fight of course.

Gates CAN malfunction. Just Sayain,

Okay so we have a basic gate structure, and we can assume that gates are generated by Sburb and therefore designed to take you where the game thinks you need to be.

We can also assume that players can alchemtize things like jet packs, jet boots, jet-fucking-unicycles... I'm partial to a jet-motorcycle myself but whatever. Anyway there's a lot of ways for players to get around and since sburb sessions are so inherently glitchy we can assume that gates can be all over the place they an be on your planet, they can be in the incipisphere they can be under-fucking-ground. It's all just a matter of what suits your session.

like mage said, GM thing. Personally I'd come up with an excuse for the kids to adventure together but that's just me.

so how long, in terms of fictional time should a session be? Months? weeks? years? days?

I'm leaning towards years.

Session length, ideally, is anywhere from weeks to months if you feel like being the little completion or are slow. Think of it as a 80 hour RPG that you live through. In Homestuck, the kids had a matter of days to get things rolling, or roughly a week, as their session had a rather nasty case of cancer. So, unless there's some complications, things should go smoothly for non-cancerous sessions.

I think. Its been a while and the cancer could just be a bomb designed to eliminate sessions that won't bear universal fruit. So, keep an eye out for a beat mesa equivalent.

>>68528
The Tumor is a bomb, which in the trolls' case was indeed seemingly made to destroy an unfruitful session, and which Meenah utilised to blow her team up so they wouldn't get scratched, being dead and in the dream bubbles; While in the kids' cancerous session it was actually designed to create the Green Sun. The cancer, on the other hand, seems to specifically relate to the Red Miles and Jack Noir.

>>68528
Actually, everything that happened before the Scratch took place in just a little more than 24 hours.

Karkat said his session took a month, and their session was basically a speed run. They made good time but skipped a lot of shit because they didn't care. Meenah's session took 3 years before they gave up but I think it was kind of implied that they spent most of that time trying and failing to advance past a certain point. A normal session probably takes a few months.

I don't think you guys should worry about the tumors when making a game like this because
a) it was stated that the tumor was an anomaly in the story
b) its presence dooms the session, because it is a bomb, so failure is a sure thing in a session containing a tumor
c) therefore the GM would have to be a huge player-killing asshole to put it in

Even if Homestuck relies on predetermination and time loops that isn't really feasible for a tabletop game. The players need to be able to make choices and introducing a game element that basically tells them that they can no longer win because the GM says so is not good.

>>68533
>>68531
Noted, a session should be anywhere from a few months to a year at maximum. Thanks for the quality posts by the way.
>>68527
Neat! have some Mok lips.
>>68528
Alright we've established session length, gates and just about everything else. It looks like we just need a logo, some clip art, and a bit of organization and some parsing. Also a confusion chart.

1: Use an Item on a target of your choice
2: Use an ability, GMs choice
3: Use an item, GMs choice
4:Attack an ally, GMs choice
5: Do nothing this round
6: Attack an enemy of your choice

Which I just provided you with. Discuss?

>>68533
Well had it not actually been the catalyst for the green sun, the kids' session would have managed it, albeit at the cost of its Derse dreamers. Its been a while since I've thoroughly read that part, but I seem to recall that Doc was lying about the Tumor and it's in every session in order to clear everything out after the Reckoning is over anyway. Might be wrong though.

>>68535
Doc Scratch only lies by omission, if he said directly that most sessions don't have tumors then... they don't have tumors. That's beside my point though. The point being that regardless of whether John's tumor was unique or if it's a feature of all failed sessions, it's not a feature that should be built into a tabletop RPG because that would be cheap and dumb.

>>68535
I doubt it. The Tumor is powered by the end of two universes and most sessions won't have two universes available to power what's essentially a cosmic garbage collector. The theory that had The Tumor filling that purpose was basically speculation on Rose's part before she was in a position to comprehend what they were really doing.

>>68537
>>68538
For the sake of ease we'll assume that only Total Party Kill GMs will place tumors in their games. (another thing that fits hussie's personality methinks.) So no tumors will appear in the Sburb Tabletop session. (unless your GM is a dick.) Thanks for the input by the way!

Is there anything else we need to cover?

God tier crunch maybe? So far we've cornered First Guardians, Denizens, Horrorterrors, and Quest Beds as sources of God Tier levels of power. Should we expand on that?

>>68538
Meenah was shown to have the Tumor, it set off a [relatively] much smaller explosion that killed her and her fellows.

>>68540
Forgot about godtiers. Too lazy to work on it just now though.

I believe I nailed down God Tier ascension as +2 to all three of your stats, successes on a roll are now 4, 5, and 6, and your Mythos Powers get cranked up to 11.

Now, I feel that the last part is a little vague and God Tiers have their own Echeladder like advancement too. Perhaps every rung you climb on your God Tier ladder, you get a reduction in MP costs for Powers along with extra dice and auto successes?

Oh god, Terezi Driving a Rocket-Car, what have you done Mage?

Okay successes for dice rolls become harder when you god tier? I'd assume you get better chances to overcome obstacles and what not, along with flight and other abilities. Please explain the 4, 5, 6 dealie to me Mage.


uhg anyway yeah God Tier abilities should be Alpha as fuck so we'll include Flight and One special ability for each aspect and one special ability for each class, they'll scale with your god tier rank. We'll throw in auto successes and Stat increases along the way.

I'm thinking 3 possible powers for each class and 3 possible powers for each aspect, you pick and choose. (or roll a d6.) sound doable?

>>68542
Most of the powers we've seen seem to not be actual abilities but game "features" like the gift of gab (which all players get once its unlocked). Perhaps every second level should reward plot points or something?

And another feature of Godtier. They can't permadie unless the players/GM decide the player was doing something particularly heroic or villainous when they died.

The Gift of gab was a joke and you know that as well as I do, Fer Shame. But each of the kids, upon assuming their God Tier role gets god tier powers, stat boosts, THE WINDY THING, TORNADO DRILLS, ALL THE LUCK, stuff like that.

I was thinking more along the lines of setting up what each class and aspect grant on hitting god tier and giving players a small selection of abilities so they can customize their character.

but yeah, Conditional Immortality is definetly a thing as far as god tier is concerned.

>>68545
the windy thing was always something john could do, and whether vriskas "all the luck" by stealing it from others was godtier or just something she could do is unclear. i didnt mean upon hitting godtier though, i mean the godtierS themselves.

Green you're being obtuse. Stop it. We can't really rely on the source material overly much since at least a good quarter of our source material consists of metafictional jokes.

God Tier means you get god level powers, John could always do the windy thing, whatever, it was there because Hussie needed something to put out that sea of fire and he chose to reveal John's powers sooner rather than later.

As has been said by numerous anons though this is a tabletop RPG not a wevcomic so we don't have the luxury of predestination or timeloops.

TL;DR
God Tiers should be treated like a class upgrade of sorts we hand out 2 powers and flight abilities and stat boosts and auto successes and have it all get sweeter with each God Tier run increase.

>>68543
In this game, we roll a pool of six-sided dice. Results of 5 and 6 are successes. If I roll five dice and I get a 2, 5, 1, 5, and a 6, I've got three successes and am a pretty lucky son of a gun. Dice pools are determined by taking your relevant stat and adding two or subtracting two depending on the retentive tags you or a scene might possess. This is day one stuff right here.

Hitting god tiers lets you count fours in addition to fives and sixes as successes. Lets you get big numbers right there.

God Tiers come with Conditional and Biological Immortality. If you'd die, you'd just respawn eventually. If your death is particularly heroic (Dying to save all your friends) or particularly just (Getting shown up and killed by a member of you particularly violent species). You also won't age to death.

Vriska's Thief of Light shenanigans also comes from the fact that she was likely mooching all the luck from her fellow players, saving it all up to fight Jack so she can at least be on par with him. But, as they say, luck is no match for skill and power and even the best luck runs out eventually.

The Gift of Gab abilities were just there as a narrative device, mostly to remove the pesterlogging and replace it with a dialoguelog as people were starting to get together and meet in person.

I thought it said the DM Set the Difficulty mage. 1, 2, and 3, being easy 4, being medium, 5, being hard, 6 being impossible. and that you'd have to have one of the die meet your success level.

Lets say ozz is repairing his pipboy after a battle, the GM sets the cap and four 4s so I have to roll four, 4s. That's the way I read it anyway, and it makes more sense to me to let a DM decide difficulty rather than slap a bunch of arbitrary restrictions in his lap.

Whatever.

Class and Aspect powers, are we doin' this or not?

>>68547
I mean the windy thing was a trait of his mythological role, not a result of godtiering. The sheer power to drill holes in the battlefield with it, perhaps. Similarly, Dave could always do the timey thing. What we've definitely seen about godtiers:
>They're basically immortal
>They all have some method of flight, though not necessarily efficient
>They get extra levels (which presumably function identically to echeladder ranks, boosting echeladder-dependent abilities)
>They are rewarded in achievements instead of boondollars (so they don't get boondollars just for reaching new godtiers, basically)
>Their normal Mythos-related abilities become insanely powerful to a point of qualifying for Taken to the Illogical Extreme (hence wind tornadoes, stealing not just some luck but AAAAAAAALL the luck, being able to guide and manipulate two entire sessions by riding flares off the green sun to eventual victory in a third session that should also have been doomed, manipulating time to the point of freezing opponents without even using a time machine...)
>Since they become their dream bodies, they can travel through dream bubbles lucidly and enter the dreams and afterlives of others at will
>All of this power (except whatever additional benefits or perks godtiers (the levels, not the players) bring) is immediate upon ascension

I think that sums up everything in a tidy package. I don't think by having John realise the potential of the Windy Thing pre-godtier Hussie was giving him an ability early, as nearly all characters have shown some mastery over their element before reaching godtier- Except Jade, whom I don't think ever influenced space directly, but then, we didn't see much of her in action after entering the Medium and before ascending.

Eh early is relative. I Gotta turn in for the night. Look just try and figure out some crunch that makes being God Tier WORTH the effort, the Immortality is fine but fighting the black king is pretty heroic. they need an edge, even iif it's an under the table edge. Make sure we have that edge!

>>68552
>lol guys so edgy
Go die in a fire. Not really.

Say, the godtiers continue affecting echeladder-dependent abilities, add one die per tier to each pool, and apply a multiplier to the effects of mythos-related abilities and fraymotifs (including joint fraymotifs with other players), which are rounded down, of 50% increments with a 200% boost in power after the character has ALL the levels? Sounds suitably ridiculously OP without being just easy as all fuck to attain. Number of godtiers is something to work out, unless you're actually powergaming itll probably be fairly lategame so say six levels. Then each godtier throw in your pick of the litter from potential fraymotifs, mythos abilities or aspect abilities or whatever, one of each until you've mastered them all, alongside your role's Godtier abilities, which I could chart up tomorrow if we need a chart but which would basically be the three (offence, defence and utility) methods of using your aspect that codify your class, taken to the extreme.

And if you go grimdark, you would lack conditional immortality and your powers would lean toward Prince of Void powers and not whatever your class actually is (this might have a caveat for additional offensive boosts for Prince and Void characters going grimdark that makes it worth taking over godtiers), if you apprentice to a creature you gain mythos abilities, fraymotifs and a flat 2x multiplier but don't get dice advantages of any kind or conditional immortality, and... Idk if I'm missing anything? Does that all sound in order?

>>68554
Technically, it's probably impossible for any other player to go grimdark, much less gain the same powers as Rose did.

For one, she was already unique due to her ability to channel the power of the Horrorterrors (or whatever that stuff even was). Going grimdark allowed her to tap further into that power. At the same time, it's important to remember that it was a corruption of her aspect, which instead gave her access to the powers of a Hero of Void (specifically the blackout). And then there is the matter of actually becoming grimdark. How does a player who is not a failed Seer of Light with access to Horrorterror magyyckz being guided by outside forces get their hands on a Cue Ball, figure out how to read it and know what exact question to ask?

I originally had another thought written down, but as I typed it out I realized that it was waaay to complicated to properly implement. So to make it easier on you guys while, my suggestion is that you use it as a special non-permanent aspect (Perhaps with a better name. Shade?) that you only can gain by "going grimdark", meaning you'll still keep your class while having access to the magyyckz. The amount you receive could be proportional to your class, meaning that a Sylph, Seer or Bard would gain less firepower than a Prince, Witch or Knight, but would instead gain access to stuff like unholy healing, eldritch knowledge or space/time/furthest ring fuckery (akin to Roxy's fenestrated planes).

The thing to remember is that grimdarkness was never meant to parallel or replace the god tiers. While we have only seen one case of it so far (and are unlikely to see another), grimdarkness is not only somewhat weaker than most offensive god tiers in terms of power, but it also doesn't make you immortal or give you access to your innate abilities. It's just a great boost in power that leaves you mad as hell and unable to communicate with others through speech. I think grimdarkness should be a non-permanent form that you lose upon dying and being revived as a dreamself or by ascending to the god tiers.

Just an idea.

>>68554
roflcopter 3deep5every2
>>68557
You know you can delete your own posts right? I mean fuck, when the sight when down I quintuple posted, no lie. I kept trying to feed my post in and the sight must've cached the command or sumthin 'cause I had to delete a whole bunch of my posts. Just click the box next to your post, scroll down all the way to the bottom the page and hit delete.

Anyway I've mentioned it in passing and I was tired and just wanted to sleep so I didn't bring it up but I think we should either co-opt the term grim dark, or make up a new one. The TermI'm looking for is "Corruption" wherein a malevolent entity, Like Doc scratch or the HorrorTerrors drives you nuts but grants you massive power. TRhis being a tabletop game I feel we should just treat it as a bunch of character classes (Like Blackguard or CancerMage in D&D) and maybe attach a humanity meter to a corrupted player. they run out of humanity points they go nuts and become an chaotic stupid NPC.

==>

Anyone Familair with Vampire the Masquerade would know how the corruption thing works.

anyway as Grimdark-Anon has pointed out the HorrorTerror's thing was very specific and we should instead exchange it for denizens, or first guardians or other cosmic entities that could grant all manner of powers. Hope could be corrupted from Righteousness into Pride and Vanity for instance. There are a lot of ways to make this work, we just take each of our current aspects, asign some corruption stats to them and let that serve as either an alternative to the god tier.

Remembe rnot everyone makes god tier, and not everyone will want to. Plenty of people like playing paladins, and plenty of them like playing blackguards.

Some people will want to evade the god tier thing entirely and go for a quick power boost and play the balancing game, others will take the slow road and get the more rewarding god tier.

We could work on other god tier alternatives but for the moment I think we should focus on god tiers and corruption

>>68555
Honestly, I think grimdarkness is a stupid idea, but it was suggested as an alternative to godtiering earlier. It's all part of Rose's "Edgy teen/Kid Punisher" theme, and didn't even figure in much plotwise- She was Grimdark for exactly long enough to get to the battlefield, babble incoherently at John and get killed. The whole thing was really a plot device to show she had suddenly attained the power of the Horrorterrors, make a big showy entrance then get beaten by the big bad in under a second to show just how big and bad he was even by comparison And incidentally in the process later show just how powerful Vriska was, that she would have had a fair chance to defeat Jack had she not been stopped by Terezi; Which is significant because it also shows that godtiering is MUCH more effective than going grimdark even in canon. John's godtiering would be the same, if it hadn't also granted him conditional immortality.

>>68561
Site wouldn't let me delete posts earlier on when I had that issue.

The Derse dreamers, possibly one per session or possibly just in general, seem very inclined to talk to the Horrorterrors. In the case of Meenah, who was already a powergamer and godtier, and presumably had one as her Lusus, she sought their counsel on avoiding the Scratch. For Feferi, she's had one as her Lusus, so she was raised by it and communicated with it every day to keep it from destroying her race, so she was naturally more understanding of the Horrorterrors to begin with. Rose was just an enthusiast of Lovecraftian Horrorterrors, who was a Derse dreamer and inclined to teenage edginess, then found out that her mother had been killed, so when she communed with the horrorterrors and was offered their help she accepted it fully and became more of an avatar of these eldritch gods than herself, which is what "going grimdark" was. Perhaps, from a more canonical standpoint, grimdarkness should be only one fairly rare potential effect of being the Derse dreamer that communes with Horrorterrors.

Rose's conditions were, if I recall correctly
>Inclined to melodrama and edginess
>Obsessed with the occult
>Suddenly extremely angry/upset when she discovered her mother was dead
>A Derse dreamer that communed with Horrorterrors
Take any one part of that out and I think she wouldn't have gone grimdark (plotwise, though Hussie would've still macguffined a display of jack's power), and each is dependent on several factours- The most notable of which are that she retained her memories from a doomed timeline because of her Seer class, she had a specific set of circumstances that led to her finding out her mother had been killed and she had already decided that Sburb was something of a sham and had begun destroying the Incipisphere as an act of rebellion.

>>68563
Whoah, hang on, it wasn't Meenah's Lusus. On Beforus the political system presumably didn't rely as much on coercion and assassination, and it was even stated at some point (I think between Porrim and Kankri) that the reason the Fuschia-bloods ruled was their extremely high longevity. Doc Scratch mentions that the Horrorterror that has served as every Alternian Empress's Lusus was Lord English's gift to the planet.

Either way, Fuschia blood definitely shields against the Horrorterrors' screeching, and Meenah did not succumb to them so much as use them for advice.

Grimdarkness seems like something best left to the GM to interpret? Aside from the fact that we don't really know what exactly it does, if it was unique to Rose/her role, or what the exact role the Horrorterrors are playing in Homestuck... it doesn't really fit on the scale of a regular session.

Rose became grimdark after looking into the cue ball (under Doc Scratch's instructions) and being overwhelmed with what she saw in it. This just... wouldn't happen in a normal session. If the point of this is to make a tabletop game where people can play through a proper game of Sburb then that's what you should focus on doing! Not accounting for every glitch and supercosmic event that occurs in Homestuck itself, because Homestuck-the-story is certainly not a shining example of what a real session works like, especially after Act 4. If the GM and players wish to recreate Homestuck complete with grimdarkness and tumors and LE and horrorterror involvement then power to them, but leave the mechanics up to them. You don't need to deal with that kind of stuff, you don't need to make rules for every story twist--and grimdarkness was story progression, not a battle mechanic.

>>68562
>anyway as Grimdark-Anon has pointed out the HorrorTerror's thing was very specific and we should instead exchange it
Yeah, the grimdarkness was specific and probably unique, due to the circumstances surrounding the Green Sun. But the corruption of a player's role by outside forces is not. My idea was just one way of doing it. While I don't exactly have much experience creating or even speculating about tabletop mechanics, I can at least pass along a few suggestions.

So. Another idea would be keeping a 'corruption' that's more in line with what Rose's grimdarkness really was about; a perverted form of her aspect (Light) and class (the passive Seer), forcefully transforming her into an extremely active Void player. (Also, I just realized that Rose talking in the blackspeech woetongue was a form of obfuscation. Another manifestation of Void.)

If you wanted to, you could (perhaps with some difficulty) implement a sort of "quest morality/attunement" meter, where, upon reaching the absolute bottom by refusing your call or simply failing to play the "right way" (as a result of failure due to, say, bad rolls), your aspect and class would change to their opposites and you'd reach something similar to grimdarkness, with an accompanying power boost. The problem I see is whether that could be seen as a viable alternative. Since you choose your own class, why would you suddenly decide to turn your Sylph of Life into a berserking Doom hero for an indeterminate period of time?

>>68565
I agree. Personally, since this stuff was brought up as a cover for players that didn't want to godtier, I'd point to the trolls' session, where the only troll that godtiered before the end of the game itself was Vriska, because the others didn't want to face their own death or didn't feel the need to. They were made out to have all been extremely capable even without godtiering- in fact, Gamzee's pent up berserker rage did more single-attack damage than Vriska could even manage, and Aradia's many doomed timeclones participating almost certainly helped a great deal, something she could have only accrued through the way she played the game. Equius was incredibly powerful from the beginning of the story just because of his physical mutation, but that probably wouldn't work for a tabletop game. And so on, most of the trolls either at or shortly after Duodecim Angelus showed incredible power that, while it wasn't on-par with godtiering, was pretty close. I don't think alternatives are really necessary, in other words; The work that goes into working out your character's unique lore and finding your questbed and awakening on the battlefield and sacrificing your extra life for conditional immortality could go into just making your character progressively stronger (as Vriska at first apparently wanted to do as well), evening the odds somewhat.

is the pastebin updated with all this good info?

Okay our current staus on godtiers is:
Stat boosts and conditional Immortality, which is fine we can work on stuff like aspect and class abilities for god tiers later.

I think it's agreed that if we ever include corruption we'll just use it in a splat book.

anything else we need to cover before we enter Playtest Alpha stage?

Whoops, sorry about being mostly absent for the past week or two. I've had some social and scholastic obligations to take care of and things should be good for now. I'm going through and compiling all of the everything we've got now into a .pdf and a new pastebin. Expect something sometime tonight after I've had a good look at things, clarified, actually hammered out language for the parts that should have language and not copy/pastes from posts in the previous threads.

While you wait, have a pretty badass picture.

i don't really understand how fraymotif generation works for one person

Ideally, you roll 2d6, choosing one die to be your condition in which you can activate it and the other die being the effect based on what Aspect your character possesses.

>>68698
I've been busy with life and my fucking computer breaking. Funny I just got back now.

Mebbe too late for this now, but in light of the most recent flash, it seems being a Mage had nothing to do with Sollux's visions, and what a Mage does is create their aspect (the Mage of Heart, Meulin, is a matchmaker, similar but not identical to Nepeta's shipping charts, and Sollux of course is a vital instrument in Aradia's death and the creator of the cursed ~ATH programme Karkat runs, which is what ultimately creates the cascade resulting in the universe having already been scratched so the kids' universe has Cancer and both sessions become doomed). Similarly, it seems that heirs literally inherit or are given their aspect- John was supposed to learn about the Breeze from his Denizen, but was pressured into it by Vriska instead, and Mituna inherits the doom which (like Sollux) he foretold from his colleagues, though exactly what this doom was is not clear yet.

So yeah, those two classes finally have a more consistent definition in-canon.

>>68698
>>68753
Okay cool noted. I think we should work on a splat book for glitched sessions sooner or later, preferably sooner.

I mean sure a standard game of homestuck will be cool, and will probably resemble Earthbound to one degree or another, but some people (like me) are gonna wanna glitch their session up to make things wierd and interesting so far the 3 most promising glitches gameplay wise I can see are;

Hazardous planets
Usurpers
Reverse Prospit/Derse relationship (in concerns to who the final boss is.)

Like Derse for instance is all sneaky/assassinate-y so Prospit shpuld use overwhelming force.

Usurper is pretty self explanatory but I think both the white and black royalty should be usurped and thus provide a VERY different end game scenario.

and Hazardous Planets, well I think that shgould be extended to the rest of the session, injecting a lot more realism than is strictly required. Forcing players to make space suits and other stuff like that.

What do you think the best glitches are guys?

http://www.mediafire.com/view/?5dcv25yfui4ck5s

Well, it may be five days off, but this thing is finally up to alpha standards. It may need some further editing, but I'm sort of dead in the water for today. Pastebin to come on Sunday.

http://pastebin.com/Hnc6FHcZ

The all important pastebin with the semi-completed game will not be seen tonight in exchange for this seperate, but equally all important pastebin with something in it.

Okay cool, you raised an Issue I was worried about Mage, since the game so far has basically been put together by three guys with an internet connection it (surprise surpise) looks like 3 pieces of glass glued together.

So far I like the spin system idea, it would generate points that could be used for stuff and if a player needs more HP or whatever the GM can hand that out as he sees fit also. (SBURB, SPIIIIIIINNNN OOONNN!)

anyways, once we get our core gameplay mechanic(s?) thouroughly unfucked we can probably start playtesting.

Unless one of you has a group ready and feels like playing our abomination.